Thoughts on recent developments in ufology, Matthew Brown, exo-theology, and Elon Musk

Yet another "whistleblower" is making the rounds. Former defense insider Matthew Brown, apparently the source for an 11-page document detailing an ostensible UAP-related program named "Immaculate Conception" (whether the paper is genuine and describes a real program is still up for grabs, though former head of AARO Sean Kirkpatrick has stated that no program under that name was uncovered during AARO's investigations when he was at its helm), is on the podcast circuit issuing eyeroll-inducing platitudes about how an "illegal internationalist regime, some sort of international cabal of sorts" is involved in concealing UAP, that we "live in the Matrix," that we are "not free", that "this reality has far more to it than we have been allowed to believe," and that "God is real." Taken together, these tropes bear a suspiciously close approximation to memes promulgated by the "red pilled" community, where religion and barely sublimated antisemitic conspiracy theories and conceited grievance politics are routinely pressed into the service of dubious right-wing positions and antiliberal sentiments. This is not to imply that Brown himself is knowingly espousing such ideology towards these particular ends, only that adjacent motifs have been increasingly normalized in the culture wars and are no longer on the fringes of belief in our post-truth historical moment. Here is a short clip showing Brown discussing his insights and the aforementioned tropes. Carl Crusher, the host of a podcast showcasing Brown's notions, rather overvalues them with descriptor of "bombshell", which they most assuredly are not:

Incidentally, the "God is real" part reminded me of another military "whistleblower", the late Robert Dean (1929-2018) who claimed to have read a secret document while stationed in Europe in the 1980s called "The Assessment," which described the presence of multiple alien species on Earth. During a presentation of his that I'll need to track down, he spoke of how "There is a God." This tie in with religion is of course an old hat in ufology, though it's often expressed in terms that are more concealed or subtle than an outright affirmative statement about the existence of God as such.

(Someone on X/Twitter suggested that ufology is running out of "secular money", and that the religion angle is being pitched as a way to canvass support among religious believers. I think this is speculative but is nevertheless entirely conceivable. Whether such a scheme would have much success in terms of attracting money is another matter and remains to be seen)

In a May 1 informal panel discussion/briefing with members of the new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Eric Davis (in attendance with Harvard astronomer and founder of the Galileo Project Avi Loeb, as well as Christopher Mellon and Lue Elizondo) told Representative Eric Burlison (Republican for Missouri) that there are at least four species of aliens that he knows about. These aliens, it won't surprise you to learn, are among those that have been continuously cycled throughout UFO and alien contact/abduction stories and promoted in endless narratives by hardcore UFO thought leaders for decades: the Greys (of Whitley Strieber and X Files fame, and now close to the definitive archetype for "aliens" in the public mind), the Nordics (of Contactee fame, starting with George Adamski and his Venusian friend Orthon), the Reptilians (often associated with malevolence, and the main characters of the famous "V" miniseries; the Reptilians are also arguably an expression of the Biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden), and the Insectoids (sometimes called "Mantids" because of their likeness to praying mantises. The Insectoids have at times been reported as associates of the Greys). My goodness: Linda Moulton Howe was right! But more seriously, this pantheon of alien gods is a rather fitting image, given the parallels between the dynamics of the UFO phenomenon and the gods of Greek mythology, as detailed in Keith Thompson's "Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination" (1991), a book that I recommend even though I found it to be ultimately rather naive.

The idea that there could be a pantheon of extraterrestrial visitors jives well with the religious belief that the forces of good and evil play out on a cosmic scale. Some aliens, it seems logical to assume, would want to help us while others would wish us ill, or at least see us as items to be exploited or enslaved for their own inscrutable ends. These different species or factions might be thought of as sublimated versions of angels and demons. This can be fit into the categories developed in theologian Ted Peters' model of how we think about extraterrestrial intelligence given our own cultural, social, religious and scientific predilections and biases: the Interstellar Diplomat, the Research Scientist, the Celestial Savior, and the Hybridizer (Matthew Brown's story would likely best fit within this latter model, given the role of government coverup and conspiracy, though as Peters notes, stories often straddle the boundaries of multiple models simultaneously, and the Brown story might also find a partial home in the Interstellar Diplomat and Celestial Savior, given the possibility that the aliens might be envoys from other worlds whose technology is being cruelly withheld from the public not be the aliens themselves but by malevolent human actors). I am currently reading Peters' fascinating book "UFOs: God's Chariots? Spirituality, Ancient Aliens, and Religious Yearnings in the Age of Extraterrestrials," originally published in 1977 but with subsequent editions released in 2011 and 2014 to shed light on developments closer to the present time. Peters has written extensively on the topic of exo-theology (the branch of theology dealing with the implications of ET life and intelligence for religious belief and vice versa) and the underlying religious impulses that animate many UFO and alien themed experiences and belief systems. I first came across Peters' work when I read his essay "Exo-Theology: Speculations on Extraterrestrial Life" in the compendium "The Gods Have Landed: New Religions From Other Worlds" (1995; edited by James R. Lewis). Numerous video presentations and interviews of his can be found on YouTube, including on his channel, which I hope more people will visit. Though I am an atheist and philosophical materialist, I find Peters' treatment of the topics of UFOs, cosmology, and evolution and the connection of these to questions of theistic belief to be deeply insightful and fascinating.

Returning to the recent panel discussion for members of Congress (which can be viewed in full on the YouTube channel of the UAP Disclosure Fund or UAPDF, not to be mistaken for the Navy's former UAP Task Force), it happened to be the same venue in which Lue Elizondo held up a photo of a supposedly silver, lenticular craft, but which was debunked instantly by savvy online skeptics who geolocated what was shown in the image and found it to be of a circular agricultural plot in Colorado. Elizondo, to his credit, later apologized for this poorly vetted "evidence" (which he claimed came from a pilot, though that too is doubtful), but it sure does seem that he has a knack for grandiose claims that are subsequently and quickly demolished by facts furnished by people who actually do their due diligence, which in turn calls into question his competence as an investigator of the anomalous, if not his honesty.

A screenshot from a video posted by New York Post journalist Steven Greenstreet on his Twitter/X feed showing the "lenticular craft" promoted by Elizondo to members of Congress.

Swinging the ball back to Peters, I've been thinking recently about how we should think of Elon Musk in terms of his role in discussions about human destiny and social evolution. Musk, I believe, is a malignant influence in our culture and the world. He integrates eugenics, racism, technofeudalism/fascism, a toxic disregard for the value of empathy, and vaporware showmanship, and is a pathological narcissist and sociopath to boot. But I've also wondered (in musings with Art Levine and Bryan Sentes) why it is that he doesn't seem to go in for the UFO/Disclosure thing, and has at times even issued skeptical takes on the topic. One reason could be that he doesn't think any such program of concealment could escape his attention ("I would know about it," being the boisterous theme here. Whether that is an accurate assessment of the situation is another question, but it likely speaks to his state of mind on the issue). But I think there could be something more subtle at play, and it relates to something that Peters has written about with regard to how extraterrestrial intelligence is often regarded by both SETI and UFO believers: as an "axis mundi", a symbolic center of the world or a place or person through which Earth and heaven join. Musk, who views himself as this link, cannot abide an extraterrestrial competitor. To acknowledge that the government or aerospace industry might be concealing artefacts of alien origin would be to call into question his self-styled omniscient "genius" which is in the know about everything, but would also cut short his exclusive title as humanity's savior (a role that, as various scholars and journalists have pointed out, exists alongside a callous contempt for the less fortunate, the poor, and other human beings who, if they cannot be molded into putty to serve his visions of global domination and esteem, must fall to the wayside of history and perish - incidentally, a notion held by a long line of thinkers starting in Victorian England who were swayed by notions of spiritual eugenics, and who find a pedigree all the way up to the present time among various tech bro types. Not coincidentally, Musk hails from apartheid South Africa, and his grandparents reportedly harbored a number of racial supremacist notions, a pattern recapitulated in some of his tweets, or "Xcretions" as they're now called). While sharing the gnostic redeemer belief common to SETI, the UFO religion and the Disclosure movement, Musk wants to be the very epicenter of humanity's expansion into space and its colonization of Mars. He shares, in other words, a faith that technology can solve all problems. An apparent believer in the Simulation Hypothesis, he does, by implication, nevertheless believe that there could be some non-human intelligence that we might describe as "alien", but he doesn't seem to credit UFOs as emissaries from other worlds (that is, within the simulated universe that he thinks we live in). This belief in a simulation, by the way, comes full circle with Brown's aforementioned "Matrix" talk, so in that sense, at least, there is a bit more of a UFO connection linking Musk. He also, arguably, wants to win this "game" (aligning with his own obsession with video games, which serves as a focus of jokes directed against him by his naysayers). This itself could play into his narcissism and sociopathy, given that the belief that one lives in a simulation might lead one to also view other human beings as "not real" or as "nonplayer characters" ("NPCs", a common taunt by members of the far-right against their political opponents) who can be used, humiliated and discarded with impunity.

Here's yet another connection that seems pertinent: the axis mundi is embodied by the shaman in many cultures, and these shamans often achieve altered states of consciousness with the help of various substances in order to travel to other realms of reality. Remind you of someone? Musk is often "off his face" on ketamine, and has made multiple appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he has at times smoked a joint with Joe as they discuss issues of cultural and social import. The trope that we gain access to higher states of awareness or cosmic insights while on drugs is a common one in our culture, but whether valid or not (spoiler alert: it isn't valid in Musk's case, as he continues to spew various imbecilities while high, which makes it doubly embarrassing), the shamanistic theme is worth delving deeper into. But in ufology proper, might we be seeing the field don a more overtly shamanistic garb in the form of all this "psionics" talk that's again making the rounds, along with items like Steven Greer's CE5 Protocols? Terrance McKenna's ideas about the powers of psychedelics and their connections to UFOs are also called to mind and have been discussed in recent time within the UFO space.

It's always fun to come across yet another reference to psionics, as I did today in my copy of "GURPS Uplift: A Universe of Wolfing Terrans vs. Scheming Galactics based on the Award-Winning Novels by David Brin" (1990; Stefan Jones), a perfectly delightful supplement to the Brin series in which extraterrestrials genetically engineer or "uplift" members of other species to help them achieve a more comparable level of intelligence. Variants of this concept have become canonical within segments of ufology for decades. The Insectoid species that Eric Davis described to Representative Burlison might itself be an example, as these beings have at times been suggested to be overseers of the Greys, and the latter have often been thought of as automatons who lack full emotional lives. Bob Lazar, as part of the mythology he developed (plagiarized might be a better way to say it) for his own caper, mentioned that humans could be the result of genetic tampering of a simian ancestor, which is of course a common Ancient Astronauts theme. And of course, all of this gets back to the religious dimension at play: that the aliens come from on high and can furnish humanity with astonishing insights not only about our origins, but also our destiny. Lazar's story neatly combines the notion of aliens as technological angels (bearing a miraculous technology that, if mastered, would allow us to ascend to the heavens and explore currently unreachable domains of the cosmos), but as creators. So it would seem that even our friend, good old seedy Lazar, the "physicist" who invested in two brothels, who lied about this "master's degrees" and employment, and who claims to come at the alien question with a mindset devoted to the hard sciences, is still (perhaps unbeknownst to him) expressing a religious yearning through his story, if we're to adopt Ted Peters' lens.

Bob Lazar made reference to mentions of humans as "containers" in "briefing documents" that he supposedly read when he was being inducted into a secret reverse engineering program. Multiple possibilities from sci fi and UFO lore could have inspired this element of his story.