V.T. spotted this one, and it's one of those articles that make you go "hmmm...". In my case, I'm not only going "hmmm," but my suspicion meter is into the red zone bordering on purple. But we'll get back to today's high octane speculative suspicion in a moment.

The article concerns itself with recently discovered "co-orbital objects" which have at least one scientist wondering if they might be "extraterrestrial probes" put in place to monitor us:

Newly Discovered “Co-Orbital Objects” Could Be Extraterrestrial Probes Watching Us

The article begins by noting the anomaly:

The Facts: A recently published paper by Physicist Dr James Benford in the Astronomical Journal hypothesizes that newly discovered near-Earth objects (there are many thousands) might be a hub for extraterrestrial 'probes' to monitor the human race.

It goes on to offer this:

Physicist Dr James Benford, a member of SETI, recently published a paper hypothesizing that we are perhaps being monitored. The study was published in the Astronomical Journal. There are many who share this belief, including former Senator Mike Gravel, who said in an interview that ‘Something is monitoring the planet, and they Are monitoring it very cautiously.’ I personally believe that our race has been known about for a very long time and we are indeed being monitored by an extraterrestrial presence. Why? Well, perhaps the planet is more important than we are. Perhaps we are a threat to others and the planet? There are a number of different scenarios one could hypothesize. Dr. Norman Bergrun, a scientist and engineer who was part of NASA’s voyager program and worked at NASA for decades at the Ames Research Centre, made it a clear point in his book, “Ringmakers of Saturn” to emphasize that these objects (which are intelligently controlled, according to him, by extraterrestrials) have probably been around much longer than we have. He also states that if there was any ill intent towards our planet, something probably would have happened by now .He also worked at Lockheed Martin where he managed the Polaris missile tests. Unfortunately, he recently passed. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of his book from one of his family members. I share the belief that if there was any ill intent or that the ET presence represented some sort of threat, something would have already happened by now.

And toward the beginning of the article we get the usual "disclosure spin":

On the other hand, we have a great deal of information that has yet to hit the mainstream alluding to the fact that we, or at least some of us, know for a fact that we are not alone, and have been privy to the evidence suggesting that we have been visited in the past, and are being visited now. This evidence comes in the form of witness testimony from astronauts like Dr. Edgar Mitchell, for example, who has told the world on multiple occasions that deep within the Department of Defense and the Military Industrial Complex, it’s well known that we are being visited and have been visited, and that a massive cover-up has been on going for a number of years. Dr. Brian O’Leary is another great example of an astronaut who has spoken out. There have been multiple insider leaks, as well as academicians and hundreds of high ranking military personnel from around the world who have also said the same thing. ... Louis Elizondo, a former high ranking Department of Defense official and part of the TTSA academy that released multiple videos of UFOs from the Navy (which the Navy recently confirmed were real) has said that he believes these objects are extraterrestrial, but officially, they’ve purposefully stayed away from this question because a lot of people have “feelings” towards it.

Needless to say, I have problems with all of this kind of analysis, and that's the subject of today's high octane suspicion. In case you haven't noticed, there's been a slight "uptick" in this type of UFO reportage lately, even in the lamestream media. No less than the New York Times, for example, reported on the Louis Elizondo story, with its accompanying videos and pictures. Color me skeptical simply for the reason that we have known " connections between that paper, and between Elizondo, and that "community", and everyone knows that the the intelligence "community" doesn't lie, right? And as for Mitchell and O'Leary, we have a similar epistemological problem, for as astronauts they are connected to the government, and this government has never lied about anything, right, with maybe the exception of the JFK assassination, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the BCCI scandal, Iran Contra, the financial meltdown and bailouts, the missing trillions of dollars, and a few other minor things. So if tomorrow the government would suddenly "come clean" and announce the presence of ET, why should anyone believe them on this one issue? (And there's that pesky problem mentioned by Richard C. Hoagland in his book Dark Mission, that there are indicators that the Apollo astronauts may have been deliberately subjected to some sort of mind and memory manipulation. And those techniques and technologies certainly exist and did exist at the time. But I digress.)

My other problem is one which I've addressed previously, and that is the assumption that the "visitors" pose no threat. If they were a class III civilization on the Kardashev scale, probably not. But if class I or II, then maybe they do, especially if one factors in my speculations that humanity has already achieved the ability to engineer systems on planetary and perhaps even stellar scales. If that's the case, then one might be looking at a kind of "interplanetary" version of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Don't get me wrong: if the ancient cosmic war hypothesis, and its corollary, the ancient Versailles Template hypothesis, is true, then it stands to reason the victors would establish a network to "watch" the planet and its scrappy inhabitants to make sure they don't break out of the quarantine-demilitarized zone around some celestial version of the demilitarized Rhineland. And while we're speculating, there's also always the possibility that "they", like some celestial France, have simply grown tired and too weary to confront the upstarts across the river.

See you on the flip side...