“Perhaps we need a National Magic Agency (pronounced ‘enema’) to make a large and expensive study of all these matters, including the future scientific study of UFOs, if any.” – Dr Edward U. Condon, physicist and publisher of the Air Force Condon Report (1969)

The Condon Report is one of those official documents that makes ufologists really angry. It is a publicly-available Air Force investigation into the UFO phenomenon that concluded that we weren’t being visited by space aliens and, as a result, the phenomena do not represent a strategic threat that the Air Force needs to be concerned over.

It sounds dismissive to the nuts and bolts crowd; this notion of a National Magic Agency. You can hear their grumblebum consternation almost fifty years later. How dare you dismiss my little theories about nuclear powered rocket ships! Don’t you know I’m a regional math teacher?! But the reality is that a lot of very powerful governments threw a lot of very smart people at these phenomena and they came away with the scientific conclusion that we aren’t looking at little green men.

And they’re right.

Let’s put some further context around the quote from Dr Condon that opens this post. It was part of a speech delivered to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He also said: “Some UFOs may be such [extraterrestrial] visitors, it may be postulated. And some writers go so far as to say they actually are. To discover clear, unambiguous evidence on this point would be a scientific discovery of the first magnitude, one which I would be quite happy to make. We found no such evidence, and so state in our report. We concluded it is not worthwhile to carry on a continuing study of UFOs in the manner which has been done so far.”

I bring this up in reference to Chris’s two most recent posts. The latter of which indicates the UK is about to experience yet another example of an over-educated media studies student bullying the mentally ill, in the form of a ‘UFO documentary’, hosted by a comedian and former staff member of the execrable Stephen Fry’s circle jerk, QI. For those living outside the UK, it’s important to be aware that, as an undifferentiated, also-ran, pointless, piece-of-shit, ‘freelance media’ parasite, you know you have arrived when you get invited to the right kind of Islington dinner parties where you can regale your Guardianista/Labour grandees with stories of your time among the ignorant savages. It is a well-trodden path for cunt-rashes, and London has been walking it since the days of Empire.

But sometimes -perhaps when we were more confident- we have walked a different path. As we know, 1947 was a pivot point in the west’s relationship with Magonia. What is so interesting about re-reading some of the early ufology texts -such as John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, from which the Condon quotes emerge- is that we actually see the moment our awareness of these phenomena bifurcated. In the early fifties we see:

The scientific realisation that these phenomena are not the result of little green men visiting from Zeta Reticuli. The beginnings of the flat-out psy-op to convince UFO groups that they were, largely as a cover for Cold War military experiments. The end of the era where people of status, whether acquired by birth or by skill, stopped giving their honest opinions of what was going on. This is obviously related to both point one and point two.

Point three is potentially more important than people who don’t live in countries ruled by monarchs actually realise. Outside of the usual men’s clubs/’secret societies’ that had existed for the previous couple of centuries, if you had automatic entry into the House of Lords because of the family you were born into, for example, you legit did not care what the hoi polloi thought of you or your opinions. This is a tremendously freeing situation. We see that in the disarming honesty of the war-era and postwar Prime Ministers in the UK.

In 1955, RAF Air Marshal Lord Dowding, the man who directed the Battle of Britain, gave a public lecture where he openly discussed the paranormal rather than extraterrestrial reality of the UFO phenomenon. When hyper-pragmatic war heroes start talking about other dimensions and how they have impacted human history over millennia, you should probably pay attention. (Or, at the very least, you should have a satisfactory justification for why your flimsy, cobbled-together pantheon doesn’t match the kind of evidence examined by people who save entire countries from invasion.) 1969 -the same year Dr Condon was speaking in Philadelphia, Sir Victor Goddard, also a RAF Air Marshal, gave a public presentation at Caxton Hall in which he said:

[W]hile it may be that some operators of UFO are normally paraphysical denizens of a planet other than Earth, there is no logical need for this to be so. For, if the materiality of UFO is paraphysical (and consequently normally invisible), UFO could more plausibly be creations of an invisible world coincident with the space of our physical Earth planet than creations in the paraphysical realms of any other physical planet in the solar system… Given that real UFO are paraphysical, capable of reflecting light like ghosts; and given also that (according to many observers) they remain visible as they change position at ultrahigh speeds from one point to the another, it follows that those that remain visible in transition do not dematerialise for that swift transition, and therefore their mass must be of a diaphanous nature, and their substance relatively etheric… The observed validity of this supports the paraphysical assertion and makes the likelihood of UFO being Earth-created greater than the likelihood of their creation on another planet… The astral world of illusion, which (on physical evidence) is greatly inhabited by illusion-prone spirits, is well known for its multifarious imaginative activities and exhortations. Seemingly some of its denizens are eager to exemplify principalities and powers. Others pronounce upon morality, spirituality, Deity, etc. All of these astral exponents who invoke human consciousness may be sincere, but many of their theses may be framed to propagate some special phantasm, perhaps of an earlier incarnation, or to indulge an inveterate and continuing technological urge toward materialistic progress, or simply to astonish and disturb the gullible for the devil of it.

Thelema nerds among you should recognise the name Caxton Hall. It is the exact same location that Crowley put on his Rites of Eleusis, where he drugged the audience with hallucinogens in an attempt to convey or potentially re-enact the impact of the original sacred rites of initiation he was performing on stage. (The above photo is from when Elizabeth Taylor -ie Cleopatra herself- played the same venue.)

As you might expect, I find this overlay of venues hugely, hugely pleasing. How in the actual fuck do you get a British fly boy in the mid fifties frontrunning Dr Vallée, Bob Wilson, consciousness researchers, me, and anyone else you care to mention? What the actual shit is Victor looking at in terms of evidence? And -crucially- where did that evidence subsequently go given that we had to endure about four subsequent decades of ‘blah blah Zeta Reticuli’? I would and have hazarded a guess. For further guessing in this direction, get Nick Redfern’s For Nobody’s Eyes Only.

What I want you do to is to really stop and think about how a tough-as-guts war hero goes in one end of a phenomenon -where we lose him- and then comes out the other end speaking publicly like a British Terence McKenna. Then I want you to think about how few recipes for invented seasonal festivals these people are actually swapping. We return to the good Dr Knowles:

The ironic thing about the paranormal is that once you peel away the cultural accretions you’re dealing with the same basic types of phenomena. And as much as occultists and pagans hate to hear it and will scream and rend their garments when you point it out, UFOs have always been at the center of weirdness. Start at Babylon and work your way up- you’ll soon see.

Pagans and occultists have fallen for the same retardo ruse as British ‘comedians’ fronting UFO documentaries. They have dismissed the actual phenomena for reasons entirely related to their own psychodrama. For example, if you happen to believe that one of the gods of the classical world has decided to take you as a spouse in your flyover/nowheresville home -despite all historical evidence pointing to their preference for temples and priestesses in centres of imperial power- then at the very least you need to be across these phenomena to separate out the extradimensional trolling from the allegedly discrete actions of said spouse.

These data can only be ignored by LARPers. It is time to see what happens when you recite the Orphic Hymn to the Stars while high in an area that has just undergone a UFO flap. It is time to face the same evidence that turns war heroes into Terence McKenna.

Book the hall.