Yesterday I updated the Sunspot, New Mexico observatory closure with some more articles, all of which are questioning the emergent child pornography narrative. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm not entirely dismissive of that story, and I hope to clarify today why I am not, and why I still think that the child pornography story is a cover story. Basically, I strongly suspect that the child porn story is a cover story, a convenient "crisis of opportunity" that allowed the raid to occur. My basic theory has been that the observatory's communications network was "piggy-backed" by another entity in some sort of private or covert communications network. Certainly, if the child porn story is true, this might have formed one component of a communications network in a network of such activity - child sex slavery, organ harvesting and so on - that by any accounts appears to be a global phenomenon. The global extent of the activities in turn requires a global communications capability of a covert nature. Additionally, under President Trump's Executive Order of December of 2017, such activities are defined as a national security threat, and as a consequence, the FBI's otherwise strange involvement in this case would be understandable. The contraindication here is that the FBI hasn't exactly appeared to be on the "side" of Mr. Trump in recent months.

The problem with the child porn story is that it does not explain other problems in the "coincident data set" surrounding the event; for example, it does not explain the nearly simultaneous shutdown of the live camera feeds from other solar observatories around the world. This has led to speculation that the whole affair was created as a distraction in order to take down those camera feeds because something was going on either near, or on, the Sun, that "they" didn't want to be seen. This view was fueled by videos making the rounds on YouTube and the internet showing alleged UFO activity around the Sun. While I remain skeptical of these videos, the basic thrust of the argument - that they were concealing something entirely different - cannot be entirely discounted. As one person put it to me, NASA currently has a solar probe near the Sun, and solar observatories would possibly be involved in its observation and coordination. Such a view does also explain the curious and alleged signing of non-disclosure agreements and the payments of cash - hush money - to individuals, as reported by Linda Moulton Howe.

Yet a third theory was that the closure may have been related to espionage that was being conducted from the observatory, which has a line-of-sight view of the White Sands range. Again, if true, the signing of non-disclosure agreements, and the paying of "hush-money" are easily rationalized in such a context.

Yet another problem emerges when one considers the reaction of the Otero County Sheriff to the whole affair, who is mystified at the FBI's behavior. In some versions of the story, the inhabitants of Sunspot were the ones who asked for local law enforcement to be present during the evacuation. The reason this may be significant is that part of the explanation for the total evacuation is that it was necessary to do so in order (1) not to alert the suspect and (2) to ensure the safety of the village inhabitants. So why would the inhabitants request the presence of local law enforcement to keep them safe if the FBI is already on the spot? In other words, the request suggests and implies that something about the FBI's presence made them feel unsafe. So let's continue crawling out to the end of the twig of speculation here: what if the presence of federal officials was not to take down a piggy-backed communications network, but rather, to remove one component using it (the child porn story), while ensuring the rest of it remained operative? What if, in other words, the raid was about protecting something, rather than shutting it down? Possible, but that too, has its problems on closer examination.

There is a further problem here with all explanations, both the official one, and the various alternative theories, and that is, none of them adequately account for the closure of the local post office. How does a local post office closure relate to a child porn story piggy-backing on the observatory communications? It doesn't, save for the "explanation" that "everyone" had to be evacuated lest the "suspect be alerted", which is part of the emergent official narrative. The problem with that narrative all along has been the whole FBI raid itself: suddenly showing up with a Blackhawk helicopter, and agents, is going to alert the suspect, unless he or she was a complete dunce. The only explanation I can find here that makes any sense is that perhaps the post office formed a link in that piggy-backed communications network of the "old fashioned dead drop" kind.

The one thing that has emerged from this whole affair, at least to my mind, is that all potential explanations, from the official one to the various theories out there, is that they all have one peculiar thing in common, and that is the idea of piggy-backed communications. It's the one aspect of this story that simply won't go away, whether or not one does subscribe to the official story. Beyond the strangeness of the observatory itself - which I highlighted in our members' vidchat two weeks ago - the piggy-backed covert communications hypothesis is the one that still makes the most sense to me, and thus, I continue to think there are more layers to this story than are being publicly admitted.

See you on the flip side...