The Pentagon’s UFO Shop, the Hitchhiker Effect, and Models of Contagion [pdf]
theblackvault.com
theblackvault.com
Despite occasional claims by Bigelow, Kelleher, and others, paranormal phenomenon are not clearly documented at Skinwalker Ranch prior to the ownership of the Shermans in 1994, immediately before they sold the property to Bigelow. The exact details of this transaction, how Bigelow became aware of the property, etc., are opaque, but it presents a substantial possibility that the paranormal history was fabricated by the Shermans to motivate the sale.
Bigelow and his various organizations (NIDSci, a more genera parascience and paranormal organization, and later BAAS, his aerospace company) have owned the ranch and been conducting research there for 27 years, and yet they have failed to produce any reasonable documentary evidence of the phenomenon. What they have produced is innumerable stories like this one, full of intrigue but absent of evidence. Some might see it as too dismissive to suggest that there isn't something paranormal at Skinwalker Ranch, but at this point people even in the UFO community are inclined to agree that Bigelow has made a huge effort and doesn't have anything to show for it.
Bigelow's decision to completely close the property to entry by other researchers, and hiring a small security force to keep people out, has been taken as a bit of an affront. This coincided with his signing a number of media deals including a "Curse of Oak Island"-esque History Channel series, creating the appearance that Bigelow is more interested in finding funding and press than finding the truth.
I have previously expressed my belief that Bigelow's involvement in DoD UAP programs, facilitated by Sen. Reid, was primarily an effort to obtain government funding to continue his Skinwalker Ranch pursuits. This article seems to support that perspective.
as noted in the linked article, Bigelow sold the ranch to Brandon Fugal, who has continued research with a private team, closed off access, and now has two television shows about the ranch and other phenomena.
For some odd reason, the Pentagon and certain corners of the Republican party really want you to believe in UFOs.
I don't think it takes much imagination to see how a public indoctrinated with the above are beneficial to those seeking power and influence through lies and deceit.
Critical thinkers are a con-man's kryptonite.
Otherwise you're demanding that we accept every ridiculous idea that comes up... literally demanding people take suggestions of "Jewish space lasers causing fires in BC" and "the earth isnt real its just a TV show stage for aliens and the catholic church are thier partners" as legitimate possibilities rather than the highlt improbable, if not impossible, insanity they are....
That's not a problem rationalism in the contemporary meaning really has, although I'm not sure this constitutes an improvement on net over its predecessor movement given how much the gloss of scientism tends to make its flights of fancy look more worth taking seriously than they deserve.
So any cry that we should be nicer to you and not roll our eyes when we get into this topic is literally what someone calls "being a snowflake."
I know it is hard to understand in this age of politically correct culture wars, but it is possible to have an harmonious society with disagreement of opinion. But if someone starts to cry "help, help, I'm being repressed!" because someone makes fun of your supernatural being, that goes out the window.
I said the same then, to much the same level of vitriol in response. At this point I really believe that it's more about behaving this way for the sake of it than about trying to accomplish any kind of real change.
I think the issue here is you might be a little sensitive to people not accepting your beliefs/life, which given your history you've shared here is more than understandable, and me going deep into my defence of free speech and atheism because is my core belief, but not my entire personality, so I don't actually give a crap, I usually engage people on something more interesting than this kind of argument.
I sympathise with your life struggles and recognise I might've touched a nerve. At the end of the day, I do really not care what anyone does with their body, their mind or their spirituality. Yet, I encourage you to accept that not every disagreement is vitriol or a personal attack.
Nothing is more dull than discussing religion, politics and sports affiliation, so I hope we can engage in better terms on more interesting topics on this site.
Now, one can believe whatever they want, this is a free world, but I don't want to hear anyone playing the victim either because someone doesn't give a rat's arse about UFOs, lizardmen or God.
Right to belief comes to right to being criticised, and well, being laughed at. If that's too much to handle, just keep it to yourself.
2. I am not trying to change any bloody thing. I just don't believe in God. No need to turn this into a political debate. I'd rather discuss religion in that case.
3. I believe in free speech. No one is taking your rights away here, you're free to do whatever you want as am I.
If the fact that I have another opinion than you, then my friend, what you're looking for is an echo chamber, not a discussion with strangers.
Can you quote his defense of a style of behavior? I scrolled up and I'm not seeing it. FWIW, I am not religious but I personally oppose anti-theism and the antagonistic sort of atheist advocacy.
In any case, I offered an olive branch in the parallel subthread. We got better things to do with our time I reckon.
It doesn't need an olive branch because, as eventually became clear, whatever argument was being pursued here wasn't with anything I'd said, or indeed anything to do with me - judging by your other comment you seem still to think I'm religious! Even were I otherwise inclined to, it'd be impossible to take offense on the back of such a total misapprehension.
But you're right that we all have better ways to spend our time.
The fable-believing egoist who wants their favorite story to "win" so that they can claim a place in some imaginary clever vanguard of those who "changed the public conversation" in America, in full projection mode here.
I also think something a lot of people do not understand is that the military routinely runs false flag operations. This is one reason I've been so highly skeptical of the recent congressional hearings. As far as I'm aware, every encounter is at best testified via second hand. Has anyone that has testified claimed to see "biologicals" themselves, or just that they heard or read about it? In the latter, we can't trust in that setting (though it would warrant more investigation).
They run these operations for several reasons. One is simply stupidity. Someone in the military might just believe remote viewing is possible and give funding. Another is to generate noise. When spies steal data, how do they know if those data and reports are genuine? It wouldn't be the first time a military got an adversary to waste countless time and money on futile pursuits. Another is simply to create a black op. You can't pour money into nothing, so you pour it into something else. These again usually use noise because when someone comes looking for that money you want to take them on a wild goose chase. The US Military has had access to the Alien story for 75+ years now and lots of people have built "evidence" around that story and many __want__ to believe in that story. I mean it is the conspiracy theory person's wet dream, that what appears complicated is actually very simple because ̶o̶m̶n̶i̶p̶o̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶m̶n̶i̶s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶z̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ "the government" did it and the world is simple again and all is right. Spooks also love this kind of simplification, as we all do. Our monkey brains are satisfied when we have no more to dig into and "just know" (it's also why we confidently talk out our asses on places like this site about things we have no remote qualification to discuss). But it doesn't require stupidity to create all this noise, nor does it require 4D chess. It just requires time, chaos, and many different actors with many different unknown agendas (which would still requisite digging into to learn more, not stopping at this explanation).
So idk if the government is recklessly spending money or they understand that this is a useful false flag, or if they just don't care in even determining the difference anymore because either way it seems useful to the end goals.
Having a very qualified pilot there at least worth attention.
Experienced pilot != Trustworthy.
From the horse's mouth: (3:52) https://youtu.be/PRM8AMrqqsc?t=232
Fravor: I have a sick sense of humor at times, so like I said I had all these [qualifications] so we used to fly, they don't do it right now because it's a little bit dangerous, but we used to fly night vision goggles low-altitude in Hornets, all right. So when you put on night-vision googles they amplify light, like a lot, so you can see a campfire like 50 miles away. So we used to do it, the good spots were down in Lake Isle Central California, there's a range, there's some bombing ranges, but people go camping up in the Superstition Mountains, which is kind of north and west of Imperial, by.. I forget what it is, the springs it's [unintelligible] it'll come to me in a minute... So we would go out at night flying on goggles and you'd see a campfire and you'd go 'Oh, UFO time', and then you'd get the airplane going about six hundred knots and then you'd pull the power back to idle so you can't hear it and you'd get zinging towards the fire. Well you turn the lights all down because we're in restricted area so we can do that, and there's lights on that you can only see if you're on night-vsion goggles so the other airplanes can see us but nobody else can se us. Then you go zinging at it and right when you get to the campfire you pull the airplane into the vertical, you stroke the afterburners, you let them light off, you count to three and pull them off and then you just go away. Instant UFO reporting. "I'm sitting out in the desert, it's all quite and all of a sudden there's a roar[?], there's lights in the sky, and they go away and it's gone!"
Rogan: So you would do that just to fuck with campers?
Fravor: Yes.
He is not just experienced, he was one of the top fighter pilots at that time. One thing is to fuck with campers and ufo “enthusiasts”, another is to go on record and testify before congress.
The number of people ever convicted of perjury for lying to Congress is tiny, and in this case particularly it would be very easy for him to fall back on 'I believe I saw what I saw!' Saying it under oath to Congress confers zero credibility to me. It's no more meaningful than saying it to Joe Rogan.
As a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that these UAPs are real phenomena and of non-human origin.
Given the pop culture behaviors about UFOs - specifically those of skepticism and rolling one’s eyes at true believers - it’s not hard to imagine that this would be considered funny, and ultimately harmless (even if ill advised).
Now he’s flying a mission and see presumably the real thing. “Shiiiit, nobody’s going to believe me now after those pranks”.
Could he be fabricating all of this? Or at least intentionally sharing misleading information? Possibly. But it’s also not hard to imagine a completely earnest version of this playing out.
I just don’t see the direct connection between the prior behavior and this public testimony.
Now, I know what you're thinking, lots of people have hoaxed bigfoot sightings before. That is true, in fact I myself once rented a gorilla suit and pranced around in the woods pranking campers. With my suit on I turned off my flashlight and ran up to their campfire OOKing and EEKing, then ran back off into the trees. Instant bigfoot sighting. I have a sick sense of humor like that. Anyway, I tell you this so that you know I understand most bigfoot sightings aren't real, but I'm telling you now that I did see bigfoot for real! I swear it on my mum's life. Why, I'll even swear it to a room fool of politicians.
I also think the focus should be on witnessing something. Saying it’s definitely Bigfoot is an interpretation of what you saw. Maybe you saw the same phenomena other people saw and believed to be Bigfoot. Maybe what you saw has explanations that aren’t currently accessible.
We can point to two things to support this idea: first, that the DoD shut down AATIP apparently just about as soon as the broader executive branch became aware of it. Second, the fairly clear evidence that AATIP was only ever funded because of Sen. Reid's dogged support---in other words, it never really was a DoD initiative, it was Sen. Reid's project (and Sen. Reid's friend) and the DoD was merely the channel for that funding.
After the abrupt and awkward end of AATIP, having produced almost no useful results at all, the DoD replaced it with their own in-house program which has since operated in a far more normal way... without any field trips to Skinwalker Ranch.
Many people, almost everyone I think, radically overestimate the significance of AATIP because they are not familiar with the general world of DoD contracting. AATIP was a tiny project in a massive budget, and one apparently included at the behest of a powerful senator, which is an extremely common way that all sorts of misventures get added to the DoD. There's little evidence that AATIP ever had serious support from any high level of military intelligence, and some evidence that military intelligence mostly ignored it. This kind of thing happens all the time, a simple result of the DoD's secondary function as one of the primary pork barrels for the US Senate. In short, calling AATIP a "false flag" attributes a lot more executive function to the DoD than appears to have happened here, and indeed than happens in the vast majority of small, eccentric DoD projects.
AATIP would have come and gone almost completely unnoticed were it not for the massive press round it received, years later, as a self-serving promotional stunt for the private, for-profit TTSA. TTSA aggressively tried to link itself to AATIP for cachet, but even those links are questionable when inspected closely. That too passed without much impact on anything, but not before other events like the Chinese balloon program thrust UAPs solidly into the media spotlight. This creates an endlessly frustrating situation in which the media, the public, and even apparently some of congress are inclined to interpret current UAP events in the context of the AATIP, even though there is almost no connection between the two.
AATIP is a result of an eccentric millionaire leveraging a very powerful senate connection to capture a bit of flab on the DoD budget for his own self-interest. This kind of thing happens over and over again, it just usually doesn't have the sex appeal of UFOs.
I fully agree. Maybe it was a poor choice of wording. I meant that something that was a false flag need not be intentioned decision making. Was just wanting to communicate that stuff that looks smart could be dumb. To make sure that people didn't take my comments as suggesting a back door secret deep state while calling out conspiracy theorists.
You're also right to bring up how much people overestimate DoD programs. Lots of government programs look way more expensive than they are. Big numbers mean different things.
If you watch the recent Sean Ryan podcast with the current owner Brandon fugal, as well as Jeffrey Mishloves new thinking aloud interview with Bigelow, you can obtain more details about the history, which seem to be missing or incorrect in your presentation.
The sale to Shermans was for merely $200,000. And Bigelow didn’t solicit the DoD’s interest: after he’s been out there a while they came calling to him.
Where did you even get your version of the details from? What motivated your bizarre take?
Also, the most interesting aspect of this article is the Hitchhiker effect and Models of Contagion.
Brandon Fugel should not be trusted. Because of the History Channel series he has a clear financial interest in the ranch, and it's obvious on casual inspection of the show that he has few compunctions when it comes to the ways he promotes his interests. The television show is an embarrassment to anyone with a sincere interest in the topic, it is worse than its obvious inspiration The Curse of Oak Island and that is saying a lot. And yet Fugel's role is to occasionally pop in to stir the drama.
Bigelow claims that the DoD came to him, but these types of contracts are usually awarded through back channels after lobbying by the firm that eventually wins them... This is the norm in defense acquisition. We know that Bigelow was drumming up political support for his projects from Reid as early as when he was making plans to purchase Skinwalker Ranch. It's extremely hard to believe that the DoD happened to select him as the best provider when the program only existed due to influence from his good friend and compatriot Reid... Far more likely that Bigelow himself established the parameters of the contract before he was considered for it, a practice that is basically normal in DoD contracting.
I know I am being harsh but you cannot judge these events based only on the accounts of the people that benefit from them. They are benefitting enormously from the information vacuum associated with military intelligence and the credulousness of the media. There is virtually nothing to check them when they make claims about what happened, and there are plenty of indications that they take advantage of this situation to create the story that they want. It's good to be skeptical, but you need to also be skeptical of the people who stir up these conspiracies.
I'm sorry but your "facts" are wrong. Here's how:
- Fugal (a not e), "should not be trusted"? How? Can you point to any clips where he's "promoting his interests" on the show as you claim? How is the show an "embarrassment"? How is it worse than the other one you mention? How is it inspired by that one? Any clips where Fugal pops in to stir drama? Also, you're aware Fugal funds this with his own money, doesn't have a DoD contract, and hasn't taken a dime from the research or the show, right? So, what's your beef with Fugal, again?--did you apply for a research position with him and were rejected?
- Do you have any evidence that Bigelow's contract was both corrupt and initiated by him, contrary to the factual timeline that Bigelow bought the ranch, started research and 6 months later gets a first call from DIA for a collaboration? So you previously worked at Sandia and have the inside track on DoD contracting, is that right? Is this an accurate picture of DoD graft, or the bitterness of a disgruntled former employee? Did they deny your clearance for something and now all stories of UFOs are false? What's the corporation that manages most of the nuclear sites, again?
- So paranormal visitation stories are mostly rumours exaggerated over time to grift? What an abusive statement against thousands of experiencers around the world. Your claim that there was no paranormal activity before Sherman fabricated it while they owned the ranch in the mid 90s is belied by an extensive study of paranormal/UFO events in the Uinta basin (including Skinwalker and surrounding ranches) going back to at least the 1950s, via Salisbury and Hicks^0. Your claim is also made to look foolish by the testimonies and history of the Ute tribe native Americans of the area.
You strike a confident tone, and speak with authority, even passing yourself off as someone with sincere interest, yet you're not in command of the facts here. You present your opinions as absolutes and dismiss the experiences of thousands of people who have experiences.
This behavior is not "harsh" (but fair) as you try to suggest, it's just abusive. You seem to act like those who want to dominate others, but who lack the courage to fight an equal fight, so they come to topics like this because they think they'll find soft targets here, owing to the persistent background of ridicule and harassment of those who are sincerely interested. So such would-be dominators fabricate their views in contradiction to facts, as counterpoints just to create conflict, that they can then use as a pretext to call anyone who pushes back crazy, or a "conspiracy theorist". If this is what you're seeking I strongly encourage you to reconsider this conduct. You won't find what you seek here, and you may soon be in for a rude shock. Wouldn't that be unfortunate?
You speak about this as if you know, but it seems you don't have, or ignore, the facts. Yet seems you've had personal experience with some aspect of this, otherwise why the passion and anecdotes about DoD contracts. An embittered bid loser to do the Skinwalker research perhaps?? I mentioned before you worked at Sandia. Was this kind of bitterness like a professional merit badge there, or just something you adopted at some point? Something that "hitchhiked" on you, maybe?
If you show up in these parts again, I encourage you to engage with this topic in a curious, open-minded and not arrogant way. You have to treat the people here well! Comprende cabron?
0: https://www.amazon.com/Utah-UFO-Display-Scientists-Report/dp...
I'm disappointed.
Your understandable reading of that is kind of charming tho. Maybe they do! Or they should! Haha :)
The Skinwalker visitor fits the criteria as the folie imposée and the main contributors of stress and isolation are easily inferred - the site is remote, and visitors are aware of its history which frames their time there as particularly stress-inducing.
It's funny how this 101-level fact that every radar technician, operator, and designer is keenly aware of somehow never seems to make it into the UFOlogist monologues about how infallible radar evidence is.
I find it odd that every time this subject comes up people just bend over backwards to behave in the most smug ways possible.
I think the smugness is a compensatory disguise, so like a psychological defense, both in reaction to something that people are genuinely scared of being real and also in reaction to something they can’t understand.
Some people are very uncomfortable with that level of ambiguity, used as they are to being across everything in their slice of life normally (or feeling like they need to pretend that they know everything to maintain the position of authority they feel expected to by the people around them) and so they react in that kind of way.
the smugness, I suppose helps bolster the points they’re saying as if we should believe them more so because this person delivers them so confidently and treats, any other possibilities, so dismissively, we should kind of take what they’re saying on faith and trust them.
I think when you take a step back and look at it, it’s very obvious that an individual couldn’t have such omniscient knowledge as to be able to conclusively deny all the possibilities of the universe from the point of view of their own slice of experience as these SmugMug’s seem to pretend. Ha! :)
I think the curious thing is that boring dismissals like that became a kind of norm in the discourse, while people are missing out on the sheer adventurous interest of engaging with something unexplainable in a curious way. I mean what could be more fun even doing that?
Yeah, it’s funny to me that the boring view became popular like this, at least for a while.