Just to take one small example, The X-Files was hitting its stride in 1994, and I was smack dab in the target demo: Nerdy college dude. And yet, all the show’s basic assumptions rubbed me wrong. Mulder was obviously supposed to be cool, but as I saw it, the show went out of its way to make him look like a loser — no girlfriend, no family, not even a pet, spanks it to porn (an at least somewhat risqué thing to imply on network tv, even at that late date). More than that, though, was the show’s attitude towards the government. You’re asking me to believe that the government — Bill Clinton’s government — is competent enough to keep an alien conspiracy under wraps?
I wasn’t in any way political back then. If forced to pick a side, I’d have been reflexively liberal, like all college kids are. I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on out in the world, let alone in the corridors of power in Washington, but even I found that pretty farfetched.
More importantly, the zeitgeist I saw was rapidly changing. X Files creator Chris Carter was born in 1956 and grew up in sunny SoCal (his wiki entry makes sure to give us his favorite surfing stance), so he more than most probably wrestled with the dilemma of how to bring Flower Power into Ronald Reagan’s 1980s. Hence the weird disconnect of the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton got his groovy, greasy, chicken-fried hippie self into the White House: The same people who, in their own college days, had nothing but hatred for the CIA and their domestic Mini-Me, the FBI, were all of a sudden kinda sorta coming around on the idea that The Feds are our friends — since, you know, the Feds are now us. It’s probably not a coincidence that Agent Mulder, FBI, was the star of The X-Files.
Explains a lot about “Gen X”, don’t it? When every single authority figure in your life, from the President on down, tells you to Fight the Power, the only way out of the clown show is to be, you know, like, whateverrr about everything — learned helplessness, 1994 version.
But smoked-out, flannel-clad, and apathetic is no way to go through life, and so we turned into a generation of suck-ups and toadies. Oh, the lunatic Marxists in the Teachers’ Unions want to encourage kids to “transition” in elementary school. Dude … you know, like, whateverrr. The college kids of 1994 are the middle managers, the Deep Staters, the lever-pullers of 2021. It’s working out about as well as you might’ve expected. You don’t need Agent Mulder to solve this mystery.
Severian, “1994”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-15.
October 20, 2023
QotD: The Gen-X-Files
August 16, 2023
QotD: Cognitive dissonance, or when cultists retcon reality
For those with even a moderate level of commitment to the cult (and I’ll leave it to you to speculate what moderate commitment to a cult might be; Festinger’s work is not without its critics), disconfirmation of the cult’s central belief led, astoundingly, to an even greater commitment to the cult. “The world will end on X date” was immediately retconned into “the world didn’t end on X date because of our righteousness“.
You know you’re really onto something when it seems head-slappingly obvious in retrospect. Yeah, of course they did that. Everybody does that to a degree. You expect something isn’t going to work out, then it does work out — it must be because you’re special, right? It’s another way of assigning yourself agency in a world where you’re basically powerless over the big stuff. Humans are wired to believe they have agency, that things happen for a reason. It sounds like I’m giving Festinger at best a backhanded compliment, but I’m very seriously singing his praises — “everybody knows” this stuff, but no one had isolated and described it before. That’s a major achievement — if I could have the equivalent of “discovered cognitive dissonance” on my tombstone, I’d die an ecstatically happy man.
Severian, “Quick Takes: Festinger Edition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-19.
June 25, 2023
QotD: We won’t be seeing any rebooted TV shows from the 1990s
Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
September 29, 2021
QotD: Lizard people
In this telling, to understand UFO reports and the weird little subculture that has grown up around their believers, you need to understand that for those people the imagery of the cheesiest sort of B-movie science fiction has taken up the same receptors in their minds that religious mythology does for the conventionally devout. What they are really grappling with is mystical experience – altered states of consciousness, mindstorms that are very real phenomena in themselves but one which they lack any context to understand in a rational and generative way.
When I remembered this, I found a fruitful question to ask. That is, what is it about their experience of reality that believers in lizard people are coding in this cheesy SFnal imagery? What are they actually trying to talk about?
The answer came to me almost immediately once I managed to formulate the question. That was the moment at which I realized that, barring one unimportant detail, lizard-people theory is actually true.
The unimportant detail is the part about the lizard people being actual extraterrestrials. But let’s look at the rest of it. The believer says: Our elites behave as though they are heavily infiltrated by beings hostile to the interests of ordinary humans. They hide behind a mask of humanity but they have alien minds. They are predators and exploiters, cunning at hiding their nature – but sometimes the mask slips.
Nothing about this is in any way wrong, once you realize that “lizard” is code for “sociopath”. Sociopaths do, differentially, seek power over others, and are rather good at getting it. The few studies that have dared to look have found they are concentrated in political and business elites where drive and ruthlessness are rewarded.
“Lizard” is actually a rather clever code, if you happen to know your evolutionary neuroanatomy. Oversimplifying a little, humans have an exceptionally elaborate neocortex wrapped around a monkey brain wrapped around a lizard brain. The neocortex does what we are pleased to consider higher cognitive functions, the monkey brain does emotions and social behavior, and the lizard brain does territoriality/aggression/dominance.
What is wrong with sociopaths (and psychopaths – these categories are not clearly distinguished) is not entirely clear, but it is certain that their ability to experience emotions is damaged. The monkey brain is compromised; sociopaths live more in their lizard brain and display a lizard-like ability to go from flat affect to aggressive violence and back again in two blinks of an eye.
So, yeah, aliens. We have a live conspiracy theory because a lot of people can sense the alienness in their sociopathic/psychopathic bosses and politicians – and sometimes the mask slips. Not having any grasp of the language of abnormal psychology, they reach for the nearest metaphor handy. There’s a close relative of lizard-people theory in which which many of our elites are held to be members of an ancient Satanic conspiracy and have become demon-ridden; this is different language carrying the same freight.
Eric S. Raymond, “The reality of the lizard people”, Armed and Dangerous, 2020-02-15.
June 28, 2021
Warren’s terminal law of progress
David Warren considers the sudden rash of “revelations” about UFOs we’re getting in the dying media:
Yeah, I know: wrong UFO
This is a demonstration of Warren’s terminal law of progress. As it extends towards “infinity”, all technical progress becomes terminally boring. This also applies to more modest attainments. A civilization that has merely made itself comfortable, and remained so for too long, must find a pretext to demolish itself. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the various more advanced “human rights” campaigns, simply expand in a vacuum of irreparable ennui. Their revolutionary demands can only be answered with wilful destruction — until the offending society is erased.
It follows that everything on this planet, made with human hands, however beautifully, must eventually come to a bad end, even though the majority of its inhabitants have good intentions, and are simply trying to get on with their lives, and would if the aggressive would leave them alone.
For instance, the Portland, Oregon police estimate it took only 200 insurrectionists to turn that city into a revolutionary hell-hole.
Perhaps our alien visitors came to discover the secret of our self-destruction. Or they were bored with the place they came from, but decided to leave before they were tempted to destroy it.
May 21, 2020
QotD: Gullibility and belief in conspiracy theories
Anecdotal thinking vs. statistical thinking. We evolved to do the former so it is natural; science teaches us to do the latter, and it is unnatural. What is natural is to connect two temporally-close events as causally connected. A happens and then B happens. So they must be causally connected, right? I vaccinated my child and shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. They must be connected, right? Not necessarily (and in this case definitely not).
Patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. If you already believe in UFOs or Bigfoot, strange lights in the sky or shadowy figures in the trees are interpreted as a meaningful pattern that supports the belief. Often such patterns carry an additional component that I call …
Agenticity: the tendency to infuse those patterns with intentional agents who act in the world. From conspiracies to ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, we tend to impute agency to the goings on around us, as if there’s someone/something out there pulling the strings.
Confirmation Bias: we look for and find confirming evidence for what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away disconfirming evidence. Once you believe that, say, “the Jews” are running the world, or that the U.S. government (or the Bush administration in the case of the 9/11 truthers) is involved in vast global cabals to control oil, it is easy to interpret daily news stories about the goings on of governments in the light of the conspiracy theory in question. Every bit of minutia becomes pregnant with meaning. It’s not chance or contingency, it’s a Vast Right Wing (or Left Wing) Conspiracy!
Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.
December 21, 2017
UFOs? Again?
I must admit I share Colby Cosh’s just disproven belief that we were done with the UFO craze:
Yeah, I know: wrong UFO
There can no longer be any doubt: every fashion phenomenon does come back. I, for one, really thought we had seen the last of UFO-mania. When I was a boy, the idea of stealthy extraterrestrial visitors zooming around in miraculous aircraft was everywhere in the nerdier corners of popular culture. If you liked comic books or paperback science fiction or Omni magazine — and especially if those things were among the staples of your imaginative diet — there was no getting away from it.
Anyone remember the NBC series Project U.F.O. (1978-79), inspired by the USAF’s real Project Blue Book program? As the anthology show’s Wikipedia page observes, most episodes had the plot of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, only backwards: they would end with the investigating protagonists discovering that UFOs remained impenetrably Unidentifiable, but must be “real” craft capable of physically improbable manoeuvres. (I know citing Wikipedia will savour of pumpkin-spice holiday laziness on my part, but the Scooby thing is a truly perceptive point by some anonymous Wiki-genius.)
Then, at the end of the show, a disclaimer would appear on-screen: “The U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. After 22 years, they found no evidence of extra-terrestrial landings and no threat to national security.”
[…]
There are very good reasons for a superpower’s military apparatus to devote a little money to following up UFO sightings. “Threat Identification”? Sure, whatever. Plenty of U.S. military flyers have seen UFOs, and these people ought to be comfortable reporting odd occurrences without ridicule. But if I were American, I would definitely want most of that budget to go to Scully rather than Mulder. Don’t throw cash at someone who really, really wants to believe.
What I find vexing is that most of the response to the Times story has been in the spirit of “Whoa, aliens!” rather than “Taxpayers got robbed.” Young people may know on some level that ubiquitous good-quality cameras have all but eliminated civilian UFO sightings. But they lack the personal memory of a live, thriving UFO fad, one that bred quasi-scholarly international UFO-study associations along with a whole publishing industry devoted to UFO tales. I wonder if the Times’ piece on UFO research, by the very virtue of its flat-voiced Grey Lady objectivity, is having the same weird effect as that disclaimer they showed at the end of Project U.F.O.
March 4, 2017
The miniatures of Gerry Anderson’s UFO
One of my favourite shows in the early 1970s was UFO, by the same creator and production team of the classic “supermarionation” shows Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet. The Prop Gallery has an overview of how the miniatures used in the show were developed and filmed:
UFO is a 1970 science fiction television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and was the final production of Century 21, formally AP Films, who had previously been responsible for other hit shows such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. UFO was the Anderson’s first live action series, financed by the Incorporated Television Company (ITC) of media mogul Lew Grade who like what he saw in the Anderson produced film Doppelganger, the series was aimed at a more adult demographic than their earlier marionette based work.
The series follows a secret military organisation known as SHADO, an acronym for Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation, who defend the Earth from alien invasion under the cover of the Harlington-Straker Studios. Starring Ed Bishop as Commander Straker much of the series was filmed the MGM British Studios, later known as Elstree, which doubled as the Straker Studio in a clever money saving move. While the series may have lacked puppets it did feature Anderson’s other trademark, stunning model miniature effects sequences realised by longtime collaborator Derek Meddings who would go on to become an Academy Award winner and one of the most highly regarded and influential effects talents ever to work in the industry.
In early 1969 Century 21 set about realising the requirements for filming from their studios in Slough and work began on developing the various SHADO vehicles. Instrumental in this process were Derek Meddings and prolific designer Mike Trim who created concepts which were to bring yet another Anderson world to life. Miniatures were built in various scales by the talented Century 21 model makers, the old puppet stages used on previous shows were transformed in to fully fledged visual effects stages to handle the construction of larger model sets and filming began in April 1969 under the supervision of Meddings.
April 30, 2016
QotD: “SETI is a religion”
Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:
N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL[where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.]
This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming”: the Caltech Michelin Lecture, 2003-01-17.
January 7, 2014
Paul Hellyer – architect of Canada’s unified forces and certified loon
To be kind, I wasn’t a fan of Paul Hellyer even before he started talking about aliens:
Paul Hellyer was Canada’s Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States’ willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens — aliens who might give us more advanced technology if only we were less belligerent.
“They’ve been visiting our planet for thousands of years,” Hellyer told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze in a televised interview.
“There’s been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb. and they’re very concerned about that, and about the fact that we might use it again,” added Hellyer, who said that a cold-war era commission determined that at least four alien species had come to Earth. “The whole cosmos is a unity, and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos, they’ve very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again. This would be bad for us and bad for them too.”
[…]
“I have seen a UFO, about 120 miles north of Toronto, over Lake Muskoka,” Hellyer said. The UFO “just looked like a star … we watched it until our necks almost broke. It was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. … There was no other explanation for it except that it was the real thing.”
The Star of Bethlehem, he added, was one of God’s flying saucers.
Moreover, the number of known alien species has leapt from “between two and 12” to as many as 80, said Hellyer, the senior cabinet minister from Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 cabinet. “They have different agendas. Maybe all of us on earth should have have the same agenda. … Nearly all of them are benign, but one or two are not, and that’s what I’m investigating now.”
August 22, 2013
Sixties TV – it was different if you were under 12
James Lileks looks at a few Gerry Anderson productions:
Gerry Anderson! You’re going to get everything you need for crackerjack adolescent-satisfying sci-fi: spaceships, shuttlecrafts, computers, control rooms, crisp commanding officers, futuristic gadgets, and a big score. And none of it will work half as well as you hoped. The spaceships will look great, though. The computers will blink and there will be switches, but nothing makes Star Trek Sounds. The control rooms are clean but everyone is talking in a British accent for some reason, like they have their own NASA that’s just as big. The gadgets are okay. The score has a trademark echoey quality you found in soundtracks, particularly British ones, from the late 60s to the early 70s. It should be good! Why isn’t it great?
I’ve pondered that mystery for a long time. Sometimes you have a revelation — hey, the founding concept of “Space: 1999 was really stupid” — or you carp about the details, wondering why the UFO interceptors went hunting with one (1) missile that required a direct hit to be effective, instead of just blowing the hell out of the area. Then you realize it’s not great because it’s all the work of someone who made horribly grinning square-headed puppets, that’s why, and never stopping thinking he was making entertainment for 8 years olds.
[…]
The title theme is here, complete with oddly romantic piano interlude. It’s every Barry Grey piece that ever left me cold, right there. In general I just don’t feel Barry Grey’s music — except for the opening of the “Space 1999” theme before it goes full whacka-chicka, and of course that other theme. Here’s a guy who wrote miles and miles of scores for things like “Supercar,” for heaven’s sake, and he turns around and knocks off the tightest, sharpest theme of the 70s.
Still, Laurie Johnson was better.
December 4, 2009
Britain lowers defences against alien invasion
It’s true . . . the British are now wide-open to invaders from Rigel: they’ve re-assigned their UFO investigation forces to other duties:
The Ministry of Defence has closed its UFO unit after more than 50 years of investigating reported UK sightings.
A hotline and e-mail address for the public to report possible sightings was shut on 1 December because it had no “defence value”, the MoD said.
The officer handling reports has moved to another post, saving £44,000 a year.
The MoD said the unit had received thousands of reports, although none had yielded proof of aliens or any security threat to the UK.
Well of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? Expect the mothership to show up any day now . . .
