[Help me graduate!] Research. X-Files, conspiracy, and your experiences.

[Sarigar]

I live near Gulf Breeze, Florida where, about 15 years ago, there was an extended series of UFO sightings. Like any other UFO sighting there are people who still support it, and others who dubunk it. My older brother got involved in it and the whole culture. Believe me, it is a culture. I even went to a convention locally with worldwide "experts". Ed Walters was the central figure initially in this craze. My brother became friends with him and several other fanatics.
So, turns out one of these guys moved to Roswell several years ago. My brother occasionally hears from him through e-mail and such. A few months ago my brother had to move and tried to rent a house near NAS Pensacola. The man he tried to rent from did an internet search and he pulled up a website that states, no kidding, "Greg _____ UFO Photographer. Missing in Action!!! Abducted by Aliens?" The guy didn't want to rent the house to him since he didn't want any trouble with the military! His buddy from his UFO days posted this on a website. Funny stuff.

 

[Wombat]

I was a huge X-Files fan for several years, even as the show started burning out before my eyese by becoming overly complicated.

But as to the nub, conspiracies, I always compare them against Watergate.

Watergate is held up as the ultimate "known" governmental conspiracy, but look at it -- what we call "Watergate" is actually a bungled after-the-fact attempt to hide what had already gone on. After looking into similar crises through history, I have relegated almost all huge governmental conspiracies to this level.

I do not believe that governments have the internal discipline and control or the long-term commitment to hide anything major. It might work for a while, but what you would get more than anything is the "Hide The Elephant Behind The Column" idea -- they guy might try to tell you that there is no elephant behind the column, but as everyone can see it, as it sticks out rather alarmingly from both ends, the denial becomes a farce. Sure, for a short time there might be a cover-up, even a succesful one, but long term? Never. Someone is bound to talk.

So while conspiracy theories are charming, in that they allow for Vast Forces of Evil to be dictating our lives, most people involved in any government are just like us -- pretty ordinary folks who are a bit better in somethings, a bit worse in others, but generally self-interested and not EVIL. The best most of us to muster in the EVIL department is petty, myself included

 

[RangerWickett]

Bump for additional discussion, hopefully. If it weren't so late, I'd reply with my own thoughts.

 

[The_Universe]

Despite my essentially skeptical nature, I really enjoy hearing about this stuff. People, add your thoughts!

 

[takyris]

Well, I posted my thoughts, and one person said that they were good thoughts, and nobody else really referred to it. It'd help if someone vehemently disagreed with me or something. I have trouble participating in conversations where I'm not being argued with...

 

[RangerWickett]

Here's what my professor said when I proposed the topic:

"This is an interesting topic. I think one important thing to remember is that the project is less on the X-Files per se and more on how the X-Files provides a window into wider sociohistorical issues. In many ways, the show was simply drawing upon and combining disparate yet related narratives that were already being reproduced in other ways in the culture. For instance, the theme of "distrust of government" had been generated by many actual events of the latter half of the 20th century, UFO/alien narratives had begun in the 1950s, etc. The X-Files rolled all this up into a package and commodifeied it as entertainment. Did this weaken the implicit critiques that might have resided in conspiratorial narratives? Did it actually increase and legitimate such critiques? Certainly, as you note, these beliefs took on a "cool" edge. You seem to think the fad has faded, but I wonder if the phenomenon has just moved to other shows or forms of expression. Maybe now that we are at war, our paranoid/conspiratorial energies have been mobilized against outside enemies, rather than against our own government (which seemed to be a large part of X-Files)."

I'm gonna see if I can listen to some Art Bell.

 

[RangerWickett]

The show itself really didn't present anything I wasn't already aware of from reading various books (I'd already heard of MJ-12, the various 'Old White Men Who Secretly Own The World' theories, the Men In Black, etc; I was a big UFO nut for a time and eagerly devoured stuff on UFO's, ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, etc) but I enjoyed the spin they put on things. If anything, it made me more aware of how things had 'changed' since the period in time when I was a UFO nut: now the MiB's didn't just harass or stalk you - they killed people. The perception of conspiracy theorists had changed somewhat since my period of peak interest.

I'm just curious, and this applies to everyone else who's replying to this thread too, how old are you? I know I was about 11 or 12 years old when The X-Files first came on the air, so I had at least a little time before that to get used to the idea of conspiracies and aliens and government cover-ups. People much younger than me, though, I wonder how they view the show, as it might have been their first exposure to these ideas. And even more intriguing, how familiar were older viewers of the show with these subjects?

To Takyris, pretty much this entire class has been about understanding why people believe these things. Sure, some of the theories might actually be true, maybe, but as an American I'm pretty sure my nation didn't create the AIDS virus so we could kill Haitians, and I know most tourists to the Andes don't suck the fat out of the natives like some sort of vampire, and I'm pretty sure that if all the Zionist conspiracies were actually true, the Jews would have managed by now to not be hated by it seems everyone. (Seriously, man, they get a rough break.)

So yes, belief in these sorts of bizarre things is in a way a religion, and for years I irregularly attended services each week, watching Mulder and Scully try to reveal the truth.

That was one of the key things that seems to have drawn in viewers: the search for the truth. The oft-repeated mantra of the show -- "The Truth is Out There" -- convinces viewers that, indeed, the show is not just entertainment, but that it is actually trying to reveal secrets of the world. Combine that with the grand synthesis of so many different myths and urban legends, and the great mass of combined rumors starts to lend the entire thing a weight of believability each individual story would not have on its own.

Effectively, there were so many hooks in the show that any viewer would undoubtedly have heard of some of them. While you might not believe in the alien conspiracy, or in the Kennedy assassination theories, if you were even a passing adherent to belief in the Illuminati, when the show touched on that topic, some subconscious part of you would recognize that as something you're willing to believe in, and then the connections between that belief, and the many other beliefs in the show, would encourage you to lend a bit more credence to theories you might never otherwise have given mind to.

The X-Files succeeded in becoming a cultural phenomenon for many fortuitous reasons, but one that may have been the greatest boon for the show was its wide-reach appeal. If it had just been a show about aliens, it would have gotten boring fast (and, in my opinion, the alien plots still did end up getting boring). Because it brought together myths from many sources, however, everyone could find something they liked.

It certainly didn't hurt that, somewhere before season three, Gillian Anderson went from cute to hot. I am proud, though, that I liked the show even before that point.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I was older than you when X-Files came on -- I was in my early 30s. I've always been interested in UFOs, urban myths, conspiracy theories, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, etc. I was really into a lot of that stuff when I was in junior high, in the mid-70s. Read every book I could get my hands on, and watched everything on TV I could -- which wasn't really that much, in the pre-cable TV explosion; cable TV existed, but we didn't have it.

What I find interesting is how the U.S. news media has basically stopped covering almost anything to do with UFOs since the '80s. Yes, there were a rash of stories back on the 50th anniversary of Roswell, but basically, if there are large-scale UFO sightings -- such as those over Mexico City in the '90s -- the national media in the U.S. gives it no coverage. If something happens locally, like the sightings in Gulf Breeze, or the lights over Phoenix, the local media might report it, but nationally it gets no coverage expect by what is considered to be "fringe" media -- supermarket tabloids and cable television programs. That's not the way it used to be.

The last wave of UFO sightings to get widespread, national coverage was probably in the mid-70s, when I was in jr. high. There was coverage on the national evening news, special hour-long news reports in prime time, stories in the newspaper that moved on the major wire services. But at some point the news media decided UFOs were no longer news, and stopped covering them. I've often wondered if it was because of subtle influence from the government or some other group that is "in control," or if the media is afraid of being laughed at, or if they just decided most people now believe in UFOs and aliens so there's no reason to do stories about them. I work in the news media, and I can't answer that question.

Someone above posted that no government conspiracy can work for a long period of time. I agree with that to an extent, and disagree with it as well. There are ways that a conspiracy can last long-term. It depends on the number of people who actually know what the "secret" is. For a conspiracy to work long-term, there has to be only a small group who actually know the secret; everyone else is not privy to the secret, they are just guarding the secret. So let's say, for example, the JFK assassination plot is true. It could be pulled off by a small group of men with the power to give the orders, and to find the men who will follow the orders without question. Then the men who gave the orders have the men who followed the orders killed. Then have those men killed. Any evidence relating to the assassination, have it declared super top secret and hidden away where access to it -- even if you have the right clearance -- is controlled. Eliminate all reference to it, so no one knows it is hidden away, or where. (Think of the final scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark") The conspiracy would stay hidden long-term, unless someone discovered the evidence or one of the original conspirators talked.

That's how they kept Roswell secret for so long -- knowledge was on a need-to-know basis only, and many of the people who were involved were military men who were ordered -- under threat of death -- to never talk about it. And they didn't, until they got older and realized they were going to die soon anyway. The threat of death held little power against them. So they started to talk.

The more people who know the secret, the harder it is to keep secret. A lot of these secrets have started to be revealed, or will be revealed in the near future, because the people originally in charge are now dead or have no power left, and the people who helped cover up the secret are no long afraid of the consequences. Also, times have changed. In the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s, people were more willing to keep a secret if they thought it was a matter of national security or of national importance. That mindset was created by WWII and the Cold War. But after various government and military scandals were uncovered in the post-Watergate and Pentagon Papers era, people in the military and the government didn't feel keeping these secrets were that crucial anymore. Others were talking, why shouldn't they -- there might even be some money to be made. Where once it was thought heroic by the public not to talk, now it is considered to be heroic to blow the whistle.

 

[RangerWickett]

I was older than you when X-Files came on -- I was in my early 30s. I've always been interested in UFOs, urban myths, conspiracy theories, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, etc. I was really into a lot of that stuff when I was in junior high, in the mid-70s. Read every book I could get my hands on, and watched everything on TV I could -- which wasn't really that much, in the pre-cable TV explosion; cable TV existed, but we didn't have it.

What I find interesting is how the U.S. news media has basically stopped covering almost anything to do with UFOs since the '80s. Yes, there were a rash of stories back on the 50th anniversary of Roswell, but basically, if there are large-scale UFO sightings -- such as those over Mexico City in the '90s -- the national media in the U.S. gives it no coverage. If something happens locally, like the sightings in Gulf Breeze, or the lights over Phoenix, the local media might report it, but nationally it gets no coverage expect by what is considered to be "fringe" media -- supermarket tabloids and cable television programs. That's not the way it used to be.

The last wave of UFO sightings to get widespread, national coverage was probably in the mid-70s, when I was in jr. high. There was coverage on the national evening news, special hour-long news reports in prime time, stories in the newspaper that moved on the major wire services. But at some point the news media decided UFOs were no longer news, and stopped covering them. I've often wondered if it was because of subtle influence from the government or some other group that is "in control," or if the media is afraid of being laughed at, or if they just decided most people now believe in UFOs and aliens so there's no reason to do stories about them. I work in the news media, and I can't answer that question.

Someone above posted that no government conspiracy can work for a long period of time. I agree with that to an extent, and disagree with it as well. There are ways that a conspiracy can last long-term. It depends on the number of people who actually know what the "secret" is. For a conspiracy to work long-term, there has to be only a small group who actually know the secret; everyone else is not privy to the secret, they are just guarding the secret. So let's say, for example, the JFK assassination plot is true. It could be pulled off by a small group of men with the power to give the orders, and to find the men who will follow the orders without question. Then the men who gave the orders have the men who followed the orders killed. Then have those men killed. Any evidence relating to the assassination, have it declared super top secret and hidden away where access to it -- even if you have the right clearance -- is controlled. Eliminate all reference to it, so no one knows it is hidden away, or where. (Think of the final scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark") The conspiracy would stay hidden long-term, unless someone discovered the evidence or one of the original conspirators talked.

That's how they kept Roswell secret for so long -- knowledge was on a need-to-know basis only, and many of the people who were involved were military men who were ordered -- under threat of death -- to never talk about it. And they didn't, until they got older and realized they were going to die soon anyway. The threat of death held little power against them. So they started to talk.

The more people who know the secret, the harder it is to keep secret. A lot of these secrets have started to be revealed, or will be revealed in the near future, because the people originally in charge are now dead or have no power left, and the people who helped cover up the secret are no long afraid of the consequences. Also, times have changed. In the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s, people were more willing to keep a secret if they thought it was a matter of national security or of national importance. That mindset was created by WWII and the Cold War. But after various government and military scandals were uncovered in the post-Watergate and Pentagon Papers era, people in the military and the government didn't feel keeping these secrets were that crucial anymore. Others were talking, why shouldn't they -- there might even be some money to be made. Where once it was thought heroic by the public not to talk, now it is considered to be heroic to blow the whistle.

I take it you believe that UFOs visit the earth, then? It sounds like you're saying that people have revealed the truth about the aliens at Roswell, yet I'm unfamiliar with anything more concrete than the stuff bandied about in that TV Movie with Kyle Maclachlan.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'm just curious, and this applies to everyone else who's replying to this thread too, how old are you?

I'll be 42 end of this June. I went through my big UFO/Cryptozoology period when I was about 10-15.

It sounds like you're saying that people have revealed the truth about the aliens at Roswell, yet I'm unfamiliar with anything more concrete than the stuff bandied about in that TV Movie with Kyle Maclachlan.

There are probably hundreds of websites you could visit to better aquaint yourself with the current 'paradigm' concerning abductions, etc; I don't have a lot since as an offshoot of both my childhood fascination and RPGs, I tend to look at sites that link RPGs to various cult activity, 'Satanic Panic', repressed memories, and similar subjects.

Some basics:

Oh, yes, there are people that think that 'the truth' about Roswell has been uncovered - the tales vary but the government either (1) recovered bodies at the crash site (2) recovered and dissected said bodies (3) recovered 'saucer' parts enough to replicate the fundamentals of alien reactionless space drives (these are suppossed to be the source of the lights you used to be able to see out at Groom Lake) (4) recovered tech and bodies, traded bodies back to aliens for more tech.

'Ufo' sightings begin in their current form as early as the late 1800's. (Though you always get references to the 'wheels of fire' described by Ezekiel in the Bible). There were a rash of 'phantom airship' sightings, including the very first 'saucer' description and the first description of a cattle mutilation. (Cattle Mutilations are a BIG part of UFO lore). See the book 'Weird Wild West' for more such tales, including Indians claiming to have hunted dinosaur-like creatures.

Barney and Betty Hill - the first reported 'abduction/tested' story. This was the seed for many, many stories to follow and set the basic pattern: aliens land, take people, experiment on them or take samples, the people are returned sans memory of the event, memory begins to return often as form of nightmares. The major branch-off for this is the 'implant' story, where aliens implant tracking or transmission chips (Remember Scully finding her own chip?)

What becomes interesting is how various forms of 'conspiracy theory' feed off of each other, producing looping paths that intersect back with the original lore and either strengthen it or create an entirely new diverging pathway.

An example of this are the Men In Black. Almost since the beginning of UFO abduction stories, there have been stories about Men In Black. The story usually goes like this: Encounter occurs. MiB's show up within hours or days to 'convince' the people that they saw nothing, or that everything has been explained. Early accounts of the MiB's strongly suggest that the MiB's themselves are either humanoid aliens, tools of the aliens, or some kind of machine. Not long after this, the 70's come along and you get MiB's identified as from 'some governmental agency', typically the FBI or the (I think then still top secret) NSA (Thus the joke that the acronym stands for 'No Such Agency').

That then ties in aliens with governmental conspiracies of a larger sort: you can devote your life just to hunting down all the strictly mundane conspiracies, including the Freemasons, the Templars, The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission (Names sound familiar from Steve Jackson's Illuminati game? They should ), FEMA (in it's role as potential shadow government and tacit approver of new concentration camps for American citizens), the HAARP array, blah blah blah.

Every now and then, you get a 'new paradigm' come out. Crop Circles are one; no-one before the Ninties had ever heard of a crop circle. Now you have 'cerealogists' (I swear, I am not making this up) who study the things despite the substancial claim made by the people who suppossedly hoaxed the whole thing.

Probably the UFO case I'm most familiar with are the sightings at Bentwaters AFB; a friend of mine was stationed there at the time, and she knew some of the principals involved; she swears they encountered something damned unusual out in those woods.

Probably as one of the better depictions of a recent 'crash' would be the Sci-Fi channel's depiction of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident in 1965.