How Believers in the Paranormal Birthed the Pentagon’s New Hunt for UFOs

[Ninshub]

Significant article at Military.com

How Believers in the Paranormal Birthed the Pentagon’s New Hunt for UFOs

Travis Tritten, Deputy Managing Editor
March 7, 2022

The Pentagon's new office for what has been rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, has deep roots in the paranormal. Underneath the Washington defense talk about threats from China and Russia, there is a conviction among advocates that the strange objects glimpsed by troops and military equipment are part of a mysterious phenomenon that stretches back decades or, perhaps, throughout human history.

As the stigma over flying saucer talk lifts, and the military connection has taken UFOs mainstream, some have become more open about those beliefs.

"People say, 'Well, we're only going to look at the nuts-and-bolts machines.' Well, you better come up with a lot of physics. It's far more advanced than we're capable of now," said James Lacatski, a now-retired DIA intelligence officer who set up the UFO program that ran from 2008 to 2010. "And then there's others who say, 'Well, they're nothing more than ghosts. Part of the paranormal world.'

"No, they're a hybrid of both," he said.


(...) "You know when we describe a white flying Tic Tac in 2004, it was described in the '60s as a white flying throat lozenge, what was described in the '50s as a white flying butane tank," Elizondo said in the interview with Military.com, claiming that solid government evidence exists of UFO encounters going back decades.

That link is quite long and very interesting. Here is another quote from the same source, relating to  the fact that a lot of reports seem to have been buried:

"I found out that this had been going on not just for months, but for years in dozens and dozens of incidents off the coast, including a near midair collision," Mellon said. "And the secretary doesn't know. Congress doesn't know, senior officials don't know. I mean are you kidding me? This is such a grotesque failure of imagination, of curiosity and of the system."

John B Alexander's book "Reality Denied" covers a lot of this in more detail.

Graham Hancock's book, "Supernatural" attempts to tie a lot of this information together. It would seem that it is now more or less accepted that many of the ancient art drawn in caves all over the world depicts scenes derived from taking entheogens such as ayahuasca! Cave art is considered to go back 40,000 years, and to be similar all over the world.

The orthodox (i.e. materialistic) version of this story is told by David Lewis-Williams, and stops there. Graham Hancock claims that the visions generated by such drugs are closely related to fairies, and UFO's - particularly abductions.

Hancock's book is actually a lot more convincing than it might sound.

David