Itty-Bitty Disclosure Day In Washington

And: Rat Plague Summer; Pim Fortuyn; L.A.'s Commie Mayor; Ray Dalio, Cassandra

From Apollo 17 (1972) moon mission, unusual lights seen inside the box

So, we have at least some government disclosure about what it knows about UFOs, or, if you prefer, UAPs. Here is a link to the Department of War’s page on which it presents its raw data. I haven’t had a chance to go through any of it yet — I’m late writing today’s newsletter because I have been sick, I overslept (California jetlag is wrecking me!), and because I had a three-hour interview with a French researcher, from which I just returned. As of this writing (near 4pm European time), there has been no detailed reporting on what’s in the files yet — there’s LOTS to go through. Fox News has a report showing some of the video released by the War department. No real bangers, it seems to me, but again, it’s early, and the War department says there will be more releases coming.

In my quick scanning some of these files, I’d say there’s not a lot there. I reserve the right to revise this opinion once I’ve looked at more of them, but again, no bangers. I feel that the government is laying the groundwork for something much bigger. But really, who knows?

Here’s something interesting and important from Diana Pasulka’s Substack today:

I remember writing the introduction to my first book about the topic in 2018 and asking myself a simple question: What do I want the public to understand most about this subject? My answer was this: almost everything people encounter about UFOs in films, television, and popular media is inaccurate or distorted. Almost everything. There are occasional fragments that ring true, but they are as rare as genuinely unexplained UFO cases themselves. Today, as I write this article, I believe that the answer to that original question has not changed.

The only reliable way to develop discernment about what may actually be occurring is to spend time seriously studying the subject for yourself—not only its contemporary manifestations, but also its long and complex history. I understand that this is difficult in a world in which you spend too much time at work and struggle to make time for important things like family. But if you really want to know, sustained attention to the historical record develops a person’s ability to interpret current events with greater clarity and caution.

I strongly recommend her first book on the topic, American Cosmic, as a basic orientation to the serious study of this phenomenon. She goes on in her Substack:

This, combined with Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim that he believes aliens can be understood from a demonic framework, is worth reflection. Why? Because there are people in the government who identify the current UFO files with supernatural, paranormal, and religious-like activity (two Representatives come to mind). To be fair to Vance, he tried to indicate that the topic is way more complex than the blanket statement, “it’s just demons.” However, once a person uses that word (the D word) in such a public forum, it’s going to get picked up and sensationalized. All nuance gets lost. David Grusch says that even so, rushing to the angels/demons framework might not be helpful. Is he right? How else should we approach the topic, especially as Grusch has cited me as a good source for understanding these nuances…? My take has always been that the angels/demons framework is probably the best starting point. Religion has been that unique structure that arose to interface with NHI. It’s worth revisiting what it has to say about it.

Make sure you understand what she’s saying here. She’s not saying “it’s just demons.” She’s saying, rather, that approaching the UFO/aliens subject as if we were dealing with disembodied intelligences is the best way to begin. Notice what she’s not saying: “…as if we were dealing with embodied creatures from other planets.” The sources I’ve had over the past couple of years of my interest in the subject have all said that whatever these things are, they are almost certainly “interdimensional” or “transdimensional” beings. You know that I believe they are probably demons, or at least demonic in nature (meaning, spiritual beings aligned to evil), even if not demons, strictly speaking. You don’t have to go that far to recognize that these entities are disembodied intelligences that are capable of manifesting in physical ways, and also capable of producing material effects.

I hope that the release of these government files, however paltry they seem to be in this first round of disclosure, makes skeptics realize that there really is something serious and substantive going on here. Again, Pasulka’s books (there are two in print, and one coming next month) are great places to begin. But let me emphasize her point above: practice discernment! Don’t take anything at face value. Not only is it difficult to understand this stuff, but you are also dealing with people who have no problem lying about it, for their own reasons.

Here is a passage from Living In Wonder, to remind you of why I think this phenomenon is ultimately demonic:

Recall that we began our journey into the mystic with the story of Nino, a lawyer who saw a UFO as a teenager and years later began to experience paranormal visitations from luminous beings he took for aliens but became convinced were demons.

It will not surprise you to learn that the twentieth-century Russian Orthodox priest-monk Seraphim Rose warned that the UFO phenomenon is demonic in origin and has many analogs in the recorded history of Christian mystical experience. He was a cleric, after all. It may shock you, though, to learn that the world’s leading authority on the UFO phenomenon, computer scientist and venture capitalist Jacques Vallée, also believes something close to this.

Furthermore, Vallée believes that the aliens, or whatever they are, are likely to be at the bottom of a new religion that will arrive in the future. This will be part of a religion built for the scientific age, which already has learned to worship science, technology, and the future.

Vallée, who was the model for the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is not a Christian or a conventional religious believer of any kind. But a lifetime spent investigating UFO phenomena has led him to assert that these entities are real. After six decades of studying them, Vallée is unwilling to say precisely what they are—but he has concluded that they are unlikely to be creatures from other planets.

Rather, in Vallée’s estimation, they are probably higher intelligences coming to us from a dimension beyond space and time. And they come with malevolent intent. They are choosing to manifest as beings from space, he theorizes, as a strategy of control—to reprogram humanity for some other purpose. And they have been at it for a long time. In his seminal 1969 book Passport to Magonia, Vallée records the striking parallels between contemporary reports of close encounters with UFOs and so-called aliens and written accounts of encounters with mysterious beings typically associated with folklore:

If we take a wide sample of this historical material, we find that it is organized around one central theme: visitation by an aerial people from one or more remote, legendary countries. The names and attributes vary, but the idea clearly does not. Magonia, heaven, hell, Elfland—such places have in common one characteristic: we are unable to reach them alive, except—as we shall see—on very special occasions. Emissaries from these supernatural abodes come to earth, sometimes under human form and sometimes as monsters. They perform wonders. They serve man or fight him. They influence civilizations through mystical revelation. They seduce earth women, and the few heroes who dare seek their friendship find the girls from Elfland endowed with desires that betray a carnal, rather than purely aerial, nature.

It might be, he speculates, that flying saucers and space aliens are merely the masks that these entities, who have always been with us, don to seduce people living in the space age. But he’s still not sure. Whatever the case, this idea dovetails with historian Carlos Eire’s speculation that we have suppressed recorded knowledge of fantastical events because they do not fit our scientific paradigm. The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who made waves by taking UFO-abduction stories seriously, once complained that “we have a kind of either/or mentality. It’s either literally physical, or it’s in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.”

I remind you also that Pasulka has said publicly (for example, here) that as she was leaving Vallée’s apartment after a visit, he suggested that she find a copy of this book, Satan, a collection of theological essays by Catholic scholars, published in the mid-20th century, initially by a Carmelite publishing house (in French; the link takes you to an Internet version of the English translation). They are all essays about various aspects of Lucifer. Vallée, who is not a Christian, suggested that this book might tell us something about what we are dealing with in the UFO phenomenon. Someone else I know visited Vallée subsequently, and reported seeing in his apartment a large book he had apparently been reading, about Luciferianism. My source did not ask Vallée about it, as he was on the way out the door. But it did catch his eye.

The Emerging Hantavirus Situation

Keeping up with this story? It’s getting freaky. Two Dutch birders on a cruise went to a garbage dump in Argentina to look for titmice, or some crap like that, and apparently came in contact with the Andes strain of the hantavirus. They probably stepped on rat poop. They brought it back onto the ship with them. Now they’re both dead, as is a third person who had been on the boat.

Here’s a WSJ report about it, which I’ve unlocked for you. You’re welcome. Some of the passengers who were on the boat during the incubation period debarked; global health authorities are now trying to trace them.

Hantavirus is hard to spread. The fear here is that this might be a mutation. It’s a disease that kills 40 percent of those who catch it. Not time to panic yet, but still.

Yeah, that’s just what we need: a global Rat Plague Summer. With that, the Iran war not likely ending soon (the CIA now says the Iranians could hold out for at least four more months, and still have most of their ballistic missiles), the incoming oil shock with its potential for civil unrest (in Europe, at least), imminent UFO disclosure, McDonalds announcing plans to phase out self-serve soda machines, and Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn star double dying in an English badger den, it’s a good time to remind y’all of what Mama always says:

(This is not my Mama)

(P.S.: the Gordon Ramsay story is fake. But it’s still awesome.)

Remembering Pim Fortuyn

Yesterday marked the 24th anniversary of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay, secularist Dutch politician who looked to be on the verge of being elected the country’s prime minister. He was murdered leaving a TV studio by a young Dutch leftist who said he was defending migrants. After serving 12 years in prison for the murder, the man walked free in 2014. He recently attended a Marxist May Day rally in Amsterdam, where he was interviewed by a journalist.

Fortuyn was no conservative. He was, in fact, a libertine. But he was a patriot. Watch this clip of a furious private speech he gave, denouncing what the Netherlands was becoming, and why he was determined to stop it.

In the wake of Fortuyn’s murder in 2002, I went to the Netherlands to do a piece on the country for National Review. I re-read it last night for the first time since it was published; this part jumped out at me:

Some 30 years ago, 60 percent of the population were at church on Sunday morning; today, it’s between 8 and 13 percent. The media have relentlessly mocked religion.

To be a believing Christian in today’s Holland, therefore, requires a countercultural courage that’s hard for most Americans to imagine. But these people exist. I stumbled across a small congregation of Iranian Pentecostals, all converts from Islam, in a distant suburb of Amsterdam. The pastor, who asked not to be identified because of past violent threats from area Muslims, told me that he was shocked by the naivete the Dutch have about radical Islam. He thought Fortuyn was “a bit extremist,” and didn’t count himself a supporter–but he agreed with much of what Fortuyn said, and was glad somebody finally said it.

In this, the Iranian pastor was like most Dutch voters with whom I spoke, telling me that Fortuyn wasn’t their cup of tea, politically, but he was invaluable as a catalyst for a long-overdue discussion of Islam and the limits of multiculturalism. Kinneging says Fortuyn struck a chord with voters sick of being taken for granted: “In the wake of the transformation of our big cities [by immigration] has come a lot of guns, violence, drugs, trading in women, and dirty streets. The political, intellectual, and journalistic elite who are in favor of this immigration do not live in these urban neighborhoods.”

Watch the Fortuyn rant, and consider that if he were alive today, he could say the same thing. His death made no difference at all, nor did the death of Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker and left-wing provocateur who was slaughtered in the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamist, who cut his throat, like a sacrificial sheep’s.

L.A.’s Commie Mayor

I don’t know if y’all are following the grassroots campaign of Spencer Pratt to unseat Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, but he’s got an incredibly strong social media game. Pratt is a former reality television star who got radicalized and politicized when his house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fires. Mayor Bass was out of town at some big 'do in Ghana at the time, and was heavily criticized for it back home.

In this five-minute clip, Pratt takes apart Bass’s youthful history as an actual Communist activist. He calls her “Karen Basura”; basura is Spanish for “trash.” “What were you doing when you were 19 years old?” Pratt asks — and then documents that Bass was in Cuba working for Castro as part of the “Venceremos Brigades.” This is actually true — not a Nixonian smear; Bass kept going back to Cuba again and again over the years, and, as Pratt recalls, issued a statement about the Cuban dictator’s death praising him as “comandante in jefe”. That’s “commander in chief,” an honorific title that the Cuban regime used for Castro.

Pratt is pissed off, and according to a local LA media poll, won the televised mayoral debate the other night, going away. Knowing nothing about L.A. politics, and observing from afar, I’m just blown away by how good this guy is on social media at articulating a message and framing the opposition.

Ray Dalio, Billionaire Cassandra

Well, this was bad news to read yesterday in the NYT:

The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.

It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II. But the development barely seemed to register in the nation’s capital, where few policymakers bothered to acknowledge the latest warning sign about the government’s poor fiscal health.

The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.

Turns out that the billionaire investor Ray Dalio recently joined Ross Douthat to talk about all this. Dalio brings a cyclical view of history to his understanding. He believes, roughly, that the US is spending itself into decline, because that’s what empires do. Douthat pressed him for a prediction on the near future for the US:

Dalio: I’ll give you my concerns. I think we have these big issues — the money issue, the political social issue domestically, and the international geopolitical issues. As I look at the clock, we’re going to come into the midterm elections and I think that the Republicans will probably lose the House. I think from that point on, you’re going to see an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order.

… My general reaction is that we are entering a period of greater disorder, to answer your question. I think greater risk than existed, and it is following that arc. Now we talk with words, but I plot things on charts in terms of what the patterns are, and these things are following those kinds of patterns.

He says we could see political violence in the US. He also says: diversify your portfolio.

I say: have a good weekend. Stay out of English badger dens.