UFOs: What Happens When a Government Cover-Up Turns Out To Be True?

“It’s one thing to keep something covered up. But the power to contain a story this big – completely contained – I think, would’ve required a set of sophisticated, complex, and forever-widening controls,” says skeptical Robert Thompson, Syracuse University’s celebrated pop culture critic. “And I just don’t think we’re that good at information control.

“However,” he adds, hedging his bet only slightly, “Mark Burnett still has not released the dailies of ‘The Apprentice,’ so who knows? There are things that do manage to not get out.”

Described by Pinterest as “perhaps the most quoted popular culture expert in the world,” Thompson’s granular view of America’s busy entertainment industry doesn’t leave a lot of time for studying The Great Taboo. Understandably, like most taxpayers, Thompson just can’t wrap his mind around the concept of Uncle Sam, with such a long track record of ineptitude and bungling, being able to keep King Kong behind the tarp for decades, across all party lines, social movements and presidential temperaments.

We spoke a week or so after the election, during the first wave of Trump’s wet-diaper twitter tantrums against reality and mathematics. With polls indicating frightening numbers of voters prefer fantasy over facts, the timing seemed appropriate. However, for most Americans to accept a reality that would shove them even farther away from the center of the universe, Thompson said, three criteria would have to be unambiguously established:

1) Proof of intelligent life in the universe, 2) proof that intelligent life has made its presence known, and 3) there are authorities who know intelligent life has made its presence known, but they’ve covered it up. And if they’ve been that successful for so long, Thompson wonders, what could possibly induce the hoarders of such a bombshell revelation to give up the giant ape? A puny request from the Senate Intelligence Committee?

“It would be a story without precedent, a story in a different category from anything we’ve ever seen,” he says. “So, the rational thought here is, we’ve kept a secret for this long, and there’s something Marco Rubio can say that will make them go, oh sure, we’ve kept it quiet since the 1940s, but why not, OK, it’s yours if you ask, sure.

“Really?”

And which messenger could convince you that a small and unbroken chain of (probably white) men have managed to dupe the USA, the whole world, for nearly three-quarters of a century? A vast majority of 74 million Trump voters believe that what the Department of Homeland security called “the most secure (election) in American history” is a fraud. How many voters at large will believe anything coming out of Capitol Hill, which “enjoys” a 23 percent public-approval rating?

“People have so little trust for their political representatives on both sides of the aisle, and in a lot of ways for very good reason,” Thompson says. “At the very highest levels in Washington, we’ve just had four years of being told things that the evidence says is simply not true. That means a healthy skepticism of what comes out of the mouths of elected officials is rational behavior.”

Climate change, for instance, is as real as the predictive equations that jumped off the page this year and into record firestorm and hurricane seasons, Thompson says. But with Congress pretending the science is still up for debate, why would anyone anticipate lawmakers making time for an issue without an obstreperous partisan constituency?

“Climate change is not UFOs. We’ve got the data we need on climate change, with many ways to demonstrate that. I’m convinced climate change is a major alien invasion that is happening now and look how we’re dealing with it,” he says. “I mean, I can look outside and see evidence of it. I can’t look outside and see a tractor beam coming down to kill me.”

Which goes to a larger point. If, for the sake of argument, Thompson’s three criteria have been satisfied, the sublime and dodgy behavior of the phenomenon certainly doesn’t appear to meet popular expectations of urgency.

“Unless it’s like (1980s series) ‘V’ or ‘Independence Day, where the thing starts showing up on the horizon, then it becomes like climate change. If we’re talking about something that’s 75 light years away or whatever, we can say we’ll figure out how to deal with it later, what’s for dinner?

“Look, we have a crisis right here on Earth without an alien invasion, where there seems to be no body of knowledge that we can all agree on. We used to have Walter Cronkite who would say – which, of course, was ridiculous – ‘and that’s the way it is.’ But at least there was an agreed-upon set of facts that people believed, and they based their arguments accordingly.

“Certainly the Nixon administration and the Johnson administration didn’t like ‘the media’ and were complaining about their reports. But there wasn’t a sense that everything they said was out-and-out lies. But now, if you’ve got no body of knowledge that people can agree on, then you can’t even have an argument.”

Well, that’s very depressing. What’s for dinner?