REAL American History 101

I meant to begin by writing that post-war America has seen some weird years, but how strange that phrase seems. Has there ever, really, been a post-war America? As long as I’ve been paying attention it’s either been fighting one or several, or preparing for the next. And sometimes, like this time, doing it all simultaneously. But you know what I mean.

Think of 1947, the year of Aleister Crowley’s death. The Paperclip Nazis were content to be working again. The father of American rocket science and the founder of Scientology were making magick in the Mojave desert in order to trigger apocalypse. Meanwhile, the modern UFO phenomenon exploded in the Western skies with the Kenneth Arnold sighting, Roswell (largely misinformation, but still significant for being misinformation), Maury Island and Tacoma, the latter two involving alleged retrieval of “saucer debris” by Fred Crisman and Guy Bannister respectively. Bannister of course is better known for his New Orleans’ stewardship of Lee Harvey Oswald, while Crisman was one of the first persons called by Clay Shaw after hearing the news that he was a target of Jim Garrison’s investigation, and was himself subpoenaed.

The National Security Act was signed into law July 26, 1947, creating the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Less than two years later the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, took a great fall from the 16th floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital. “There is something I would like to talk to you about,” Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington told him following the March 28 ceremony in which Forrestal formally stepped down. They shared a private ride back to the Pentagon. As Richard Dolan writes in UFOs and the National Security State, “what Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office…. When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, ‘you are a loyal fellow,’ for several hours.”

These are all things that really happened; they left a kind of footprint in the real world. But for the most part their traces go unexamined, and the connections and linkages they suggest are unpursued. It can be in their faces, and most people still can’t see it, and it’s not entirely because they’d rather not.

Do you know why, and do you know what this is they can’t see? It’s the dark matter. It’s the universe most people are blind to, but which explains the universe they inhabit. It’s the black thread that holds the visible light like dew on a web. That’s parapolitics. That’s para-everything. It’s the night vision goggles through which the rationalists and the self-identifying skeptics never peer. To them, the darkness is contentless void. But it isn’t. And any meaningful estimate of the situation, 2006, needs to account for it.