The careful buyer of an object of dubious provenance has two indications, if not of its worth, then of its authenticity. The object might be priced at or above market value. Here the higher price might mean the seller knew something the buyer did not — either that the market had gone up, or that the seller was ignorant of the fact that it had not. (This last is called “making the market.”)
In an unregulated interchange — a flea market, for example — the rule is Caveat emptor (“Trust everyone, but cut the cards”). An item priced above the market here might be wrongly described (“Well, we don’t know. It looks like a ____”), or, indeed, it might be counterfeit.
I used to collect and trade pocketknives. And many is the time I came across one, at a knife show, gun show, or auction, gussied up and false as the Whore of Babylon. Trade associations, formed ostensibly for the protection of buyers, are, essentially, instruments of monopoly. One might pay a higher price for a trifle bought at a “reputable” auction, or certified by an expert, but collusion and fraud among such sellers are well known.
All auction houses have taken bids “off the chandelier,” and the greatest art experts have been tagged for false attribution.
Paying too much for an object, a pocketknife or a Vermeer, does not guarantee either the object’s worth or its authenticity. The higher the price, the greater the incentive to fraud.
But what if the object for sale is priced below the market? If the Cattleman’s Jack is in the two-dollar tray at the flea market, along with the cap lifters and corkscrews, and it looks damned like a 19th-century rare case knife, why, then, Bob’s your uncle. You may be mistaken about the knife’s worth, but you can be absolutely sure about its authenticity, as its price could not include the cost of faking it.
We might say the same of information.
We live in a sea of propaganda. What is presented as news by the NGO Truth Ministries must advance an agenda, as air time/screen time and, thus, access to the recipient’s attention is limited.
In the good old days the newspapers’ recitals of crime and weather were leavened by that known as “Human Interest.” “Rooster Learns to Type,” e.g. Today even this category is devoted to instruction, “Free-Range Rooster Learns to Type Faster Than Industrially Raised Bird,” if I may.
All of the content of the legacy media is propaganda — note that even the weather reports have their shoulder to the wheel, and reflect (cold or warm) the ravages of global warming.
The gussied-up non-news of the monoliths might coincidentally be accurate; but as the sway of the Left broadens into absolute totalitarianism, no category of so-called information may be relied upon to be a report rather than a lesson/instruction/command.
The Left’s screaming may be understood as “Men can have babies or we’re going to ruin you.” As we know.
How can one possibly trust anything issuing from a source we know to be tainted? Or, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. (Trans.: “He fooled you once, shame on him, he fooled you twice, shame on you.”) The absurd and blasphemous is presented as fact, “authenticated” by the power of its proponents, and their perseveration creates a (grudging or unconscious) acceptance of their lies.
* * *
I wrote in these pages earlier this year (“Time Travel,” March 8) that we might imagine visits from extraterrestrials bringing gifts of Wisdom and Order to our confused world. But how, I asked, could this beneficence be disseminated, other than through either existing channels (the corrupt) or by its imposition by the Visitors (slavery)?
No, I, in my wisdom, concluded, “The visitors might be more advanced than we” is but another rendition of the liberal wish for this or that “czar” to cut through the red tape: one who knew better, and so could rule the idiot masses. Additionally, I wrote, the cognitive dissonance of the last few years was such that, should we hear that aliens have landed, we might well remark, “So what?”
I have a particular affection for the notion of these Visitors, as I saw them. Twice.
I was in Vermont both times. The two incidents were 20 years apart, and I give you the synoptic report:
The first time I saw lights in the night sky. There were five or six points bright as a star. They gathered into a loose formation and made a circuit of the horizon in about one minute. They stopped, held still in space, and did it again.
I called the Air Force base at Plattsburgh, and was thanked and told to go on my way.
The second time I was walking with my wife, and we saw one light. It was stationary, in the northeast, larger than a star and as bright. It moved slowly, east to west, and appeared to be some one or two miles away, the distance hard to determine, as we didn’t know the object’s size. It then shot away to the northwest, hovered there, and made a complete circuit of the horizon, counterclockwise, just like the first apparition.
It returned to the spot where we’d first seen it, stopped, and, again, began to proceed, slowly, toward the northwest, then made another circuit of the sky. I didn’t call Plattsburgh, as I’d already learned “Shut up and go away.”
* * *
I became interested, you might imagine, in extraterrestrial phenomena, and read many books on the subject. I discovered a lot of guff, of the National Enquirer genre (“Two-Headed Space-Monster Runs for Congress,” etc.), and some firsthand reports of visitation/abduction, which I’d be happy to discard outright as beyond possibility, but of which, as a witness myself, I had to withhold condemnation.
And I came across the odd pilot report: a description of encounters with UFOs by men who were not only trained observers of aerial phenomena, but whose reports were made at the risk of ridicule or unfortunate professional consequences. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book (1952–69) was a supposed investigation into unidentified flying objects. Its results mirrored those of the Warren Commission, laboring to fit facts to conclusions. In both cases we have the governmental report that “everything’s fine, go to bed.” But I’d seen them.
Many years pass. I have no dog in that fight, and am closing out my days, as have many before me, shaking my head sadly. And, again, what if my extraterrestrial friends showed up to be acknowledged?
And now, it seems, they have been.
I found the acknowledgment, as it were, in the two-dollar bin at the flea market. It must be authentic, as it profited no one to fake it; and I find it true, as it describes exactly the display I’d seen those two times in Vermont.
September 12, 2021, issue of Aviation Week. The magazine is for and by aviation professionals — it does not concern itself with the Joy of Flying or “the time I ran out of gas,” but with commercial aviation, safety, defense, and business. See, in this issue, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Research Gathers Momentum.”
They report that in 2015 a Navy pilot flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt observed an object, later dubbed the “gimbal.” And there is a photo of the thing, taken from his F-18.
In the article we also find reference to the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter with UFOs, tracked by scanned radar from the cruiser USS Princeton. The objects indicated “unbelievable velocities and acceleration of power.” Kevin Knuth of the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena writes, “It’s unavoidable for these accelerations to be less than 1,000 G’s, which is absolutely insane, so what’s going on here is truly anomalous.” At 1,000 times the force of gravity a 150-pound human being would weigh 150,000 pounds.
The object observed came to an abrupt stop at sea level, with no apparent period of deceleration whatever, just like those I saw in Vermont. Knuth writes that the amount of energy that would have been necessary (for this instant deceleration) would have been equivalent to “100 tons of TNT, or . . . blowing up 250 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles.”
The photo taken from the F-18, the “gimbal,” appears on page 34 of a 48-page issue. It’s in the back of the book, that is, in the two-dollar bin. Take a look at it: It’s a flying saucer.
How refreshing, after all the reports, both weary and wicked, passing as news, to find actual, odd revelation about the physical world.
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