As most of you know, I am currently working on assembling some materials for a book proposal about the various moral panics that flared up in 1947 and burned through the 1950s. As part of that research, I am invariably forced to deal with the so-called Roswell crash, even though the incident was of no particular importance in 1947, except as an illustration of how the flare-up in anti-communist panic in the preceding weeks led military officials to use that summer’s UFO flap as cover for operations aimed at the Soviet Union. I was, however, amused to read this week that Michael Salla and Corey Goode are flogging a new claim, that Donald Trump has been briefed on the Roswell crash and that the flying disc that the military claimed to capture was in fact a time-traveling military vehicle from the future. The warrant for their claim comes from a recent interview between Trump and his son, Don, Jr., in which Trump pandered to the large contingent of right-wing UFO nuts by suggesting that he knew “interesting” things about Roswell. In an article published on ExoNews, Salla quotes Goode to this effect: I have mentioned this in the past. It was brought up again recently after Trump commented on Roswell. POTUS ‘Roswell Briefings’ are basically this: Roswell was NOT an Alien event. It was a mishap from US in the future. POTUS is told that the MAJORITY of the lights seen in the sky are from our own craft operating in the future and creating a temporal butterfly effect. They are told that what the ancients saw in the sky was often the exact same phenomenon…. Goode went on to connect his claim to the pro-Trump Q-Anon conspiracy theory and to argue that Trump is an agent of disclosure, and that he is helping to fight a Doctor Who-style time war between humans from two competing timelines. Goode argues that Trump’s uncle John examined Nikola Tesla’s secret papers about space aliens in 1943 and shared the results with the future president, thus imbuing him with secret knowledge that forever marked him among humanity’s elect.
It amazes me how badly right-wingers want Trump to be a demigod, or somehow touched by the divine. Nevertheless, Salla doesn’t like Goode’s ideas and suspects that the story of time-travelers is simply cover meant to hide the truth about space aliens. “The explanation that Roswell involved time traveling future humans who arranged for the crash to occur to speed up our technological development certainly sounds plausible, and will appeal to those wielding Occam’s Razor to dismiss the extraterrestrial hypothesis,” he says. In what world is time traveling super-soldiers the most probable explanation for a balloon crashing in the desert?
25 Comments
Ken
7/21/2020 09:24:35 am
Wouldn't it be easier for future scientists to send back a textbook to advance technology instead of crashing a flying saucer? And since that would presumably speed up their own technical advancement they could keep doing it until we knew everything there was to know.
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Brian
7/21/2020 10:06:00 am
You bring up an interesting point: what is this need on the far right to see Trump, of all people, as divine? The cynical use of a major sinner like Trump by the Evangelicals to push through their anti-human, pro-death agenda is one thing, but why would anyone so powerfully want to see an obese, spray-tanned, badly dressed, cognitively impaired, inarticulate, sputtering, whining man-baby as divinely inspired that they would tell themselves he's some sort of Harry Potter/Star Wars/Terminator hero? Future sociologists and psychologists are going to be monopolized by this subject. He's like a black hole, sucking all attention into its gaping nullity.
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Jim
7/21/2020 11:25:15 am
Joe is not going to like this.
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Kent
7/21/2020 07:46:02 pm
Yeah, I hear Mr. Scales enjoys good analogies and funny humor.
Joe Scales
7/23/2020 10:13:17 am
Both of which on this site are few and far between...
Professor hance
7/27/2020 11:25:43 pm
Joe kent is the master of the few and far between; and t'isnt being wrong.
Ralf Buelow
7/21/2020 11:45:16 am
The Tesla-Trump story is true, except for the fact that there were no space aliens and that everybody can read John Trump's report on the FBI's website, see https://vault.fbi.gov/nikola-tesla/Nikola%20Tesla%20Part%2003%20of%2003/at_download/file - please go to PDF pages 37 - 44
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David Evans
7/21/2020 02:56:30 pm
Interesting that they mention the butterfly effect. I thought it was common knowledge, at least since Ray Bradbury, that anything you do in the past risks altering your present in unpredictable ways. But maybe the future travelers are like Trump and just don't care.
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Kent
7/21/2020 07:36:23 pm
I think you misunderstood Goode's misunderstanding. Goode said "lights seen in the sky are from our own craft operating in the future and creating a temporal butterfly effect." In other words future activity creating effects in the past which Good mistakenly calls "a temporal butterfly effect."
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CALEB SEARCHER
7/22/2020 12:06:07 am
Which would be a first for Trump, since as a malignant narcissist he isn't interested in anything except himself.
Nick Danger
7/22/2020 09:25:26 am
If future technology is based on technology from the future coming to the past, who invented it in the first place?
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Donald Miller
7/22/2020 11:50:25 am
"Trump is an agent of disclosure, and that he is helping to fight a Doctor Who-style time war between humans from two competing timelines
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Awesome Weed
7/22/2020 02:37:50 pm
Sounds like they're rehashing the John Titor hoax. Claimed WWIII would occur when the world finds out the United States has a time machine, and Russia nukes the west coast.
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Kent
7/22/2020 10:00:10 pm
Those who don't already know about it might find fun in looking at the John Titor hoax. In a nutshell, he was sent back like a Terminator to find a working IBM 5100 computer that was needed for some nonsense in the future. It's great fun to read for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
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Kal
7/23/2020 05:39:03 pm
Trump is just saying that to appease his base. He doesn't know what happened at Roswell, or care. It's not even a secret. Russian spy balloon. It crashed, The air corps retrieved it. Trump a babay when it happened. He still is, Ha.
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Kent
7/23/2020 10:04:15 pm
Idiots insist on insisting that the RUSSIANS are behind everything, yet the same idiots vilify Joe McCarthy. I guess it comes down to whose ox is being gored.
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7/26/2020 03:07:01 pm
I remember reading many weird FBI files when they were first put on microfilm (I go way back). The mention of that particular report brought to mind some musings I had at the time reading it. First, a 'Tesla Set' (an interplanetary 'ET Radio') supposedly built after his death by his assistants that communicated information about Tesla possibly being an alien plant.
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David Evans
7/26/2020 04:36:32 pm
Reagan's Star Wars was not an impenetrable wall of force. It was a mix of ground-based and space-based rockets and lasers. It was always accepted that some attacking missiles would get through, the purpose was to make it impossible for the whole country or its retaliatory ability to be destroyed in one strike.
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7/27/2020 03:34:14 pm
Read the entire quote. It was a supposedly four-part system meant to be based at various locations along our coasts. Tesla is said to have described part of the defense as a focused beam 0ne one-hundred-millionth of a centimeter in diameter (sounds like a laser or energy beam to me) being able to blast and melt Aircraft motors at a distance of 250 miles. Moreover the system itself seems to be the source of the idea he had created a "Death Ray". I won't argue the comparative minutiae as I simply don't believe the journalistic account is anything more than a compilation of previous rumors as to what Tesla was doing in his final years.
David Evans
7/27/2020 07:26:17 pm
Charles Verrastro: I can't read that link since I'm in the EU. I wasn't denying what Tesla might have done, only saying that Reagan's program didn't sound very like it. I have my doubts that Tesla would be able to create such an incredibly narrow beam, and also wonder how he proposed to aim it. But clearly I should find out more about him. Do you have any good references?
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7/28/2020 02:08:34 pm
I didn't mean to start a thread on an entirely different tangent, but here's the verbatim sections from the relevant FBI files.
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David Evans
7/28/2020 04:03:53 pm
That's fascinating, but it leaves me with the definite impression that he hadn't fully worked out his ideas. "Particles which may.be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions" in a stream thinner than a hair? If they are relatively large how do they cope with air resistance and sidewinds? If they are microscopic, how is the beam prevented from spreading? He appeals to "gas focusing" which I don't think had been proved to work over miles of atmosphere. And (the cherry on the cake) he proposes to use these lethal beams to transmit television?
Balloon Wall of Death
8/2/2020 07:22:09 pm
Tesla allegedly proposed using a network of balloons as low-flying satellites to transmit his power. Very similar to what was recently done in Puerto Rico to restore communications after the hurricane. I've read speculation that his network of balloons would be this "impregnable wall". It was claimed that anything flying close to this field would be zapped from the sky by an arc of electricity.
David Evans
8/3/2020 02:40:38 am
Yet another thing I didn't know about Tesla. Thanks. Of course Tesla only had to deal with relatively slow and low-flying planes compared to Reagan's Star Wars, so it might even have worked.
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Gayle
8/3/2020 09:10:33 am
Wasn't that an episode of Futurama.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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