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Russia and Ancient Astronauts: A History of a Propaganda Campaign

2/21/2018

28 Comments

 
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​Last Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted more than a dozen Russians and Russian-linked interests, laying out a compelling and chilling analysis of how the Russian government sought to create discord in the United States through propaganda efforts to manipulate American public opinion about the 2016 presidential election, including efforts to inflame racial tensions. Officials including the assistant attorney general and the sitting national security advisor said that these indictments provided “incontrovertible proof” of Russian election meddling. Shortly after the school shooting in Florida, which occurred just two days before the indictments, thousands of Russian and Russian-linked social media accounts began spreading memes designed to inflame mostly conservative opinion about gun rights and gun control. 
​The extent of Russia’s propaganda war on the United States is breathtaking in its audacity, but in seeing the vast amounts of money and effort the Russians have poured into propaganda, I can’t help but think that these efforts to destabilize the United States are not limited to presidential politics, gun rights, and racial tensions. I have repeatedly run into Russian-linked material in examining the ancient astronaut theory and UFOs, and it seems to me that there is an effort to support “alternative” science in an effort to destabilize America’s faith in science and reason.
 
I can’t prove it, and much of what I have found is circumstantial and impressionistic. But the fingerprints of this campaign play out across both official documents and media accounts going back to the Cold War. The trouble is that only some of the fingerprints are legitimate. Others are more than likely to be the result of political paranoia. Far too many come from the words of fringe writers, themselves unreliable sources. But distinguishing between the two threads is difficult due to the lack of definitive proof and the continuing classification of official records. The following vignettes are only partial and suggestive, but the pattern they imply seems difficult to deny, especially in light of the documented fact that American intelligence services purposely used UFO reports to spread disinformation and propaganda behind the Iron Curtain, as when the CIA faked a UFO crash at Spitsbergen, Norway, a fact confirmed by the National Security Agency, which identified the story as an American “plant.”
 
If American intelligence service records confirm U.S. efforts to weaponize the UFO phenomenon for propaganda reasons, it is difficult to imagine that the Soviets and their Russian successors did not do the same. Indeed, the U.S. government was concerned about such actions from the beginning.
 
Only a month after Kenneth Arnold saw the first “flying discs,” American newspapers began reporting that Soviet spies were investigating UFOs in America in the belief that they were American spy planes. On August 15, 1947, the FBI looked into the story on orders from Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover and determined that it was untrue, but the source behind the articles, carrying a Washington dateline, was never determined. In 1952, just five years after the invention of the UFO, the CIA concluded that there was significant risk that a foreign power, namely the Soviet Union, was conditioning the American public to believe incredible, antiscientific things such as UFOs. “This whole affair has demonstrated that there is a fair proportion of our population which is mentally conditioned to acceptance of the incredible. Thus we arrive at two danger points which, in a situation of international tension, seem to have National Security implications,” read an August 19 memo on flying saucers. The Air Force, meanwhile, was monitoring UFO groups because of the suspicion, not always unfounded, that their funding and membership had ties to Communist countries. The government at the time worried that there was the potential that UFOs could be weaponized for “psychological warfare.”
 
 In 1953, a scientific committee chaired by H. P. Robertson and acting on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies released a report about how to handle UFO information in light of the risk that enemy agents could use flying saucer reports as a way to inject “hostile propaganda” into American homes. The panel wondered, however, why Soviet journals contained no discussion of UFOs, while the subject fascinated the West. “The Panel noted that the general absence of Russian propaganda based on a subject with so many obvious possibilities for exploitation might indicate a possible Russian official policy,” the official report read.
 
It is a virtual certainty that the authorities in Moscow became aware of U.S. concerns that claims about space aliens could be used to undermine American society, the Christian faith, and faith in science. I find it hard to believe that it is only a coincidence that within months of the intelligence services hashing out their concerns, Moscow changed its tune about space aliens. In the first years of the UFO craze, Soviet authorities rejected space aliens and put down the whole affair to decadent Western madness. But as they readied their own space program for the shocking launch of Sputnik, suddenly the Soviet press began publishing accounts of “ancient cosmonauts,” with a message much like the one American authorities feared might destabilize American audiences. The American Embassy in Moscow sent word back to Washington in February 1968 that Soviet ancient astronaut material was “primarily for U.S. consumption.” The previous year, the CIA dryly reported that interviews with Soviet scientists about UFOs returned no useful information, with Soviet officials claiming that no Soviet media would report on such things because they are not “scientific.” “This is interesting,” the CIA reported, “in view of the readiness of Soviet newspapers to print rather fantastic reports of hypotheses and ‘observations’ suggested by the more imaginative members of the scientific community. Apparently some official sanction is needed.” The report concluded that the Soviets had no clear UFO policy since the scientific establishment and the Soviet media were of different minds, but this is almost certainly not the case.
 
The first claims started showing up in Western-facing Soviet publications around 1955, and by 1960 these had commanded the attention of the Western media. Time magazine, summarizing news accounts of the time, noted that the Soviet state publications that had once ridiculed UFOs were now triumphantly exploring a strange new theory, alien visitors from the past dubbed “cosmonauts from outer space,” and they noted with disapproval that official organs of the Communist state had “opened their pages” to bizarre claims, including the idea that the Tunguska explosion was caused by a UFO,  that Sodom and Gomorrah had been felled by a nuclear bomb, and that Baalbek was a UFO launchpad. On February 22, 1960, Time suggested that “ever since the first Sputnik, the Russians have indulged in their own kind of science fiction about possible visitors from outer space.” But the claims were aimed largely at a Western audience, and seemed custom designed to undermine Western religion and science—replacing God with space aliens, and making technology into frightening, unknowable magic. While Time might have scoffed, less elite writers quickly fell in line. This is not just my opinion, by the way. As far back as 1980, Omni magazine noted that the ancient astronaut theory seemed to be “a notion encouraged in official antireligious propaganda” in Russia.
 
UFO researchers were not shy about revealing their Soviet connections. For every conspiracy theorist or fantasist, like Gray Barker, who alleged that the KGB was tapping his phones, dozens happily wrote in print about ancient astronaut and UFO material they received directly from Moscow or Leningrad authorities and publications. Ivan T. Sanderson, Jacques Bergier, Louis Pauwels, Erich von Däniken, Robert Charroux, and Peter Kolosimo were only some of the many writers who made use of Soviet research in their ancient astronaut books, and several of these authors traveled to Soviet Russia to meet with Soviet officials, in part because these trips gave them the fiction of being respected thinkers denied them in the West. Just read through the ancient astronaut books of the 1960s, and you will find them teeming with references to Russian scientists and Soviet “discoveries.” Gullible “ancient mysteries” writers gobbled up any “forbidden” science from behind the Iron Curtain. After reading a Soviet Sputnik magazine article on ancient astronauts in the late 1960s, Von Däniken—who was and is an adamant anti-socialist—flew to Moscow, where he met with I. S. Shklovskii, a collaborator of Carl Sagan’s, who had pioneered ancient astronaut ideas. Despite his politics, he had no trouble making use of everything Russian sources fed him about space aliens and ancient astronauts. Kolosimo, whose Not of This World won a prestigious Italian literary prize, was himself a dedicated communist and used Soviet material for ideological reasons and needed little convincing.
 
Once the Western media had been seeded with anti-scientific ancient astronaut nonsense, the Soviet government immediately clamped down on the material. The rapid change in policy took outside observers by surprise. U.S. diplomatic officials expressed puzzlement that in 1968 anti-UFO literature started to appear in the same Soviet magazines that had previously endorsed ancient astronauts, with no attempt by those magazines to explain the discrepancy. By 1970, UFOs and ancient astronauts had been officially condemned by the Soviet Academy of Physics as anti-scientific. While Western governments did not connect the dots, it seems that with the success of Chariots of the Gods and its ilk, the propaganda purpose of promoting ancient astronauts in the West had been achieved. Internal Soviet media would henceforth condemn UFOs, while Western-facing media would, intermittently, keep the story alive.
 
By 1980, the trend of Western fringe writers using Soviet materials had become so clear that Omni magazine chided ancient astronaut theorists for their use of untrustworthy Soviet propaganda: “Reports from these Russian [UFO] enthusiasts— Western newsmen are delighted to find Russians willing to talk on the record about anything — are considered highly credible by Western ufologlsts when they appear in UFO magazines and newsletters.” The prevalence of Soviet and Russian propaganda in the ancient astronaut field was so noticeable that no less a believer than the late Ancient Aliens pundit Philip Coppens wrote in his Ancient Alien Question (2011) that articles from the Soviet Union shortly after the 1969 moon landing about Egyptian-style obelisks and pyramids on the moon were actually anti-American propaganda designed to discredit American scientific achievements. These pseudoscientific claims were quickly picked up by American writers, including Sanderson, who spread the intended message to Argosy readers. A few months after Coppens published his concerns, his Ancient Aliens colleague David Wilcock shot a propaganda video for Russian television in which he discussed anti-American themes, including allegations that the U.S. government was controlled by space aliens and Jews and that 9/11 was an inside job. The show aired in 2013 in Russia, and according to Wilcock, writing at the time that an English subtitled version launched on YouTube, the show was a paid adaptation of one of his books: “[My] investigation was taken seriously enough to be turned into a major Russian television documentary -- nearly three years later. … In the fullness of time, information that was once thought to be ‘crazy’ might start making a lot more sense.”
 
The effort to promote ancient astronauts among Westerners extended even to mainstream writers who they thought could be bent to Soviet ends. Carl Sagan’s interactions with Soviet scientists like I. S. Shklovskii on space aliens and the ancient astronaut theory generated enough concern that American intelligence services tracked and monitored Sagan, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, an ex-KGB spy claimed that the intelligence service had used these connections to feed Sagan propaganda that Sagan later used in attempting to lobby Congress about weapons issues. Similarly, Soviet conferences in 1964 and 1971 on the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe served multiple purposes, including propaganda and, some have suggested, espionage. (Sagan edited the proceedings of the 1971 conference.) The Scottish astronomer John Macvey, for example, was so influenced by these conferences that he wrote a book about ancient astronauts that was marketed to “disciples of von Däniken.” J. Allen Hynek, the U.S. government’s top UFO researcher, rushed back from the International Astronomical Union conference in Prague in 1967, after meeting with Soviet officials, convinced that there was now a “UFO gap” and that the Soviets had with “dispassionate thoroughness” analyzed the UFO problem and would soon beat the U.S. in revealing the existence of extraterrestrials. He took to Playboy magazine to demand the U.S. military devote more resources to hunting space aliens. Skeptical Inquirer reported in 2005 that UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass had claimed that Russian businessmen, whom he was certain were actually Kremlin operatives, used to meet with him about UFO questions in the hopes of obtaining “insider information” about aerospace projects but Klass said he kept the FBI informed about these meetings. (The FBI had actually investigated Klass for disclosure of classified information in the 1950s and considered him “intemperate” and “irrational” by the 1970s due to his strident and sometimes unhinged communications about UFOs.)
 
After the Soviet government backed off its interest in UFOs, the Soviet Union had given the KGB authority over most UFO material, and for good reason: Since Soviet UFO sightings were often tied to spy missions, secrecy was of paramount importance. In 1977, a Soviet rocket launch near the city of Petrozavodsk spawned claims of a UFO sighting, and the tale spread around the world, from Soviet UFO journals to the National Enquirer. The event was actually quite mundane, as New Scientist reported in 1981. It was the launch of a spy satellite. However, Soviet officials could not admit as much, and for more than two years after the event, they government tried, without success, to suppress claims of a UFO over Russia by forcing government scientists to falsely ascribe the sighting to everything from a natural phenomenon to a Sputnik launch gone wrong. Nobody believed the lies because they were transparently false, and the incident served as notice that the Soviet Union would use scientists, when necessary, to tell transparent lies, and that the Soviet government officially condemned flying saucers. However, in the dying days of Soviet Russia, news organizations like TASS began, with official approval, to publish transparently fake tabloid stories about alien encounters and UFO sightings.
 
“They’ve been feeding us rubbish about the dream of Communism for years, and we now see they were lying,” a Soviet citizen said to Time in 1989. “At least this gives us something new to dream about.” In 1990, the Soviet government teamed up with China to launch a massive UFO investigation and promoted it triumphantly to the world, though it was forestalled by the collapse of the regime the next year.
 
This was apparently the state of things when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the first years of a weakened and independent Russia saw little effort, so far as the records seem to indicate, to continue Soviet policies. But things started to change in the middle and late 1990s, at the time when Vladimir Putin was rising to power. In 1998, Putin was appointed the head of the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB. But even before this, the FSB released formerly secret KGB UFO files to American media. Books like The Soviet UFO Files (1998) and much-hyped television specials, including an ABC News documentary (1995) and a TNT documentary hosted by Roger Moore (1998) reported Russian UFO stories. Around the time of the second Gulf War, UFO publications began reporting that Russian intelligence had given out the story that Saddam Hussein was reverse engineering alien technology from a crashed UFO, and this was the real reason for the invasion of Iraq. As far as I know, the Russians, who opposed the Iraq War, never took credit for the story, but it lives on to this day in anti-American fringe claims about U.S. forces stealing “star gate” or “Nephilim” technology from Iraq.
 
After Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia, relations with the United States worsened, and Russian efforts to reassert Soviet-style international influence began to increase. In 2005, Putin’s government launched an English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today, now called RT. In 2010, a dedicated American channel replaced the English service for U.S. audiences. Governments around the world have declared the network to be a propaganda outlet for the Russian government, and a purveyor of “materially misleading” information, as British regulators declared. The U.S. government forced the network to register as a foreign agent, and in 2015 a party celebrating the channel saw Vladimir Putin, future Trump national security advisor and federal convict Michael Flynn and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein (who continues to support Russian interests) seated together at the same table. Amidst the pro-Putin commentary on the network, the channel devotes a disproportionate amount of time to coverage of UFOs, ancient astronauts, and prehistoric mysteries. At first blush this seems like an odd fit for a channel devoted to pushing Moscow’s interests. But it makes entirely good sense. First, such content draws an audience to an otherwise little-watched channel. But more importantly, such content draws audiences already primed to accept conspiracy theories about nefarious U.S. UFO cover-ups, who are then more open to accepting anti-American messages and straight-up Russian propaganda against U.S. interests.
 
It is for this same reason that other Western-facing Russian propaganda outlets, such as the new Sputnik magazine (not to be confused with the 1960s version), also heavily feature UFO and ancient astronaut material, which they package in forms ready for sharing on social media.
 
The consistency of this material across Russian propaganda outlets heavily implies that the promotion of ancient astronaut themes is an official propaganda objective. It is unlikely that Russian outlets would so consistently push these claims, and especially conspiracies about U.S. and Jewish efforts to suppress the “truth,” if Moscow did not want these conspiracy theories spread. Putin-linked media companies and even official organs of Russian science advocate for similar conspiracies within Russia, part of what some observers have called Putin’s policy of discrediting the authority of science as part of a push for greater power for himself and for the Orthodox Church. In 2016, Russians staged protests of Putin’s pseudoscience, and Foreign Policy reported that Putin intentionally encourages lunatic ideas because they cast the West in a bad light, as the suppressors of hidden truths.
 
With so much pseudoscience coming out of Russia, it was inevitable that it would make its way into the American media, both directly and indirectly. RT stories eventually generate social media presence that forces mainstream U.S. publications to cover ancient astronaut claims. David Wilcock, who participated in Russian propaganda, has remained in contact with Russian agents, if his blog posts about his “secret” Russian sources are to be believed. It is not impossible that disinformation agents are feeding him lies. His anti-American rants about how evil Jews and space aliens have corrupted the Democratic Party are of a piece with Russian propaganda efforts, and his blog posts routinely make use of false information from Russian propaganda outlets or are attributed directly to Russian sources. Ancient Aliens, on which Wilcock has appeared since 2009, has devoted several segments and a full episode to celebrations of Putin’s Russia and the supposed truths possessed by Russian authorities regarding space aliens. Similarly, the FBI began investigating Alex Jones’s InfoWars for Russian connections after discovering that Russian bots were being used to amplify the social media reach of some of Jones’s conspiracy theories. Jones, of course, routinely promotes conspiracies about Nephilim, ancient astronauts, and UFOs—including David Wilcock’s work—alongside pro-Trump propaganda. This returns us to the beginning and the discovery that Russian bots are still at work amplifying divisive messages on social media.
 
It would be a mistake, however, to attribute to Russia nefarious mastery of the media. There is, as yet, no proof that Russian promotion of these claims extended beyond enhancing the profile of ancient astronaut claims and passing along conspiracy theories to a few key figures. Indeed, an Associated Press report found that a leading Russian troll farm was staggeringly unprofessional and amateurish. While the otherwise baffling focus on ancient astronaut and UFO conspiracy theories on RT and in Sputnik speaks to an official policy, such material has never been a dominant theme in Russian propaganda. Indeed, so far as I can tell, it has passed so far beneath the radar that there has never been a study made of Russian UFO propaganda. But the bigger question is this: Why bother at all?
 
The answer to that can be found in Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy, in which the scholar outlines the growing connection between UFO and ancient astronaut beliefs and anti-government rightwing politics. In the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, claims of secrecy and suppression of UFO truths by the U.S. government allowed space alien beliefs to become aligned to militia movements and other extreme rightist causes that similarly claimed that the government was evil and not to be trusted. Thus, ancient astronaut and UFO conspiracies served as a wedge issue and recruiting tool to attract new members to rightist causes and indoctrinate them in anti-government extremism. It is important to remember that the Russians did not invent the ancient astronaut theory, which had long before emerged from Theosophy (widespread in Russia before Bolshevik suppression), nor were they involved in the emergence of flying saucers into American culture in the late 1940s. Instead, the Russians seemed to be reacting to developments in America and Western Europe, exploiting issues of concern in the West, and using wedges like ancient astronauts to do so. By keeping such material circulating and enhancing its reach and effectiveness, Russian propaganda outlets serve to generate and enhance internal discord in the United States by encouraging anti-government and anti-science views. 

28 Comments
Brian
2/21/2018 09:36:41 am

And the American public, living down to H.L. Mencken's cogent assessment of it, greedily gobbled up this BS, just as they gobbled up the Russian propaganda during the election and are gobbling up the Russian propaganda following the 8th school shooting of a year not yet two months old. Dear Lord, how long? Is there any way for sensible people to become the majority?

Jason, this is a really good post. I hope that at some point you or some other qualified person does a really in-depth, fully referenced study of these propaganda efforts.

Reply
Michael Callis link
2/6/2019 08:45:12 am

I have posted on Facebook a connection to Regnery Press and Jerome Corsi, Donald Trump, Ann Coulter and the publication of works by Allen Hynek head of UFO research.
The article by Jason Colavito is a confirmation of my post ony Michael Callis Facebook pahe

Reply
Rackham
2/21/2018 09:45:45 am

As a teenager growing up reading fringe books from the 60s and 70s back in the 90s, I can recall vividly one sentence that appeared like a leitmotiv: "According to certain soviet scientists..." It became a running gag among my friends to describe any made up or dubious information. Weird to think a bunch 15-16 years ordinary old teens detected the soviet fabrications without effort, yet the same old hoaxes, disinformation and fake stories still shape greatly the fringe even today. And I can assure we wanted to believe in a wonderful past... however the arguments were just not making sense...

Reply
Baller
2/21/2018 11:54:13 am

This sounds familiar. The Flat Earth Theory, the Mandela effect, Dinosaurs did not exist, and many more memes on social media seemed to me to have some third party interest at their root. Would not surprise me in the least if the Russkies were using UFO's as propaganda and subversion. I think some of the same parameters of manipulation could fit any of the tv shows criticized here.

Reply
Scott David Hamilton
2/21/2018 12:22:28 pm

Quick correction: the Parkland shootings were on Wednesday, the indictments dropped on Friday. I totally understand that things seem to happen so fast under Trump it’s hard to keep track.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/21/2018 12:50:45 pm

I get that fixed.

Reply
Machala
2/21/2018 04:58:56 pm

But it didn't take long for the Russian bots on social media, to jump all over the school massacre, trying to stir up disinformation and discredit the student's reactions and protests !

The average citizen doesn't even realize how good these Russians are at creating U.S. personae and manipulate emotional responses on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp.

Does the U.S.use the same sort counter-intelligence tactics ? Of course it does. It's just not as good at the disinformation game as the Russians - or as good at cyber espionage and internet spying, as the Chinese, North Koreans and Israelis.

Reply
GodricGlas
2/21/2018 11:02:13 pm

My own native ability to detect Russian Trolls tells me that you are a Russian Troll.

I'm sorry about that.

Machala
2/21/2018 11:52:11 pm

@GodricGlas

I hope you're being facetious ? Admittedly, I don't live in the U.S.A..but am the furthest thing from a Russian troll that you can imagine. Neither my ethnicity or nationality is Russo/Slav.

I've mentioned before, I'm a political agnostic.
Along with my other interests, I write political satires directed at various world iconoclasts - Putin, Trump, Maduro, and Duterte are some of my current targets.
Nowadays, I write primarily for Spanish language production or publication...although, I occasionally, do a piece in English or French.

Sorry, I don't read, write, or speak Russian or Ukrainian !

Bob Jase
2/21/2018 12:55:21 pm

I don't think that Russian ufo nonsense started as a government effort but rather as a religion-dampened down acceptable version of woo in the old SSR. Lots of people need magical thinking and if you aren't allowedd to believe in a god then alien overlords are the next best thing.

Reply
Kal
2/21/2018 02:04:24 pm

And the ancient aliens people wonder why the aliens don't just land. We're a planet of media obsessed paranoid and dangerous tribal nation states making up stuff about 'the other guy' who is 'different from us and therefore bad'. If there were aliens visiting us, they probably have orders, 'Steer clear of these guys and go hang out with more civilized beings'.

Could the Russian intervention have even swayed the electoral college? Heck yes. Not even a conspiracy. The current administration is pretty blatant about is, and the cover ups, which seem more interesting than all the 'fake news' on the Clintons they're still on about.

How do you know Alex J. is not a Russia backed shill?

Trump obviously is. Not even a conspiracy. He even said 'the contest is rigged, folks', because right in the open, the conservatives rigged it.

...and blamed the Liberals.

And the cycle repeats like a bad soap opera reality TV show, with an oddly silent Cold War era generation forgetting Joe McCarthy and the blacklisting and the 'Red Scare' they grew up with.

From an ex gen historical standpoint, I find that odd, and curious that Churchill was quoting an earlier man, when he said, 'if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.' Not we are doomed, but doomed to repeat it.

What is repentance? Repeating something, going back.

So no wonder aliens haven't really sent emissaries to Earth. They see is and go like, 'These guys are not ready, and at this rate, might not be'.

The irony, the alt right seems to be in league with the very people they scorned 60 years ago.

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Joe Scales
2/21/2018 04:05:27 pm

"The irony, the alt right seems to be in league with the very people they scorned 60 years ago."

And I would have thought the more obvious irony would be that those pushing the Trump/Russia collusion angle in dividing our country were the ones falling prey to the meddling. But as the Russian nationals indicted will likely never face trial, given our presumption of innocence... well, make of that what you will.

Reply
Americanegro
2/21/2018 07:28:59 pm

Try to follow along won't you? They won't be tried because they won't be extradited from Russia. And they were working for Mme. Fishy Smelling Bird's Nest Down There anyway.

An Anonymous Nerd
2/21/2018 07:57:44 pm

Actually, as a point of logic, it'd be the fans of the reality television star who "fell prey" to the meddling, in the sense of going along with it, presumably unknowingly.

Here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5yvQSYkx8

I guess the rest of us were victims in the sense of sentiment whipped up cost us an awful lot but not because we "fell prey" to anything, but because we lack the luxury of denying the consequences.

As to the actual topic of the post, it's a very interesting angle, one I had not considered. And more than a little creepy, how easily the lack of value we place on intelligence and knowledge can be exploited. Ultimately though if we taught critical thinking we wouldn't fall for such things, any more than we fall for the domestic equivalents, such as Alex Jones or the Ancient Aliens folks.

-An Anonymous Nerd

Joe Scales
2/22/2018 10:25:07 am

"Try to follow along won't you? They won't be tried because they won't be extradited from Russia. "

That's a given. I didn't mean that they wouldn't face trial because of our presumption of innocence. Only that because they will likely never be tried, AND we have a presumption of innocence... well, I left the rest open to interpretation.

Carry on.

Americanegro
2/21/2018 07:25:47 pm

Jeez Louise, do we have to go through this again? There WERE Soviet agents in the military and the State Department, and under the reign of FDR there was one living in the White House. How do people not know that McCarthy was right? Some kind of alien mind-eraser technology?

Reply
Americanegro
2/21/2018 04:09:32 pm

I could hear the panties twisting with every word. Didn't vote in the last election so the Russians didn't influence me but I would never vote for Mme. Fishy Smelling Bird's Nest Down There. Jason appears to be okay with Obama's interference in Israel's election and Mme. Fishy Smelling Bird's Nest Down There's state-sponsored assassination of a head of state in Libya. "We came, we saw, he died. CACKLE!" SMFH.

"The Russians" are the new UFOs. And Jason fell for it.

Reply
Joe Scales
2/22/2018 10:39:01 am

And as Facebook is the devil, I wasn't there to fall prey to it either...

Reply
GodricGlas
2/21/2018 10:46:18 pm

Go, Jason!, G-G-Go Jason! Like it's your Birthday, Go, Jason!

That's all I got for the moment.

Go Jason.

Thanks very much.

Reply
bkd69
2/22/2018 01:14:47 am

And then there's this:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dulles-plan-conspiracy-theory-russian-election-trolls

A conspiracy theory started in Russia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US has been doing exactly what the Internet Research Agency has been doing all this time.

Which illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the independence of the American entertainment industry from official government policy and agencies.

Reply
Kal
2/22/2018 03:15:25 pm


"Which illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the independence of the American entertainment industry from official government policy and agencies."

Which agency do you think started the world wide web and the internet? It started in the late 1970s in the government servers the size of buildings, and was later made to fit on smaller computers as tech caught up, so that by the 1980s, a form of it could be created for public use.

It cannot be a conspiracy when it is in the great wide open. Alien ships hovering over DC would be next, but they would likely stay away, or the footage is faked from an earlier movie.

The internet as we know it is a descendant of those agencies, so naturally they started it, so we know who they are.

The irony is that their internet creates a universal world network that allows no true conspiracy to exist, as with the stroke of keys, anyone would immediately post a rebuttal, anytime.

Reply
Jamie Eckles link
2/25/2018 01:09:43 pm

You are confusing DARPA with the NSA/CIA, etc. Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is who came up with the World Wide Web. In 1990 he created HTML, URI, and HTTP. I've never seen anything that ties him to any agency in the US.

Reply
Americanegro
2/26/2018 07:29:08 pm

And "government servers the size of buildings" betrays a lack of knowledge of the history of computing.

Reply
Daniel
2/27/2018 01:20:28 pm

Interesting article, but the Mueller indictment is an absolute joke.

Reply
Daniel
2/27/2018 01:30:01 pm

"I can’t prove it, and much of what I have found is circumstantial and impressionistic. But the fingerprints of this campaign play out across both official documents and media accounts going back to the Cold War. The trouble is that only some of the fingerprints are legitimate. Others are more than likely to be the result of political paranoia."

Too bad this sort of skepticism isn't applied today to claims made, without evidence, by US officials. We are living at a time when conspiracy theories have become mainstream, and that applies not just to the History Channel and the Right, but also to CNN and the intelligence community.

Reply
Skeptical
3/5/2018 01:50:02 am

A debunker of conspiracies propagating one of the largest conspiracy theories of the decade… that’s a hell of an irony.

Reply
Magus link
3/18/2018 01:30:16 am

I Think the article is missing one thing, and that is the American - or rather - the whole Western education system. Due to its lack of discussion and engagement with students and people who buy into these beliefs, the propaganda has become the obvious Place to turn to.

Take, for example, the right-wing "journalist" Lauren Southerns ban from entering the United Kingdom this past week. This is much more important than the moon landing. The moon landing? Yes. Because what Western media reports is that YouTube will begin publishing links to Wikipedia articles where YouTube discovers videos that might include Conspiracy theories.

My Point here is that the people who Believe the moon landing was a hoax numbers in perhaps a couple of hundred people. The majority of "Trumpers" don't care about that - they care about the Lauren Southern story - and that has not been reported. This increases the publics skepticism towards established media and pushes them to fringe media instead, like InfoWars.

I'm sure there are many other examples. But I still stand by my Point. The educational system had no hedge against UFOs when they broke out in the 1940s, but that was over 75 years ago! Surely book sales, video games and Movies about aliens and the paranormal must show Western authorities the popularity of UFOs and the paranormal?

Reply
Reed Criswell
12/24/2019 01:52:55 pm

I have noticed traces Russian propaganda in Ancient Alien media as well. I've started wondering if Putin hasn't increased anti-science disinformation to slow conversion of the world's energy production to sustainable sources.
Since his hold on power is almost entirely dependent on his ability to plunder profit from Russia's fossil fuel exports, the necessary transition of the world to sustainable energy is an existential threat to his regime.
Further, I wonder if US and multi-national fossil fuel corps aren't allying with him for the same reason. Would explain a lot of right-wing embrace of Putin and ancient alien ideology

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          • Eratosthenes' King List
          • The Story of Setna
          • Leon of Pella
          • Diodorus on Egyptian History
          • On Isis and Osiris
          • Famine Stela
          • Old Egyptian Chronicle
          • The Book of Sothis
          • Horapollo
          • Al-Maqrizi's King List
        • Teshub and the Dragon
        • Hermetica >
          • The Three Hermeses
          • Kore Kosmou
          • Corpus Hermeticum
          • The Asclepius
          • The Emerald Tablet
          • Hermetic Fragments
          • Prologue to the Kyranides
          • The Secret of Creation
          • Ancient Alphabets Explained
          • Prologue to Ibn Umayl's Silvery Water
          • Book of the 24 Philosophers
          • Aurora of the Philosophers
        • Hesiod's Theogony
        • Periplus of Hanno
        • Ctesias' Indica
        • Sanchuniathon
        • Sima Qian
        • Syncellus's Enoch Fragments
        • The Book of Enoch
        • Slavonic Enoch
        • Sepher Yetzirah
        • Tacitus' Germania
        • De Dea Syria
        • Aelian's Various Histories
        • Julius Africanus' Chronography
        • Eusebius' Chronicle
        • Chinese Accounts of Rome
        • Ancient Chinese Automaton
        • The Orphic Argonautica
        • Fragments of Panodorus
        • Annianus on the Watchers
        • The Watchers and Antediluvian Wisdom
      • Medieval Texts >
        • Medieval Legends of Ancient Egypt >
          • Medieval Pyramid Lore
          • John Malalas on Ancient Egypt
          • Fragments of Abenephius
          • Akhbar al-zaman
          • Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah
          • Murtada ibn al-‘Afif
          • Al-Maqrizi on the Pyramids
          • Al-Suyuti on the Pyramids
        • The Hunt for Noah's Ark
        • Isidore of Seville
        • Book of Liang: Fusang
        • Agobard on Magonia
        • Book of Thousands
        • Voyage of Saint Brendan
        • Power of Art and of Nature
        • Travels of Sir John Mandeville
        • Yazidi Revelation and Black Book
        • Al-Biruni on the Great Flood
        • Voyage of the Zeno Brothers
        • The Kensington Runestone (Hoax)
        • Islamic Discovery of America
        • The Aztec Creation Myth
      • Lost Civilizations >
        • Atlantis >
          • Plato's Atlantis Dialogues >
            • Timaeus
            • Critias
          • Fragments on Atlantis
          • Panchaea: The Other Atlantis
          • Eumalos on Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Gómara on Atlantis
          • Sardinia and Atlantis
          • Santorini and Atlantis
          • The Mound Builders and Atlantis
          • Donnelly's Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Morocco
          • Atlantis and the Sea Peoples
          • W. Scott-Elliot >
            • The Story of Atlantis
            • The Lost Lemuria
          • The Lost Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Africa
          • How I Found Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Termier on Atlantis
          • The Critias and Minoan Crete
          • Rebuttal to Termier
          • Further Responses to Termier
          • Flinders Petrie on Atlantis
        • Lost Cities >
          • Miscellaneous Lost Cities
          • The Seven Cities
          • The Lost City of Paititi
          • Manuscript 512
          • The Idolatrous City of Iximaya (Hoax)
          • The 1885 Moberly Lost City Hoax
          • The Elephants of Paredon (Hoax)
        • OOPARTs
        • Oronteus Finaeus Antarctica Map
        • Caucasians in Panama
        • Jefferson's Excavation
        • Fictitious Discoveries in America
        • Against Diffusionism
        • Tunnels Under Peru
        • The Parahyba Inscription (Hoax)
        • Mound Builders
        • Gunung Padang
        • Tales of Enchanted Islands
        • The 1907 Ancient World Map Hoax
        • The 1909 Grand Canyon Hoax
        • The Interglacial Period
        • Solving Oak Island
      • Religious Conspiracies >
        • Pantera, Father of Jesus?
        • Toledot Yeshu
        • Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay on Cathars
        • Testimony of Jean de Châlons
        • Rosslyn Chapel and the 'Prentice's Pillar
        • The Many Wives of Jesus
        • Templar Infiltration of Labor
        • Louis Martin & the Holy Bloodline
        • The Life of St. Issa (Hoax)
        • On the Person of Jesus Christ
      • Giants in the Earth >
        • Fossil Origins of Myths >
          • Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephants
          • Fossil Elephants
          • Fossil Bones of Teutobochus
          • Fossil Mammoths and Giants
          • Giants' Bones Dug Out of the Earth
          • Fossils and the Supernatural
          • Fossils, Myth, and Pseudo-History
          • Man During the Stone Age
          • Fossil Bones and Giants
          • American Elephant Myths
          • The Mammoth and the Flood
          • Fossils and Myth
          • Fossil Origin of the Cyclops
          • Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man
        • Fragments on Giants
        • Manichaean Book of Giants
        • Geoffrey on British Giants
        • Alfonso X's Hermetic History of Giants
        • Boccaccio and the Fossil 'Giant'
        • Book of Howth
        • Purchas His Pilgrimage
        • Edmond Temple's 1827 Giant Investigation
        • The Giants of Sardinia
        • Giants and the Sons of God
        • The Magnetism of Evil
        • Tertiary Giants
        • Smithsonian Giant Reports
        • Early American Giants
        • The Giant of Coahuila
        • Jewish Encyclopedia on Giants
        • Index of Giants
        • Newspaper Accounts of Giants
        • Lanier's A Book of Giants
      • Science and History >
        • Halley on Noah's Comet
        • The Newport Tower
        • Iron: The Stone from Heaven
        • Ararat and the Ark
        • Pyramid Facts and Fancies
        • Argonauts before Homer
        • The Deluge
        • Crown Prince Rudolf on the Pyramids
        • Old Mythology in New Apparel
        • Blavatsky on Dinosaurs
        • Teddy Roosevelt on Bigfoot
        • Devil Worship in France
        • Maspero's Review of Akhbar al-zaman
        • The Holy Grail as Lucifer's Crown Jewel
        • The Mutinous Sea
        • The Rock Wall of Rockwall
        • Fabulous Zoology
        • The Origins of Talos
        • Mexican Mythology
        • Chinese Pyramids
        • Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs
      • Extreme History >
        • Roman Empire Hoax
        • American Antiquities
        • American Cataclysms
        • England, the Remnant of Judah
        • Historical Chronology of the Mexicans
        • Maspero on the Predynastic Sphinx
        • Vestiges of the Mayas
        • Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
        • Origins of the Egyptian People
        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
          • Volume 2: Anthropogenesis
        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
        • Traces of European Influence
        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
        • Great Pyramid As Noah's Ark
        • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
      • US Government Ancient Astronaut Files >
        • Fortean Society and Columbus
        • Inquiry into Shaver and Palmer
        • The Skyfort Document
        • Whirling Wheels
        • Denver Ancient Astronaut Lecture
        • Soviet Search for Lemuria
        • Visitors from Outer Space
        • Unidentified Flying Objects (Abstract)
        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
        • UFO Hypothesis Survival Questions
        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
        • Atlantis Discovery Telegrams
        • Ancient Astronaut Society Telegram
        • Noah's Ark Cables
        • The Von Daniken Letter
        • CIA Psychic Probe of Ancient Mars
        • Scott Wolter Lawsuit
        • UFOs in Ancient China
        • CIA Report on Noah's Ark
        • CIA Noah's Ark Memos
        • Congressional Ancient Aliens Testimony
        • Ancient Astronaut and Nibiru Email
        • Congressional Ancient Mars Hearing
        • House UFO Hearing
      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
        • Premodern UFO Sightings
        • The Moon Hoax
        • Inhabitants of Other Planets
        • Blavatsky on Ancient Astronauts
        • The Stanzas of Dzyan (Hoax)
        • Aerolites and Religion
        • What Is Theosophy?
        • Plane of Ether
        • The Adepts from Venus
      • A Message from Mars
      • Saucer Mystery Solved?
      • Orville Wright on UFOs
      • Interdimensional Flying Saucers
      • Flying Saucers Are Real
      • Report on UFOs
    • The Supernatural >
      • The Devils of Loudun
      • Sublime and Beautiful
      • Voltaire on Vampires
      • Demonology and Witchcraft
      • Thaumaturgia
      • Bulgarian Vampires
      • Religion and Evolution
      • Transylvanian Superstitions
      • Defining a Zombie
      • Dread of the Supernatural
      • Vampires
      • Werewolves and Vampires and Ghouls
      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
      • King Solomon's Mines
      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
      • The Wendigo
      • Sredni Vashtar
      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
      • The Corpse on the Grating
      • The Second Satellite
      • Queen of the Black Coast
      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • The Bathtub Hoax
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • Employment of Homosexuals
      • James Dean's Scrapbook
      • James Dean's Love Letters
      • The Amazing James Dean Hoax!
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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