Listen to me, I know the truth...

The Skeptic, 6.1

Deep inside a secret installation, somewhere in the desert of Arizona, live two alien spacemen, survivors when their UFO crashed in the Midwest sometime in the 40s. The bodies of their not so lucky cabin-mates lie preserved in freezers. A nearby facility holds the remnants of their spacecraft, its shiny hull made of a metal unknown on Earth. Elsewhere, people who see strange lights in the sky are visited by sinister Men In Black, who hint that they are government agents, and advise extreme caution about discussing things seen in the sky. But if it's all so secret, how do we know about these goings-on at all? Simple. Because there is a small band of people who have found out about a conspiracy of silence, that involves the highest levels of the governments of the world...

Are there groups, perhaps including the government, who conspire to suppress the truth? According to folklorists, stories about `suppressed truths' form a kind of `escape valve' for individuals who feel increasingly powerless in a stifling bureaucratic society. You can feel a sense of personal triumph against a monolithic bureaucracy if you discover secret and sensitive information, and the nature of the information doesn't really matter. It could involve Jack the Ripper and the Royal connection, the alleged murder of Pope John Paul I, the ultimate truth about the JFK assassination, Masonic Policemen, Paul McCartney's `death' in 1967, Elvis alive and well in Texas, the inflated price of CDs, secret NASA tapes of astronauts describing flying saucers, the deaths of scientists working in connection with Marconi defence contracts, the Iraqi super-gun, the recent spate of burglaries of MP's offices...

And it's easy to rationalise, and answer the question `Why is truth suppressed?' If it were not, it would cause top officials to lose their jobs, or cause panic in the populace, or endanger a secret government plot, and so on. What of the UFO conspiracists, for example? Could the US government possibly have earth-shattering evidence for alien visitors ferreted away somewhere, and keep it secret? The UFO scene, perhaps more so in the USA than over here, is positively seething with conspiracy theorists, and one can imagine the origins of this situation. After all, it must be terribly frustrating to be aUFOlogist these days. Claiming a government cover-up is a perfect excuse for the lack of tangible UFO evidence. It seems that it is entirely because of the lack of widespread evidence, rather than despite it, that belief is growing amongst the hard-core UFOlogists about three par ticular species of alien who are already here visiting us. These are the `Greys' (they're from Zeta Reticuli), the `Nordics' (origin unknown, but it sounds like it should be Sweden), and the `Talls' (they're quite tall). Last December, two British UFOlogists appeared on Channel 4's Clive Anderson Talks Back, and it was hard not to be impressed with their conviction that Greys, as real as you or I, had walked up their garden paths. You could also see that they were quite delighted to be `special'. After all, it was them - and not the rest of us - to whom the Greys had chosen to reveal themselves.

The belief that certain individuals are selected to be recipients of revealed truth is something which conspiracy theorists, cultists, hard-core UFOlogists, scientologists, and so on, all share. The whole `New Age' movement - although this term is becoming less and less useful as time goes on -  is based on the premise of discovering (or re-discovering) `truths' which have been forgotten in the modern world. New Agers are `special', because they have seen the light that the rest of us miserable post-industrialists haven't. Of course, skeptics themselves are wt immune to the specialness syndrome, although most of us would like to believe that we are. Where you sit on the line stretching from Super Skeptic to Wet Skeptic depends on many factors, but one might be whether you feel special because you know -  whereas others may not - that everything `paranormal' is bunkum. You have read all the skeptical books, you read The Skeptic, so you know the truth. Does that make you part of a worldwide conspiracy of skeptics...?

Skeptics often get accused of poking fun at the New Age, but it works the other way, too. On New Year's Eve I visited the Yorkshire village of Haworth, `home of the Brontes' and all that. Amongst all the tourist paraphernalia I came across `Spooks', a New Age shop to end them all. `Spooks' sells everything a New Ager could ever dream of wanting, and the rest. (I almost shelled out for some black candles, but with first-footing only a few hours away it didn't seem like an auspicious move.) Leaving the shop, something in the window caught my eye - a photograph of James Randi, of all people. I looked closer. `Spooks' had voted him `Twit of the year'.

 

©Toby Howard 1995


Back to the index