A great example of misinformation

News wires are heating up with another example of the ultimate non-story released today, the story of the latest release of UFO files from the UK Ministry of Defence group the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) the group that advises military and political groups on threats to British defensive capabilities. We have known about the role of DIS in administrating British UFO reports and sightings for a number of years. A former member of this group Nick Pope has been openly speaking on the UFO circuit since his retirement from the group in the 1990's and indeed the group itself closed its UFO desk in the late 1990's as far as public reports were concerned at least. I'm sure many people will be reading these news reports and getting tremendously excited about the highlights like Prime Minister Tony Blair being briefed on UFO's in much the same way that thirty years ago when a document from Winston Churchill asking to be briefed some people took it as proof of UFOs and extraterrestrials, so why have I started this article by saying that it is a non-story? Well there are a few reasons. Firstly these documents, 6,700 in number were actually released in August 2011, but have only been made available online through the National Archive today, so serious UFO researchers have been studying them for almost a year already, and there has been little if any new information of any significance.

Then we need to consider that these documents had been declassified before that point which suggests strongly that they do not relate to any threat to national security, which any genuine sightings almost certainly would. It should also be noted that although there are a huge number of documents, these are not the complete set of documents for the period. They represent approximately 78% of the total with the remainder still be too highly classified to be covered by Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. It should also be noted that these documents have been released under FoI rules which exempt many classes of official document which are considered security or commercially sensitive. Lets also look at the Tony Blair connection. The documents suggest that all Prime Ministers are briefed on UFOs but this should be expected as they are likely to be asked at public events as was the case when UFO researcher Richard D Hall posed the question of the release of information to David Cameron at a public debate. It would be extremely remiss of government advisers to leave a politician of this stature with no answer to such an obvious question. It is not evidence of UFOs per se, just a matter of expediency.

Also to be considered is that these documents were released initially to UFO researchers and the documents reveal that part of the role of the DIS was to maintain links between UFO research groups and government. This strongly hints at the possibility of disinformation, particularly in light of recent cases of media and police disinformation policies and the use of selected economists to present positively spun government finance figures. Whatever these documents are, in terms of evidence of British government seriousness about UFOs they are in no sense any new evidence, nor do they move the debate over whether UFOs are real or not any further forward. To date there is no evidence of UFOs, whether you chose to believe that or not, it is a statement of fact. That is not to say that such information doesn't exist, nor that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. There is every possibility that any real evidence would be kept secret as suggested under American and UK policy for dealing with UFO evidence laid out in the 1960's.

What is of interest is the way in which the media is reporting these files, and the impact that this has on how the alternative media is portrayed when viewed with a cynical eye.

Why critical thinking is the key to conspiracy theory

Our leaders would have you believe that all conspiracy theories are nonsense, that they are the preserve of tin foil hat wearing ex-hippies or far right extremists, and this can be a convincing argument for people whose exposure to conspiracy theory is David Icke and Alex Jones, or what they read in the mainstream press. It's perhaps a comforting thought that we don't really have to worry about a cabal of super wealthy individuals controlling the planet, and that our political leaders are acting in our best interests, albeit with occasional mistakes, but they are only human. Conspiracy theories have become a tremendously useful tool in the game of controlling populations, and the intelligence communities around the World have been caught out over and over again seeding pet conspiracy theories to cloud the issue. Even back as far as the Roswell case in 1947 this was the case. One of the earliest of the modern era conspiracy theories and certainly one of the best known it is now well established that the US Air Force saw an opportunity to create a confused and unusual cover story for a project that they wanted kept secret.

The real story of the Roswell crash is now well understood to be the accidental downing of an observation balloon that was part of a program to monitor nuclear tests in the Soviet Union under Project Mogul. At the time however there was already discussion of UFO's from the earlier sighting by Kenneth Arnold in June 1947 and documents from the period make specific mention of using UFO's as a cover story to protect the project. This was seen to work well and the concept was developed by the US military and the CIA as well as by intelligence agencies around the World. There are a great many secret projects, operations and missions both military and non military that could not operate without that veil of secrecy. The consequence of this is that there is a definite and deliberate policy of feeding misinformation into both the mainstream and alternative media in order to cloud the issue in relation to the real stories around the World. This extends to not simply creating false stories but finding ways of discrediting any story that approaches the truth. A great recent example is the role of Nick Pope in the UK. Nick Pope was employed by the British Ministry of Defence to act as the liaison and contact point for UFO sighting in the UK. After this role Mr Pope was allowed to continue his work in the public domain, and was of course immediately pilloried as a dis-information agent, still on the MoD payroll and feeding incorrect information to conspiracy groups.

This served the purpose of creating an air of doubt over what was credible information about ongoing real world conspiracies and what was spin put out to protect those same projects. By creating doubt you create argument, and end up with what we are currently seeing which is far too much time wasted on infighting and internal debunking rather than actually working towards finding out what is really going on. This is where critical thinking becomes the best friend of anyone seriously looking into the way the World works. By understanding that not everything in the mainstream media is true, but at the same time not every conspiracy theory is true either you begin to approach the reality. With ever story you read, ever news report you watch, every conspiracy story you follow, learn to ask yourself the key questions that allow critical analysis. Start with an understanding of Occams Razor. If you have two or more possible explanations for an event the best position is to believe the one which requires the least number of assumptions until such time as further evidence proves this wrong. The more complicated, the more an explanation relies on other assumptions, the less likely it is to be the solution. Then follow basic police procedure. Ask yourself why a certain explanation would be correct or incorrect, who stands to gain, what the motive is. Even crimes committed by the criminally insane have a motive, although that motive might not make sense without understanding the insanity. In short, follow the money, find out who profits.

Understanding that there is a reason for everything that is reported in whatever form is crucial. Learn to think carefully and question everything. Educate yourself to understand the World around you. Study history, geography, philosophy, economics, politics and science and begin to understand the way the World really works.