Project Bluebeam

Regarding the curtrent spate of UFOs, Time reports,

Other than the first balloon, which China has acknowledged was theirs, the Pentagon doesn’t yet know what the objects are or where they came from. Asked directly, a senior military official did not rule out the possibility that their provenance could be extraterrestrial.

I have several reactions, the main one being that if these are alien visitors, they would have needed warp drive-style technology to get here, given their likely home planet would be hundreds or thousands of light years away. So an obsolescent F-16 with a heat-seeking missile can shoot one down as it piddles along at 20,000 feet? This doesn't even fit the War of the Worlds model of alien invasion. According to Wikipedia,

The main narrative begins when an object thought to be a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. The narrator discovers that it is an artificial cylinder. Some Martians emerge briefly, but have difficulty coping with Earth's atmosphere and gravity. When humans approach the cylinder with a white flag, the Martians incinerate them. Military forces arrive that night.

. . . The next day, the narrator takes his wife to safety in nearby Leatherhead. That day, he sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the poisonous "black smoke". Tripods have wiped out the army around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking.

. . . [The narrator] begins to go mad from his trauma, finally attempting suicide by openly approaching a stationary fighting machine. To his surprise, he discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly pathogens, to which they had no immunity.

H G Wells was a 19th-century bourgeois optimist, and, a Darwinian, he saw the force of natural selection overcoming the evil of alien invasion, even though the aliens had a temporary technological advantage. But if the mysterious cylindrical or octagonal objects drifting over Canada and the Great Lakes are from aliens, they seem to be slow and bumbling, they don't fly all that high, and they so far don't seem to have a heat ray.

The YouTube commentator Mark Dice raises the issue of Project Bluebeam, something I hadn't heard of before:

The premise is that government will use a manufactured threat of alien invasion to create mass panic and impose a social agenda. If that's so, they aren't even at the H G Wells/Orson Welles level of inducing it -- but wait a moment. Mark Dice doesn't even mention COVID. As we ever so slowly transition to the morning-after phase of the COVID mass panic, we're gradually being told that the vaccines were ineffective, and even more recently, study after study has confirmed that masks were ineffective as well. In fact, those studies were being published throughout the period of lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distance. Here's one from 2020:

A cloth mask or face covering does very little to prevent the emission or inhalation of small particles. As discussed in an earlier CIDRAP commentary and more recently by Morawska and Milton (2020) in an open letter to WHO signed by 239 scientists, inhalation of small infectious particles is not only biologically plausible, but the epidemiology supports it as an important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. . . . We also worry that the public doesn't understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings when we observe how many people wear their mask under their nose or even under their mouth, remove their masks when talking to someone nearby, or fail to practice physical distancing when wearing a mask.

Even so, the authors carefully hedged their position, insisting that since masks themselves were ineffective, ever more stringent lockdown and distancing measures were the real solution. No doubt this allowed them to keep their jobs despite their heterodox views. Notwithstanding the unsupportability of the public health establishment's claims, even at the height of the pandemic, the narrative was maintained.

What we're learning from the Twitter files and other sources is that an elaborate social mechanism was in place to enforce the norms of the moral panic, and only now, three years later, are we beginning to recover. Over the weekend, our Roman Catholic parish had a fundraising dinner, and our pastor during brief remarks suggested that in many ways, the process of getting back to normal worship life was only beginning. Looking back at the first months of 2020, a key focus of the public health agenda was to prohibit religious gatherings of any sort, indoor or outdoor, prohibit singing or responsive worship, forbid the distribution of food in any religious context, and eliminate hymnals, prayer books, and missals.

In hindsight, these efforts, done in the name of "science", were misguided and ineffective; luckily, sustained legal effort was able to defeat them fairly quickly, although as our pastor pointed out, only now, and only gradually, has the parish been able to recover something as routine as post-Sunday mass coffee hour. I don't rule out that, given even the hokey UFOs we're now seeing at the Plan 9 Fron Outer Space level, the authorities might intend to resume their attack on ordinary institutions in the name of "science".