Skilluminati Research

1980 Jaques Vallee Interview with Omni Magazine

Posted Jul 06, 2007

A BIG THANK YOU to Pirx for providing us with this scan. If you're unfamiliar with Jacques Vallee, start right here. If you are familiar with Vallee, you don't need any further introduction. What follows is some choice excerpts from the interview, concluded by a link to the original scan in .pdf format. Enjoy.

Omni: Why do you think people are bored?

Vallee: While the public is becoming increasingly interested in the subject, it is bored with the obsolete question of wether UFOs are real or not. It's a little bit like asking if Jesus Christ existed or not. You'll find ten scholars on any campus who will "prove" to you that Jesus never existed, and you will find ten more who will "prove" that he did, all using the same documents. It's an interesting question for those few scholars, but it's not an interesting question for the rest of us, because -- historically, socially, culturally and so on -- Christianity has been a fact of life for centuries.

In a particular society, if enough people believe in something, then that something exists. To paraphrase one of the founders of modern sociology, "If men believe something to be real, then it is real in it's consequences." The expectation is there. That's what I've called conditioning. Wether the conditioning comes from an outside source or wether it comes from Earth, from the old human culture, or even from the collective unconscious as Jung suggested -- wherever it comes from, the expectation is there. We expect social changes to come from this belief, maybe even historical changes. That's the new perspective I've tried to explore in this book [Messengers of Deception], through a total departure from the methods I've used before.

Omni: Didn't it subsequently irritate you when you heard so many UFO supporters arguing about the numerous cover-ups that were going on? There's always a UFO fan who goes on about how the Air Force has secret files.

Vallee: That was characteristic of UFO believers in the United States, especially in the Fifties, when a group called National Investigation Committe on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and its leader, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, were trying to get congressional hearings to expose the "coverup." It seemed to me there were much better things to do, such as study the phenomena itself.

When I was compiling the catalog of landings that is the appendix to my book Passport to Magonia, I found that I had much better access to the files of the air force than to those of the UFO groups. Those groups were allegedly set up by citizens anxious to reveal the truth, but they have never published their data, for purely egotistical reasons. If you go through my catalog, you'll find more cases of UFO landings from the Air Force than you will from any one of the amateur UFO groups. So that says something.

Omni: With all these possibilities in mind, what are your plans for the future?

Vallee: In a sense, I'm just beginning. There is a tremendous sense of excitement about this. I finance my own research now, having left all the groups I ever belonged to. I find I can cover much more ground with my own resources and my spare time. I now work with a very small group of scientists. I try to control the information very critically. And I try to work only on cases that have not been publicized, have not been reported to newspapers, and have not been looked at by the UFO groups.

DOWNLOAD JACQUES VALLEE'S OMNI INTERVIEW

EXTRACTING WATER FROM AIR: A PATENT AND A PROJECT

?People have been trying to figure out how to do this for years, and we just came out of left field in response to Darpa," said Abe Sher, chief executive officer of Aqua Sciences. ?The atmosphere is a river full of water, even in the desert. It won't work absolutely everywhere, but it works virtually everywhere."

Sher said he is ?not at liberty" to disclose details of the government contracts, except that Aqua Sciences won two highly competitive bids with ?some very sophisticated companies."

He also declined to comment on how the technology actually works.

?This is our secret sauce," Sher said. ?Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it tastes good, but we won't tell you what's in it."

Ever since we first read about Abe Sher and Aqua Sciences, it's been a priority mission to reverse-engineer the miraculous "Water from Air" machine. Aqua Sciences made the news for their "mobile freshwater generation systems," which they're selling to FEMA, DARPA, and the US Military. After all, on a planet where over a billion people are constantly ill because they can't access safe, drinkable water -- selling something like this to the highest bidder is just unforgivable.

But we're not down with the "bitch and whine" activist crowd -- Abe Sher will do what Abe Sher will do. And what we will do, is put Abe Sher outta business. Towards that end, we're going to "open source" our project to some extent, starting with sharing a patent we tracked down. Bizarrely, the second half of the diagrams on this patent are hand-drawn, horribly and illegibly. This is most odd, because it indicates those images were substituted after the patent was accepted and filed -- it's highly unlikely that the US Patent Office would have accepted something so amateur to begin with. Strange happenings afoot.

DOWNLOAD PATENT 7,053,934 -- "Device for Collecting Water from Air"

Filed in: Future Tech

Manuel De Landa on “Policing the Spectrum”

Posted Jul 06, 2007 1 comment

"Unlike the analyst, who deals only with simple forms of camouflage, the spy operates in a veritable hall of mirrors, in which several levels of intrigue and dissimulation interact. And unlike the intelligence analyst, whose performance can be evaluated by his failure or success in making patterns rise to the surface, the activities of spies and counterspies take place in such deep secrecy that making a rational evaluation of their performance is often impossible. This has tended to create an aura of "mysticism" around espionage agencies, giving spies the feeling of belonging to a secret caste of initiated individuals who have exclusive access to "esoteric" knowledge. Their successes and failures can only be judged by people having access to this inner sanctum."

"For this reason the photoanalysts at the CIA and the cryptologists at the NSA have to operate in a very different environment than their colleagues in think tanks like the RAND Corporation. RAND was originally created in 1946 as a mathematicians' think tank, designed to apply the tools of Operations Research and game theory to the problems of warfare, and it has remained pretty much a technocrat's stronghold ever since. Analysts at the CIA/NSA, on the other hand, must work together with clandestine operators, in charge of sabotage, assassination and psychological warfare, and with spy managers, who put together and maintain networks of infiltrators and informers. The atmosphere of excessive secrecy created by these two characters affects in many ways the performance of the analytical component of the intelligence agency. This is not to say that the work of the analyst is unrelated to the world of secrecy and security measures. Rather, it is as if there were two kinds of secrecy, one with a valid military function and another that has a negative effect on the internal workings of the war machine."

"Almost without exception secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic "espionage industry," whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:

The agencies justify their peacetime existence by promising to provide timely warning of a threat to national security.... Over the years intelligence agencies have brainwashed successive governments into accepting three propositions that ensure their survival and expansion. The first is that in the secret world it may be impossible to distinguish success from failure. A timely warning of attack allows the intended victim to prepare. This causes the aggressor to change its mind; the warning then appears to have been wrong. The second proposition is that failure can be due to incorrect analysis of the agency's accurate information.... The third proposition is that the agency could have offered timely warning had it not been starved of funds. In combination, these three propositions can be used to thwart any rational analysis of an intelligence agency's performance, and allow any failure to be turned into a justification for further funding and expansion."

DOWNLOAD "POLICING THE SPECTRUM"

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Time as a Weapon: John Boyd

Pentagon Red Teams: Get a Job Overthrowing the Government

Global Trends 2007-2036

Filed in: 5GW Project

2003 NBIC Report: William Sims Bainbridge on “Memetics”

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Update 11/18/08 Faced with a global economic crisis and the prospect of a radically altered standard of living, there's been a lot of traffic coming through Skilluminati Research to read about the "Changing Images of Man" report. I've also fixed the link for this gem of an information overdose from William Sims Bainbridge. The media tools and psychological triggers that marketing and advertising persuaders use are no different from the tools and triggers of political spectacle. It's worth taking the time to understand the rather obtuse field of Memetics -- because most of the people who do understand it are being paid to use it against you.

After this excerpt there's links for further reading on the subject, as well as some related Skilluminati articles. The NBIC report, however, covers a tremendous range of topics and memetic theory is just a tiny slice. The acroynm stands for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Enhancement. Here's the Abstract overview:

"The chief areas of application include: expanding human cognition and communication, improving human health and physical capabilities, enhancing group and societal outcomes, strengthening national security, and unifying science and education. Convergence will be based on the material unity of nature at the nanoscale, technology integration from the nanoscale, key transforming tools, the concept of reality as closely coupled hierarchical complex systems, and the goal to improve human performance."

Not exactly a page turner but there's about 50 amazing passages in here, most of which you can clear find through browsing the table of contents.

In the "information society" of the 21st century, the most valuable resource will not be iron or oil but culture. However, the sciences of human culture have lacked a formal paradigm and a rigorous methodology. A fresh approach to culture, based on biological metaphors and information science methodologies, could vastly enhance the human and economic value of our cultural heritage and provide cognitive science with a host of new research tools. The fundamental concept is the meme, analogous to the gene in biological genetics, an element of culture that can be the basis of cultural variation, selection, and evolution.

"World-views" may be self-regulating, in this respect, each dominant ideology naturally stimulating the evolution of counter-ideologies. Just when Western Civilization rejoiced that it had vanquished Nazism and Marxism, and the "end of history" was at hand, radical Islam emerged to challenge its fundamental values (El-Affendi 1999). Quite apart from the issue of terrorist attacks from radical fringes of Islam, the entire Muslim religious tradition may have an evolutionary advantage over western secularism, because it encourages a higher birth rate (Keyfitz 1986). An inescapable natural law may be at work here, comparable to that which regulates the constantly evolving relations between predators and prey in the biological realm, ensuring that there is always a rival culture, and complete victory is impossible (Maynard Smith 1982). However, deep scientific understanding of the memetic processes that generate radical opposition movements may help government policymakers combat them effectively. It may never be possible to eradicate them entirely, but with new scientific methods, we should be able to prevent them from driving our civilization to extinction.

The scientific study of culture is both possible and pregnant with knowledge of human behavior. Thus, it deserves to be given more resources, especially in light of current events. These events include not only the terrorism of September 11, 2001, but also the dot-com crash and the failure of nations as diverse as Argentina, Indonesia, and Japan to sustain their economic development. Memetic science could help us deal with challenges to American cultural supremacy, discover the products and services that will really make the information economy profitable, and identify the forms of social institutions most conducive to social and economic progress.

DOWNLOAD THE NBIC REPORT -- "Converging Technologies"

For more information on memetics, the best intro I've seen so far would be Wes Unruh's introduction -- look past the fact it's a Squidoo page and check out The Truth About Memetics. (Wes is also the author, along with Vancouver-area metagenius Edward Wilson, of the very expansive and thought-provoking book The Art of Memetics, which you can read for free by clicking here.)

Courtesy of Pizza SEO, here's a DIY curriculum for a deeper understanding of memetics as a practice:

1. Start with Language and Power, a thorough and unusually honest assessment of persuasive language patterns, from a wide variety of contexts and disciplines.

2. To keep your brain moving with another model (this is contradictory but still useful), check out The Memetic Lexicon.

3. To scramble the signal even further, here's purely pragmatic perspective from Eric Dahl, who maintains this wiki about Memetic Warfare.

4. Finally, for a sense of where all this logically leads, check out Dan Bartlett's excellent introductory essay The Biology of Belief.

Filed in: Social Control

Joe Delgado’s “Physical Control of the Mind”

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Skilluminati Research presents the most complete copy of "Physical Control of the Mind" we've been able to get ahold of, featuring a majority of the chapters as well as many of the original photographic illustrations.

Delgado's work has grown to essentially mythological status. It is our opinion that Delgado was a butcher with sausage fingers, so this book is primarily presented as an antidote to conspiracy theory speculation. Most of the grandiose claims Delgado states as "incontrovertible facts" have been shown, in the decades since this work was published, to be hilariously ignorant. Recent interviews with Delgado indicate that he might have realized he was taking an absurdly reductionist approach to the single most complex problem facing science in the 22nd century. (Those same interviews show him to be the same fascist he has always been, too. Some monsters never change.)

With our bullshit remarks out of the way, we present to you, "Physical Control of the Mind"

DOWNLOAD JOSE DELGADO'S "PHYSICAL CONTROL OF THE MIND"

Filed in: Social Control

Pentagon Red Teams: Get a Job Overthrowing the Government

Posted Jul 06, 2007

The Defense Science Board, always a valuable source for info you probably shouldn't have, has a report on Red Teaming in a Department of Defense context which is most tasty. We offer a pdf download of that report at the end of this short, meaningless article.

How do you test the security of your secure systems? You hire someone to break in. This is true for base installations and it's true for networks and communications infrastructure, too. Right now, there are fake terrorists and hackers working for the government to test out vulnerabilities. The logic, clearly, is to locate potential threats and cracks in the system before Someone Else realizes that they're there to exploit. Red Teams need to improvise, move quickly, and be mostly invisible. To me, at least, that sounds like one hell of a fun job.

We argue that red teaming is especially important now for the DoD. Current adversaries are tougher targets for intelligence than was the United State's major cold war foe. Red teaming deepens understanding of options available to adaptive adversaries and both complements and informs intelligence collection and analysis. Aggressive red teams are needed to challenge emerging operational concepts in order to discover weaknesses before real adversaries do. In addition, in the wake of recent military operations, use of red teams can temper the complacency that often follows success.

Of course, if you're going to do some freelance Red Team activity in hopes of getting hired, make damn sure that you're doing it well. Don't get caught until you want to get caught, until you are in total control of the negotiation. They respect balls and expertise just as much as they respect guns. (For quick reference, think of Keven Spacy in Seven.)

Remember the case of poor Gary McKinnon, who got caught snooping around UFO files . Did they think "whoa, what a badass hacker?" Did they hire him? Fuck no, they're sending him to Guantanamo Bay. Prepare thoroughly before diving into shark tanks.

The Defense Science Board is a beautifully frank operation, and you can only respect people who write as well as they do. Even if they're raving fascists, they're still lucid on the laptops:

Red teams and red teaming processes have long been used as tools by the management of both government and commercial enterprises. Their purpose is to reduce an enterprise's risks and increase its opportunities.

Red teams come in many varieties and there are different views about what constitutes a red team. We take an expanded view and include a diversity of activities that, while differing in some ways, share a fundamental feature.

Red teams are established by an enterprise to challenge aspects of that very enterprise's plans, programs, assumptions, etc. It is this aspect of deliberate challenge that distinguishes red teaming from other management tools although the boundary is not a sharp one. (There are many tools used by management for a variety of related purposes: to promulgate visions, foster innovation, promote efficiencies.)

If you're interested in a high-paying job with lots of benefits that you have to break laws in order to apply to, then we recommend you look into this rapid growth area. Think about it: if you can remote view, then you can compile a dossier on 50+ extremely sensitive US secret locations all around the world and get a job. Right? Occult Red Teams probably already exist, so bear in mind you might have some competition.

DOWNLOAD Defense Science Board report on Red Teams

Filed in: 5GW Project