TECHNOIR

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Copyright © 2010 JOHN LASKER.

ISBN: 978-1-84961-069-8

Published by: TheEbookSale Publishing

Limerick Ireland

www.theebooksale.com

www.realtimepublishings.com

Contributing Editor:

Richard Connor of Columbus, Ohio

Don’t believe what you read on the Internet.

            I beg to differ in a big, big way. Yet for some odd reason, I seem to hear that a lot these days. I heard it repeated by SONY, during a TV ad for their PlayStation, of all things. I also hear it a lot from the talking heads at CNN and FOX. Journalists talking down about journalism...I can hear the grave diggers snickering now. Because they're lovin’ this coordinated effort by some of the world's biggest multi-national corporations, defense
contractors, energy companies, mining companies, and complicit corporatist governments, to bury true journalism.

            No doubt about it, journalism – and especially investigative journalism itself – is on the fast track to extinction. Newspaper staffs have been slashed to the bone. As for investigative reporters, there are maybe one or two left at most daily newspapers these days. What’s more, nearly every newspaper has shrunk their physical pages to the size of Post-it notes. During this same time magazines and journals are going under like rocks on a pond. Experts blame lack of readers. People don't have the time to pick up a paper anymore, they say.

            That theory however – that people don't read anymore, or people don't care about journalism anymore – doesn't jive with me. I believe there is a more secretive reason behind the demise of real journalism.

            As the world-renown political activist Norm Chomsky has said over and over, our planet has roughly 1,000 powerful and super- rich corporations. And they're working hand-in-hand (with cash in hand) with governments to create a global “free market.” This collusion between corporations, governments, and to an extent militaries, is what Chomsky calls “neo-liberalism.”

            In essence, neo-liberalism keeps a small number of people mega-rich, while the masses, as in billions, work for a few dollars an hour, or in the case of workers in El Salvador sewing sports jerseys, ten cents an hour. The UN estimates that globalization and unregulated capitalism has increased disparity between the richest and poorest 20 percent of the world population by over 50 percent from the 1960 to 1990. Just imagine what the global free market has accomplished since, when globalization really began to hit full stride?

            One strategy used to achieve this incredible separation between the working class and ownership class, is to buy out American mainstream journalism. The mainstream media than is part of the neo-liberalism scheme as well, but in this way: chained to a wall in the basement and the door locked. For example, in a more clandestine approach to influencing media, many CEOs of Chomsky’s 1000 corporations now sit on the boards of newspapers and news channels. And while it would take me several-thousand words to name names and corporations who have either taken over newspapers and news channels, some are juggernauts you're probably aware of. There’s Gannet Company, for instance, which has bought hundreds of major newspapers and news channels during the last 25 years. There’s also Rupert Murdoch and his Fox empire. Both are huge corporations. So it’s no surprise they’ve furthered a pro-corporatist agenda and basically told the working class to deal with your own problems (that they created, such as low-balling wages). Being a corporatist means purging any anti-corporate efforts to make as much profit as possible. Thus hundreds of investigative reporters and teams have been cut and slashed, and in turn, putting a chill on scores of major news operations. Traditional editors and reporters hand-cuffed from doing real journalism; it’s as simple as that. This is one big reason why newspapers are shrinking and readers turning away in droves. Without serious inquiry into a community’s neoliberal allies (corporations, governments, militaries) there’s not much else to read. You can only take in so many articles about the new jungle-gym down at the park.

            “We’re not going in that direction anymore,” is what the new bosses have told thousands of editors and journalists who wanted to know what’s going to happen to the investigation desk. As if investigative journalism has caught some disease. Essentially, they’re killing investigative journalism before it gets them. Because in many cases, investigative journalism is about protecting the masses, the working class, from being exploited by the super rich. From being exposed to their “Shock Doctrine” as Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has so clearly exposed in her mind-boggling book of the same name.

            So what can we do? What can  the reader do, the voter, the concerned citizen who loves to dig into those three-part investigative series about the giant defense contractor, which first bought out the government via lobbyists so to win that $100 million dollar contract to make weapons for our own troops, a contract it then outsourced to Chindia? I say look to the Internet. Support Internet journalism because there are scores of outlets in cyberspace with the content you're looking for. From the
Alternet
to
Toward Freedom
, there are hundreds of legitimate journalism sites offering professional news gathering and more importantly investigative journalism, at a very low price (you’re monthly DSL cost, for instance). And if you can afford it, I ask you to make small donations to some of your favorite sites. This is how journalism can get out of the basement, to give it a voice again. A grassroots movement powered by concerned people connected to the Internet. With everyone making a small contribution, even if the contribution is turning a friend onto the right web site, the tide could be monumental. Look at what happened leading up to the 2008 Presidential Election.

            Some of you are probably scoffing and wondering: Investigating UFOs is serious journalism? First of all, for those who are specifically looking to read about the subject, I applaud your effort for wanting to know more. The subject, no doubt, is addictive. Some even treat it as a guilty pleasure. Of course it is. We’re talking about possible answers to stories and mysteries mankind has wrangled with for thousands of years. In this sense, it is no wonder UFOlogists are taking a closer look at the Old and New Testament.

            Again, UFOs are a subject, an issue, buried and dissed by the mainstream media. Why? That’s a mystery unto itself. Is it because they don’t want to upset the global military industrial complex, especially the Pentagon, which deliberately tried to discredit many a UFO investigator? It is very probable the US and other nations have reversed engineered UFO technology so to benefit the military and society. For instance, the transistor, the integrated circuit, stealth radar, and lasers, might all have originated very, very, very far away. Keep in mind, the Soviet Union’s Air Force during the Cold War had a standing order to shoot-down UFOs.

            Nevertheless, to those who do scoff at such things, I ask you to at least consider the UFO history that has burned itself into my community. Where I am from, the middle of Ohio, Columbus to be exact, surprisingly has a tremendous UFO history, one that needs journalists to document it. To start, the greatest and most reliable UFO incident began in Columbus after a US Army Super Huey lifted-off from a nearby helipad. It was on its way home to Cleveland, and would be taken hostage mid-air, but just for a few moments. You can read about this in Chapter 11, which also raises the specter of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, of Dayton, Ohio, one of the largest air bases in the world. Here, rumors will always persist about whether extraterrestrials, whose craft apparently crash landed in a New Mexico desert, were shipped to Wright-Patt, as it is sometimes called, for the strangest autopsies in human history. Moreover, Wright-Patt is home to some of the Air Forces most important (and most secretive) research. But central Ohio is not famous for strange aerial cases alone. The US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, the US military’s official investigation of UFOs, civilian office for scientists and researchers was based at The Ohio State University, located in urban Columbus, and my proud Alma matter. Coincidentally, right across the street from Ohio State’s southwest campus is the research corporation Battelle Laboratory. There are many reports – and leaks of classified information – suggesting that reverse engineering of UFO craft took place within Battelle’s labs.

                Back across the street at Ohio State, Project Blue Books’ offices were led by Dr. J. Allen Hynek who is said to have been skeptical of the aerial phenomenon at first, but slowly shifted to becoming a believer that our tiny pale blue dot was being visited by a species that hypothetically could be a billion years ahead of ours in regards to evolution. He allegedly told (very) close family and friends the US military had indeed “retrieved bodies” post crash. You can get a glimpse of Dr. Hynek late in Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of a Third Kind
when the UFO mothership finally rendezvous’ with mankind at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Hynek’s assistant during Project Blue Book was Jenny Zeidman, a UFO hunter in her own right. She would investigate the Super Huey-UFO confrontation, known better as the “Coyne Incident”, and turn it into a case for disclosure. She still resides today in central Ohio suburb. Hopefully a few of us can at least try to continue to further their efforts to end this one of this planet’s greatest riddles.

            Again, if you’re still a hardcore skeptic, at least contemplate all the questions the UFO mystery raises. Has the US and Russian military acquired UFO technology? Are what the Bible claims as “God” or “angels” actually visitors from another galaxy? These two questions alone call for serious investigation; heck even the Vatican has conducted research into intelligent life from another world. Yet whether the US government is doing so, is a good question; and if yes, a mystery unto itself as to why keep such inquiry a secret. Of course the mainstream media refuses to put any effort into understanding this subject. That leaves those people interested in UFOs – which, by the way, is a huge, huge number across the globe – to get their information from the Internet.

            Here’s another interesting aspect of UFOs you might not be aware of: Wernher von Bruan, the “Father of the American Space Program,” who before this stint worked for Nazi Germany and made the Europe-terrorizing V-2 rocket, allegedly told a confidant that the United States would create an arsenal of space weapons based on a lie. The lie being America needed space weapons – such as Battlesats loaded with laser canons and missiles – because of a threat that flying saucers and extraterrestrials bring to the human race. Funny thing is half of his prediction would come true. The US military is slowly building an arsenal of space weapons (see Chapter 3), but according to experts such as Bruce Gagnon, the “lie” the US is using to build their space-weapons arsenal is missile defense. During the Bush administration, which doubled missile-defense spending and this continued under the Obama administration, the US Air Force and Space Command had plans to deploy a “constellation” of Battlesats orbiting the Earth by 2020. Such a constellation would have been a massive cash bonanza, way bigger than Iraq, for defense contractors – giants such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Don’t forget the US, since Ronald Reagan called for “Star Wars,” has spent over $120 billion on a program that so far has never shot a hostile missile out of the sky. Interestingly, US missile defense shot a satellite down from low-Earth-orbit in 2008. No wonder Gagnon calls the US missile defense program the “greatest Trojan Horse ever.”