THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE CARD TRICK

Fuck man, that wasn’t me. How old do you think I am? That was Forrestal, he of the cement poisoning, yeah. Couldn’t hack it.. I never met him, no…and how old do you think I am, again? I would have been like one. Fuck. I am strictly a child of the 1980s. Pac-Man. Defender. Robotron 1984. Late 1980s. That’s where I came in. That's my mindset. That where my mandate started.

Anyway, shit was falling apart for half a decade before I got there. Hangar 18. In Search Of. That fucking Roswell book. Eyeroll.gif. The meat of the story was already in the hands of the public, in an “inspired by true events” way. So they brought me into GARNET. Yeah, that’s what it was called. I didn’t name it. It was a lot of shouting heads at the time. Old white people in a wood-panelled room in Maryland trying to distill political invisibility from a million different leaks.

So, one day I say, hey, we don’t try to squash this shit, man, we lean into it. We take the curve at high fucking speed until the wheels wobble right the fuck off, and the story becomes a rotting wreck in the desert that no one even notices anymore as they drive past.

So they let me run with the MAJESTIC papers leak because it had already been out for most of a decade and they still wouldn’t go away. Stanton fucking Friedman amirite? They were getting some traction because, fuck man, they were real. Duh.

So, what do I do? I anonymously release the MAJESTIC papers to a dozen different targets over a nine month period. At a glance, they all look the same, right? You’ll like this. They look the same, but they aren’t the same. All the security mark-ups, names, and titles are fudged with. A stamp from 25 years too late. A classification from 10 years too early. A font change that shouldn’t be. I didn’t change a single classified fact.

It was easy. Inside a week half of MUFON couldn’t agree on their veracity. Inside a month, our speed was picking up. Shit would drop, we’d find and plug the leak, and, at the same time, release more of it, only, you know, fucked up slightly — ever so slightly. Then let the rubes do the rest. It became rote. It became policy. I became the leader of GARNET because everyone else couldn’t see the jazz Forrestal came up with for what it was: mockery and ridicule is the most feared social response to the American animal.

A half decade of smooth sailing. Lots of work but nothing too strenuous. Lots of stuff to do, but the fire had gone low for the moment. The worst shit we had was fucking Bob Lazar, and he practically covered himself up. I just let that fucker dig himself a hole. Hey Bob, here’s a new shovel from your friends over at the agency…

Then X-Files shows up like a bad fucking hangover of the 1950s, right? Let’s all become interested in this shit all over again, America. Cool? Cool.

Well, fuck me.

So then, my MOGUL song and dance. Rendlesham forest counterintelligence. Alien autopsy. And sweet goddamn, it really did feel like it was going to spill there at some point. But again, laugh, point, mock, tweak, smile and move on.

We turned a corner with the MOGUL report, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. For a couple of months it felt like it wasn’t sticking, and even I began to doubt myself, but then it all settled in. Then the Alien autopsy and the fucking wrong type of telephone on the wall. I mean, we didn’t even do that one. Someone pointed it out on a message board and ZIP! problem solved. Only, that was the right phone. You can fill in the rest.

Haha. I know.

And then, of course, the program ate its own fucking face. I mean, you can’t concentrate that type of power in a dozen people with oversight on everything and expect it NOT to explode at some point. People get greedy. But I was always good at tea leaves, I was always modest in my needs. I laid low for a couple of years in my hidey hole without saying a word betting that I was too valuable to cap.

When the new program called me back in the new commander gave me back my mandate and I got back to work. Welcome to fucking Youtube. iPhones. And holy hell, you’d think my job would go right to shit, huh?

Well, you might be surprised.

By the time the real shit hit the fan in 2019, the entire flooding of information sources online was almost wholly automated. Our detection group would find a hit in a video or a photo, or in keywords and the algorithm would go to work. Good shot of a UFO? Upload two-dozen other clips of it that don’t look nearly as good. Fake witness accounts of the original witness bragging about “faking” a sighting, and Bob’s your uncle.

And then, rising up like some nightmare, fucking AARO, the Gimbal video, Elizondo and Grusch. Holy fuck.

Let me tell you man, my ulcers had ulcers.

So, you’ve been here two years now? You want a preview of coming attractions? OK. It goes like this: 2025-leaks begin to confirm all these crazy stories. SERPO. Underground bases. Nordics. Photo and video leaks of the Eisenhower meeting an alien at Holloman. Crates of Roswell photos. The Kitchen Sink. This comes out, day in, day out for a year or more, right?

Then — we’ve got this guy, right? — skunk works guy, he leaks the all environment vehicle, the AEV. It’s an Air Force project that, from the right angles, looks like a weird flying disc, right? Doesn’t have engines or wings. Unlike anything in the air. There are live videos. Hours of footage. They’ve been flying that shit for decades. He leaks it and goes: the US has had inertial and mass reduction technology since about 1949, and has utilized it in limited places, because it is wildly and prohibitively expensive to create. It's code-named GALLOP.

But that’s not all. A high ranking retied general in the Air Force — just a mensch — comes forward and says, "I worked for the counterintelligence on GALLOP, and it's a crazy story." This is played out over months, right? Some vague articles. Then some obscured face interviews. Then his identity is revealed. Then the real interviews: 60 minutes, etc.

Roswell, crashed discs, coverup, all the files, photos were a counterintelligence op against the Soviets to prevent them from discovering the actual truth. The Soviets had just stolen the A-Bomb, see? And the US needed something inscrutable and bizarre to draw the Soviets off from their new math for GALLOP. So just like they had assembled plywood and blow-up armies to fool Hitler, they grabbed on to the Flying Disc craze and built a fake phenomenon and history to fool Uncle Joe.

Joe Stalin would look at the pretty balloons, and not the actual tech, right?

And this fiction was real, or, at least, it really operated. Entire departments. Agencies. Divisions. All bent on studying these fake things made by other departments who thought they were the ones producing the counterintelligence on the UFO phenomenon, but who were actually making propaganda. But compartmentalized. Contained, so it felt real. The people who served in them, believed them. They had to believe them, right? Lots of money got sucked into these projects. HUGE amounts of money. And if these fictions didn't exactly line up? If the facts didn't play out when they were carefully examined? Well, that was just an error in the cover-up, right?

It just gives me chills.

So then, after the AEV leak, the office of the President confirms the story, they apologize for the lives lost in the MAJESTIC counterintelligence op and the money “stolen”. They say that there are no aliens, no Roswell UFO,  no flying discs except the ones operated by the US Air Force since the early 1970s, with test craft going back to the mid 1950s. This culminates with congressional hearings and a big three TV demonstration of the vehicle, and interviews with some scientists working on the math.

We end it on an upbeat note; if this tech didn’t cost what it costs and take as long as it takes to harness, we could change the world for the better for pennies on the dollar. America is working on that, right now. Same old card trick, slightly different shuck and jive.

And…that's how you put the genie back in the bottle…

Go ahead and say it kid. I’m fucking good, right?