Friday Nights and Conspiracy Theories
I'm sitting in the dark of the junk room – sometimes humorously referred to as the “study” – with some quiet music playing, all the screens nearby switched off, and a full screen text editor called “WriteMonkey” on the laptop – to prevent me from becoming distracted by anything and everything. I am my own worst enemy. I completely understand why George R R Martin writes in a DOS word processor on a computer that only has Wordstar installed on it.
I wrote 50,000 words in November last year in 13 days. I used an 18 year old iMac with an old copy of Scrivener installed on it. The old iMac really isn't much good at anything else. The funny thing? I wrote a good proportion of the words during lunchtimes at work in a web based text editor called “Writer”, invented by a company called “Big Huge Labs”.
One day I'll have a go at writing something of substance – I just find this head-emptying journalling thing easy. I don't really have to plan, think, or make much sense – I just empty my head into the keyboard.
I didn't set out to write about writing again. I'll stop.
It's the end of the week!
I just watched the USA women's football team beat France. I would love to have been a fly-on-the-wall in the Whitehouse, especially after the second goal. I've never seen a grown man as obviously intimidated as Donald Trump is by Megan Rapinoe.
My eldest daughter asked earlier what we might be doing this weekend. After working full time for a few months, she's starting to realise that weekends are not to be wasted. I suggested going to London to see the Manga exhibition at the British Museum, but it's a private exhibition and therefore costs money. Once you add in the cost of getting to London and back it becomes an expensive day out. We already have tickets to return to “Hyper Japan” in July. Perhaps I'll talk her into a trip to the book shop in town.
(note to self – I do NOT need to buy any more books – the “to read” pile next to the bed is becoming dangerously unstable – if it fell over, it could kill somebody)
I spent an hour earlier watching the Robert Lazar documentary on Netflix. When I was younger I read all manner of conspiracy theory books, and in the early days of the internet scoured usenet for information on UFOs, secret bases, and secret histories. Of course as you get older you become more cynical – less willing to accept any new information without validation and verification. Bob Lazar always kind of flew in the face of that though.
If you've never heard the story before, Robert Lazar is the reason you know the name “Area 51”. He blew the whistle on the existence of the base in 1989, and the supposed reverse-engineering of alien spacecraft there. Nobody ever really got to the bottom of what motivated him to go public, and very few believed any of his claims anyway. Plausible denial won out, and the world forgot about him.
Here's the thing though – thirty years later, Lazar has started to tell his story – and in the intervening years the details he described in 1989 – things he couldn't possibly have made-up – have been proven accurate. Gravity has been observed to be a wave. The existence of the S4 facility at Papoose Lake has been admitted, the viability of the substance on the periodic table known as “Element 115” as a fuel source has been confirmed. Even the hand scanners used for entry into the high security facilities (that people laughed about) have been proven to exist. One thing after another, for years.
I wonder if there are any other examples in history of whistleblowers being discredited for decades before being proven correct?
I think perhaps the most intriguing part of the story (to me) is that at least one of the craft Lazar described being reverse engineered at S4 was recovered from an archeological dig – it had been here for a very, very long time.