The 90s Conspiracy Genre

[Albicacore]

I will start by setting the mood with Anthony's description:

The 90s [conspiracy culture] was light and mist spilling through open doors at night, lights in the skies, spooky pine forests, serious looking men in dark suits.

What I'm talking about here is the conspiracy genre rather than the culture. Bransle's post explains the difference. The culture should also be discussed as well but I would rather focus on the media. 

It came out of a time when major scientific breakthroughs were occurring, especially in space and the body (which are two subjects a lot of stories in this genre are about). The Hubble telescope, the ISS, GPS, the World Wide Web, the Human Genome Project, GMOs, the first cloned animals. All of these were on people's minds at the time. They appeared a lot in popular culture. Like Jurassic Park being about cloning. And there were a lot of theories about these things.

The genre is very much a pre-9/11 thing. It deals extensively with fears of the unknown. It's mysterious. It's romantic. There is a coziness to it beyond just nostalgia:



Here are some of the best works from this genre:

The X-Files



The X-Files is the most influential piece of media in this genre. It is 'The Conspiracy Show'. Anthony explained it better than I can:

Something I've been discussing with people is how the 90s conspiracy culture was such a complete aesthetic, or at least looks like one in retrospect. The X-Files seems like it was able to emerge naturally from what was already there and fill the shoes. The tastes and inclinations of actual conspiracy theorists (typical 90s conspiracy theorists are even regularly somewhat lionised in The X-Files, get to be friends with Moulder, etc) were able to combine with the genuine concerns of the time (rather mild because 90s), the things which actually were popularly talked about underground (urban legends and UFOs, safe but intriguing stuff), and the tone of the 90s (beginnings of darkness and moodiness creeping back into popular culture, early high tech fascinations that were not yet zogged).

Drowned God



While The X-Files is the most influential piece in the genre, Drowned God is the ultimate work. It is a collage of all the most abundant theories in the 90s. It's a complete vision. I highly recommend playing it. It's free here (download the automatic version). 

Further reading:
PH51 thread
Interview

Spriggan



This genre wasn't just confined to America, Japan was involved too. Spriggan is an excellent manga about 'OOParts' with supernatural powers and a group that protects them. It's inspired by Chariots of the Gods and the concept of ancient aliens.

[The Green Groyper]

The main difference between nineties conspiracism and what came after 9/11 is the former was in some sense a fun thing to engage with. Whether you took it seriously or not. The conspiracy genre after 9/11 had an element of neurotic morbidity that made it...unpleasant to immerse oneself in too deeply.

[JohnTrent]

Great thread. I like that you specifically mentioned the PH51 thread on Drowned God. Will look into Spriggan at some point.

In this post I am responding in part to the comments made in the Video Game General thread as well as this one. I hope that some of these statements will be of use here and not just vaguely replying to the posts made in the other.

This may be a case of recency bias but I find that conspiracies today are categorically different from ones in the 90s, or further back. There will always be the devout conspiracist who wishes to emphasize the importance of certain historical topics (Ancient Egypt, The Templars, and Weishaupt's project). Undoubtedly, there are still people who adopt this method of interpretation today, and certain works after 9/11 followed in that tradition. The example I'm thinking about at the moment is S.K. Bain's 9/11 as Mass Ritual, where each fact about the Twin Towers and its collapse can be compared to an esoteric ritual; in Bain's mind, Sirius plays an important role in 9/11. Michael Hoffmann's Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare plays a similar game with the JFK assassination. I am not denying that, as of now, there would still be a ritualistic role in conspiratorial thinking, but the significance seems drawn more to secular society than towards inhuman presences or towards mysticism. From what I've seen so far, the 90s Conspiracy Culture and the 90s Conspiracy Genre have a convergence of many traits. It can involve social phenomena that appears more popular today — looming presence of the United Nations, Bilderberg Group, black helicopters flying over American cities, and subliminal messaging — and more mysterious qualities that fall outside the boundaries. Speaking of subliminal messaging...


I was talking with @PIGSAW awhile back about the X-Files and Twin Peaks, and he mentioned this episode. This is a good example of how, even in something like X Files, the paranormal subjects could be merged with the simply abnormal ones. In this episode, there are two forces at work: one is the use of subliminal messaging through electronics, and the other are chemicals that afflict the person nearby. Through the combination of both forces, those who have been placed under control begin to act violently. There's an amorphous pairing of stories that appear through X-Files that can cater to government-related conspiracies as well as extraterrestrial-related ones. As one might see when you delve into the game manual of Drowned God, a variety of superstitious details and real life details converge together, forming a neat worldview. My impression is that the belief and unbelief was not a consequential factor in 90s Conspiracy Culture/the 90s Conspiracy Genre. One could fuse the question of alien life with the symbol of a Deep State in a film, and the writers involved could experiment with these ideas at will. It seems now that conspiratorial art does not have the freedom it once did in the 90s, becoming a sectarian battle. It is certainly arguable that those who would have written screenplays for shows like X-Files would today be battling "post-truth" or "fake news". The way in which one interacts with conspiracies has changed to the point that you can either be antagonistic towards their existence or adopt them uncritically; the rare few who do not follow either condition are free to revive the Conspiracy Genre without worry.

If I had to explain why this sectarian tendency emerged, I would suggest 9/11 as a plausible cause.

Most who have engaged with the topic are immediately aware of a purely human force at work, reminiscent of the JFK assassination. In both cases, the public is still responding to the event and attempting to compile, usually in isolation, a set of names, institutions, and times to figure out the assassination for themselves. There was a left-wing radio host named Mae Brussell who was, from an ordinary glance, a normal middle-class American woman (though she was twice-divorced). She, like others, had dedicated uninterrupted years of her time to compiling every possible detail of the assassination, grasping at whatever connections she could manage. To some degree, those who responded to 9/11 acted in similar accord; the official records appeared to be too limited in their observations + conclusions, so this requires others to consider all possible parts, from the involvement of other nations to members of US intelligence. I don't think being fascinated by this one topic should necessarily limit a person's creative abilities. They might come away from it unscathed. This video alone serves as a counter-example:




I do however think that it can constrain most people's attention, especially since there are a limited set of explanations one can have for 9/11. The most bizarre ones are the Mass Ritual theory and the Hologram Theory, but even these ones involve human actions or human technologies. The believer in the Mass Ritual Theory could always come away with the conclusion that The Elites are demented and insane enough to believe in mass Masonic rituals, not believing that supernatural forces actually play a role. You could put that up to the test, I suppose, by speaking to such people, but regardless it is always a possible conclusion to make. I'm not going to make too many sweeping claims about conspiracy theorists today because it's an disparate group of people who often are entirely different (Hell, Alex Jones still talks about demons and otherworldly entities). However, there is definitely a portion of people who, having paid close attention to 9/11, care less about aliens, Fortean phenomena, etc. People like David McGowan were one of the first to start reporting an alternate narrative of 9/11, which if you know his work should tell you that the manner of conspiratorial thinking has shifted back over to the Mae Brussell type.

The 90s Conspiracy Genre, then, is an interval where people were able to focus on many different elements for artistic inspiration. It is free reign for experimentation, which is perhaps why it seems so much more utopian and optimistic than today. Those who were within this genre were not hoping to make a documentary or a rebuttal. People could watch these shows or play XCOM without having feeling the overbearing fear of pedophilic insane elites or thinking it's "too far". You'll always have Francis E. Dec characters around but you don't always have moments where artists could work in the Conspiracy Genre without qualms.

[Guest]

Another good addition is Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin.

The plot follows a former psychic who is sent back in time to prevent the apocalypse. Not only does this anime show case a series of different UMA but also time travel, magic, and other things that fit the conspiracy genre. Also this anime is literally set in the 90s.

[Bransle]

Recently I watched the movie Communion, 



It's very insightful about this culture, as it was based on the autobiographical book describing a real experience of someone dealing with an alien abduction by someone (Whitley Strieber) who would also act as screenwriter and close consultant. It's a bit of a silly film - Christopher Walken didn't take the real person he was playing as very seriously and that makes for an hilarious performance, but I can understand why Whitley Strieber was so resentful towards the film.

The movie portraits an average family going through something extraordinary and trying to come to terms with. An interesting facet, and one that is very common for this time of "conspiracy" or "esoteric" culture, is that the frontier between this outside reality and the "underground" side of this one doesn't exist. Whitley's journey is an internal one, but also one related to these foreign beings. There's a lot of similarities in the way the place these creatures dwell in is portrayed and how Twin Peaks's Black Lodge is,



It's a mental palace and also a physical location in the middle of the woods. Logic and time don't work like they do on Earth - it's a place of dance, of creatures of dubious allegiance, of doppelgangers, of important questions and ambiguous answers, were one can get lost forever in just one night. Whitley, like Cooper, ventures into it - unlike Cooper, however, he finds his own peace in there, even when the question of who these aliens are and what they wanted from him remains unanswered. 

You can watch the whole scene in here,



There's a figure in most of this "conspiracy narratives" and related whom I will call The Magician, due to Twin Peaks's poem, the Major Arcana, and a few other associations. "The Magician longs to see a chance between two worlds", he's a man with a feeling for the supernatural and a supernatural willpower which makes him able to pursue it. He's eccentric and unable to understand much of society, but he's not an outcast inside of it. There's a holiness to him. He's very similar, in a way, to a child, and the outer world of secrets and inexplicable phenomena is for him like the world of adults would be for a kid - both in its promise and in its horror. 

The Magician appears on Drowned God ("Like the Magician, you're skillful, and determined", says the Tarot card) as the player character, who is mostly defined by his will: the game also features this sort of outside reality and underground/unconscious one. The journey to find out the truth is a mental one and a physical one at the same time, and very real places you visit are also symbolic and metaphysical ones. In this places, even when "grounded", laws of time and space don't apply - locations are in different time periods at the same time, as well as being two places at the same time or connected to others in ways that wouldn't make sense geographically.

Communion is optimistic in its view of the events, despite them being at the same time deeply traumatic, and compared to rape in the movie. It's the doorstep of something beyond: you're not meant to cross it, but also not meant to be afraid. Strieber reconciles with the monsters that raped him, dances with them, and accepts the extraordinary event that happened to him as part of a giant cosmic event that he doesn't understand. He and his family are again at ease, and Christopher Walken continues being a goofball.

[Albicacore]

This may be a case of recency bias but I find that conspiracies today are categorically different from ones in the 90s, or further back. There will always be the devout conspiracist who wishes to emphasize the importance of certain historical topics (Ancient Egypt, The Templars, and Weishaupt's project). Undoubtedly, there are still people who adopt this method of interpretation today, and certain works after 9/11 followed in that tradition. The example I'm thinking about at the moment is S.K. Bain's 9/11 as Mass Ritual, where each fact about the Twin Towers and its collapse can be compared to an esoteric ritual; in Bain's mind, Sirius plays an important role in 9/11. Michael Hoffmann's Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare plays a similar game with the JFK assassination. I am not denying that, as of now, there would still be a ritualistic role in conspiratorial thinking, but the significance seems drawn more to secular society than towards inhuman presences or towards mysticism. From what I've seen so far, the 90s Conspiracy Culture and the 90s Conspiracy Genre have a convergence of many traits. It can involve social phenomena that appears more popular today — looming presence of the United Nations, Bilderberg Group, black helicopters flying over American cities, and subliminal messaging — and more mysterious qualities that fall outside the boundaries. 

I agree that the 90s Conspiracy Genre is fairly secular. There is still a heavy presence of the supernatural but it uses a secular worldview to explain it all. Like with the Ancient Astronaut theory. Instead of dismissing ancient mythology as just made up, the proponents of the AAT believe that everything that ancient societies believed is true but just misinterpreted. What ancient people thought were gods were actually aliens and the powers they held were actually some sort of advanced technology. The AAT is very compelling. Even though there is a fair amount of confirmation bias it still makes more sense than Mexicans building the pyramids. Libtards get really upset about the AAT. They say its white supremacy and imperialist and whatever. Maybe they are right:



The 90s Conspiracy Genre is about mysteries. Sometimes mysteries of the past with the AAT and more commonly mysteries of the then present. It often deals with more tangible issues like a vindictive deep state government hiding the existence of aliens or experimenting on the public. 

I was talking with @PIGSAW awhile back about the X-Files and Twin Peaks, and he mentioned this episode. This is a good example of how, even in something like X Files, the paranormal subjects could be merged with the simply abnormal ones. In this episode, there are two forces at work: one is the use of subliminal messaging through electronics, and the other are chemicals that afflict the person nearby. Through the combination of both forces, those who have been placed under control begin to act violently. There's an amorphous pairing of stories that appear through X-Files that can cater to government-related conspiracies as well as extraterrestrial-related ones. As one might see when you delve into the game manual of Drowned God, a variety of superstitious details and real life details converge together, forming a neat worldview. My impression is that the belief and unbelief was not a consequential factor in 90s Conspiracy Culture/the 90s Conspiracy Genre. One could fuse the question of alien life with the symbol of a Deep State in a film, and the writers involved could experiment with these ideas at will.

Blood is a great episode. It's very weird. 



Subliminal messages, mind-altering chemicals, and an ex-mailman going postal. 

The best part about the 90s Conspiracy Genre is that it's weird. Even the 'tame' stuff like The X-Files is weird. Weird is good. It used to mean 'having the power to control fate'. 

You are right that the genre is an amalgamation of things. It's a mix of the supernatural with politics and science. It's a union of opposites.

There's a figure in most of this "conspiracy narratives" and related whom I will call The Magician, due to Twin Peaks's poem, the Major Arcana, and a few other associations. "The Magician longs to see a chance between two worlds", he's a man with a feeling for the supernatural and a supernatural willpower which makes him able to pursue it. He's eccentric and unable to understand much of society, but he's not an outcast inside of it. There's a holiness to him. He's very similar, in a way, to a child, and the outer world of secrets and inexplicable phenomena is for him like the world of adults would be for a kid - both in its promise and in its horror.

The Magician appears on Drowned God ("Like the Magician, you're skillful, and determined", says the Tarot card) as the player character, who is mostly defined by his will: the game also features this sort of outside reality and underground/unconscious one. The journey to find out the truth is a mental one and a physical one at the same time, and very real places you visit are also symbolic and metaphysical ones. In this places, even when "grounded", laws of time and space don't apply - locations are in different time periods at the same time, as well as being two places at the same time or connected to others in ways that wouldn't make sense geographically.

Communion is optimistic in its view of the events, despite them being at the same time deeply traumatic, and compared to rape in the movie. It's the doorstep of something beyond: you're not meant to cross it, but also not meant to be afraid. Strieber reconciles with the monsters that raped him, dances with them, and accepts the extraordinary event that happened to him as part of a giant cosmic event that he doesn't understand. He and his family are again at ease, and Christopher Walken continues being a goofball.

This movie looks great. I like how weird it is. Walken's dialogue is so weird its awesome. 

That's a great point about The Magician. Archetypes are fairly important in the genre. Especially in the more supernatural stories. 

Drowned God is a union of opposites. Places and people exist as a combination of things because in the world of Drowned God, everything is related to the grand lie that is human history. Ideas, people, and places meld together when they are metaphysically close and become physically close. It all makes sense. Harry Horse was sincere. 


On another note I've noticed the Swiss are very interested in aliens.



H.R. Giger most famously.



Both Erich von Däniken and Tsoukalos the Ancient Aliens guy are Swiss born.

And Billy Meier who is an UFO religious leader and a very interesting character.

Meier's prophecies repeatedly blame Jews (whom he refers to as "gypsies") for future atrocities.

It's somewhat related.

[JohnTrent]

Recently I watched the movie Communion, 

It's very insightful about this culture, as it was based on the autobiographical book describing a real experience of someone dealing with an alien abduction by someone (Whitley Strieber) who would also act as screenwriter and close consultant. It's a bit of a silly film - Christopher Walken didn't take the real person he was playing as very seriously and that makes for an hilarious performance, but I can understand why Whitley Strieber was so resentful towards the film.

Ah, I saw that movie too. I was planning to read Strieber's book at some point to get a different angle, since Walken's performance (as you mentioned) is immediately off-kilter from the beginning. I mentally tend to compare the scenes in Communion with the one in Fire in the Sky:



In the earlier scenes where Walken/Strieber wasn't as reconciled with the contactee experience, there's a subtler form of fear before the explicit "rape". The effect is dulled a little since Walken does not portray a credible character from the start, but the sudden intrusions of the extraterrestrials evokes mystery and dread.



It straddles the line between collective hallucination and reality, the participants unsure about which option to choose. Most accounts about meeting extraterrestrials tend to rely upon a dreamlike setting: it resembles sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucination, or simply occurs during the nightly hours. It's the time when the standard stimuli of real life (e.g., chirping of birds, sounds of distant moving cars, active conversations happening outside of the home) are reduced. This may be why there's such a strong connection between owls and UFO-related phenomena.

"The Magician longs to see a chance between two worlds", he's a man with a feeling for the supernatural and a supernatural willpower which makes him able to pursue it. He's eccentric and unable to understand much of society, but he's not an outcast inside of it. There's a holiness to him. He's very similar, in a way, to a child, and the outer world of secrets and inexplicable phenomena is for him like the world of adults would be for a kid - both in its promise and in its horror. 

The Magician appears on Drowned God ("Like the Magician, you're skillful, and determined", says the Tarot card) as the player character, who is mostly defined by his will: the game also features this sort of outside reality and underground/unconscious one. The journey to find out the truth is a mental one and a physical one at the same time, and very real places you visit are also symbolic and metaphysical ones. In this places, even when "grounded", laws of time and space don't apply - locations are in different time periods at the same time, as well as being two places at the same time or connected to others in ways that wouldn't make sense geographically.

Great connection. The image of the Magician is very profound. Like with the Magician, who must struggle to become adept (c.f. Mozart's Magic Flute: "Oh, eternal night! When will you disappear? When will daylight come?"), many who engage with the subject of extraterrestrials may find themselves deceived and misdirected. Usually this is due to material causes.



The book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception is centered around what Vallee thinks to be infiltrators of the UFO community:

But the current proliferation of spurious material that confuses the real issues bothers me. It should be analyzed and exposed for what it is: at best, a dangerous delusion, the germ of new cults that would extinguish the light of reason and free inquiry; at worst, an attempt to draw attention away from the real nature of the UFO phenomenon, a deliberate effort to drive serious research into the quicksands of speculation.

Organizations with mysterious sources of money are now springing up with dozens of local chapters all over the United States and Canada, and indeed, all over the world. They hypnotize witnesses. They hold seminars and conferences; they edit expensive books and video-tapes; some even run their own presses. Their activity blurs the real nature of the phenomenon and complicates its study. It adds another factor of confusion to the bewilderment of sincere witnesses who wonder what they have seen and who are looking for a helping hand.

Those who spend time in the field—analyzing traces left by the UFO phenomenon, interviewing witnesses, and assembling a study of the underlying patters—have now stumbled on evidence of a quite different sort: some of the most remarkable sightings are actually complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered for our benefit. The witnesses are merely the victims and the instruments rather than the authors of the hoax. Who is perpetrating such deliberate fabrications and what is their goal? There is no single answer to this question because there is no single source to human fantasy, no single reason for the deviousness of those military or civilian agencies that are spending our money to conduct secret psychological experiments—as the mind control projects of the Sixties and Seventies have abundantly demonstrated.[...]

This bears emphasizing: some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public. And some cases simply did not happen. The stories about them, numerous rumors of crashed saucers and burned aliens, were not so much the result of delusions as the product of deception: rumors deliberately planted in the eager minds of gullible believers to hide more real facts about which it was felt that the public and the scientific community had no "need to know."

Richard Doty is mentioned in the book, who later appears in the documentary Mirage Men about essentially the same topic: men who are attempting to deceive certain individuals about the existence of aliens and alien aircraft.



You will notice in the documentary that Richard Doty has an incredibly unique physiognomy, one that's very repellent to the eyes. [EDIT Note: Also, his surname is apparently of "unknown genealogical origin", which could explain the uniqueness]. He is a person who, when recorded, gloats about making certain people insane through his deception. Those who believed in UFOs, after interacting with him, would suffer from acute paranoia after what he told them. Usually it had to do with some malevolent extraterrestrial presence, also giving them the notion that they were specially chosen by the government to receive certain classified info about UFOs. Now, Jacques Vallee would be invulnerable to these types of deceptive scenarios because he did not believe in the regular consensus about aliens; similar to John Keel, he thought they were occupying a different dimension from us, or maybe were a type of life-form that our current science is unable to comprehend.

It is curious to observe that even scientifically trained researchers who accept the idea of multiple universes, or the few ufologists who understand the idea that space-time could be folded to allow almost instantaneous travel from one point of our universe to another, still cling emotionally to the notion that any nonhuman form of consciousness is necessarily from outer space.

In this respect my ufologist friends are making the very same error they denounce so strongly among SETI researchers: they are only willing to accept aliens that originate very far away from us.

The simple truth is this: if there is a form of life and consciousness that operates on properties of space-time we have not yet discovered, then it does not have to be extraterrestrial. It could come from any place and any time, even from our own environment. It could certainly come from another solar system in our galaxy, or from another galaxy. But it could also coexist with us and remain undetected. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time itself. They could even be fractal beings. The earth could be their home port.

---

I agree that the 90s Conspiracy Genre is fairly secular. There is still a heavy presence of the supernatural but it uses a secular worldview to explain it all. Like with the Ancient Astronaut theory. Instead of dismissing ancient mythology as just made up, the proponents of the AAT believe that everything that ancient societies believed is true but just misinterpreted. What ancient people thought were gods were actually aliens and the powers they held were actually some sort of advanced technology. The AAT is very compelling. Even though there is a fair amount of confirmation bias it still makes more sense than Mexicans building the pyramids. Libtards get really upset about the AAT. They say its white supremacy and imperialist and whatever. Maybe they are right:

A part of what has intrigued me about the Vallee/Keel ultraterrestrial believers — meaning those who theorize aliens to occupy a dimension or are an unknown lifeform that has existed among us for our entire history — is that it seeks to solve a similar issue to something like Julian Jaynes and his bicameral consciousness theory: why did the men of antiquity "hallucinate", and what does it imply about the hallucinating madmen of today?

One of the most interesting problems in hallucinations is their relation to conscious thought. If schizophrenia is partly a return to the bicameral mind, and if this is antithetical to ordinary consciousness (which it need not be in all cases), one might expect hallucinations to be the replacement of ‘thoughts.’ In some patients at least, this is how hallucinations first appear. Sometimes, the voices seem to begin as thoughts which then transform themselves into vague whispers, which then gradually become louder and more authoritative. In other cases, patients feel the beginning of voices “as if their thoughts were dividing.” In mild cases, the voices may even be under the control of conscious attention as are ‘thoughts.’ [...]
Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories and knowledge than the patient himself — even as did the gods of antiquity.

Of course, like the meeting with ultraterrestrial or mysterious beings, the return to the bicameral mind sends a person into similar states of despair and perplexity:

Most of us spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia.

The rift between the ancient and the modern leads contemplative men to seek out what guiding causes once thrived in past, what impelled Man's mastery over nature. I will link this video because it's how I interpret the Ultraterrestrial Theory. It was written by Mark Frost:



AAT seems to me like a similar theory insofar as it attempts to explain the events of ancient history through a force outside our immediate knowledge.

Blood is a great episode. It's very weird.

Subliminal messages, mind-altering chemicals, and an ex-mailman going postal. 

The best part about the 90s Conspiracy Genre is that it's weird. Even the 'tame' stuff like The X-Files is weird. Weird is good. It used to mean 'having the power to control fate'. 

You are right that the genre is an amalgamation of things. It's a mix of the supernatural with politics and science. It's a union of opposites.

Exactly. The X Files and Twin Peaks are very unafraid to pursue these matters. I don't know if this is 100% true but I remember hearing that the original plan for a 1990s Season Three of Twin Peaks was supposed to have Major Briggs as the main character, making Twin Peaks a connected anthology of sorts. X Files is basically an altered form of that vision. What troubles me today is the thought that people trying to write similar stories have thought-terminating obstacles in their way. Something might prevent them from creating a real weird story with its own internal logic, or someone with greater authority in the business would actively prevent them from realizing the story if it did come out right. The 2010s-2020s Conspiracy Culture is definitely, as Anthony said in the Video Game General, more ugly. That being said, I still can imagine possibilities where weird fiction could be crafted out of our present material. The question is if people actually want to see it anymore, or if they would prefer mediocrity.

I will be watching X Files now .

[Lohengrin]

From The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.

Conspiracy, or rather, this whole genre I believe to exceed beyond the simple term "Conspiracy" or "Conspiracy Theory", has always been preoccupied with mystery, the pagan unknown, the darkness, that which has yet to receive illumination and escaped conventional rationality... for now.  I speak of 'pagan' not merely in the religious sense but rather the setting to which many of these events and narratives transpire; the rustic countryside of scant human presence, disappearances abound and that which occurs cannot be held to the same scrutiny as those in more civilised environments.  Expansive farmlands, empty highways, forests, the darkest jungles, mountains, caves, Antarctica, the ocean, and of course, outer space.  Crop circles, abductions, uncontacted tribes of dubious connection to the human genome, and especially the night and its darkness.  That which cannot be verified with what we have.  Lovecraft and his circle wrote extensively on this same phenomenon, only earlier in the century rather than the end, largely drawing on the same ideas that inspired those more close to us, even before the diffusion of aliens into mainstream popular culture.

It came out of a time when major scientific breakthroughs were occurring, especially in space and the body (which are two subjects a lot of stories in this genre are about). The Hubble telescope, the ISS, GPS, the World Wide Web, the Human Genome Project, GMOs, the first cloned animals. All of these were on people's minds at the time. They appeared a lot in popular culture. Like Jurassic Park being about cloning. And there were a lot of theories about these things.

Cursory reading and knowledge of the genealogy of influences may show many such conventions or tropes Lovecraft and his circle wrote about to have originated in Edison's Conquest of Mars by minor astronomer Garret Serviss, an unauthorised sequel to Wells' War of the Worlds, where it is discovered in the book's narrative that the Martians constructed ancient monuments and transported entire populations around, among many other firsts for space science fiction.  I don't believe him the origin of the ideas, but he's certainly among the first to write down what people were starting to think in the 1890's against the backdrop of advances in archaeology and science, leading to the environment Lovecraft had written in.  The exploration and surveying of Africa, discovery and guesswork of ruins, the deciphering of ancient scripts such as hieroglyphics and cuneiform, globalisation and early exposure to these foreign cultures, research into the origins of Indo-Europeans or Aryans, incandescent light bulbs, the world was evolving so fast.  Exposure to oriental philosophies sparking religious movements such as the aforementioned Theosophy, Thelema, mystics and clairvoyants such as Edgar Cayce, the profusion of discussion on lost civilisations and even continents, such as Atlantis and Lemuria, where many believed to be the origin of mankind.



Back to Lovecraft, the figures which he writes about defy most conventional and rational logic.  What is Cthulhu?  What are the shoggoths?  Why are there aliens capable of flying through the interstellar medium, so on and so forth.  To a resolute sceptic and rationalist such as Lovecraft, this disturbs him in the most profound manner, and yet intrigues him to no end.  We haven't the means to elucidate such beings, they are truly supernatural.  They are awesome, majestic, grand, and in the classical sense, demonic.



A kernel of truth may be found in the 'TradCath' insinuation "Aliens are Demons", only with the term stripped of primarily negative connotations as per the original daemon loaned from antique Greek.  I believe David Icke hit the nail on the head positing a connection between aliens and mythological fairy tales.  Alien encounters can be gleamed as modern iterations of classical encounters with entities such as fairies, elves, daemons, djinn, shedim, youkai, what have you.  All of which operate in dark or liminal spaces away from the prying light of the Sun.  They may not even inhabit the same dimension we do.  Their motives are unknown and cannot be categorised into moral paradigms of 'good' and 'evil', rather like actual beings you have to make sense of.  Obviously, they are not human, or any terrestrial being that we know of, but they are intelligent like us, if not more so.  And that makes them especially intimidating for some.


(Note: While writing this JohnTrent had already beaten me to this video though I might as well say my piece on it)

This is one film from 1993 that I'd like to share, inspired by a real encounter.  An excerpt of an infamous later scene where one of the characters is on board the aliens' ship where they perform invasive experimentation on him in what looks like a child's nightmare of a dentist encounter.  Nightmare, night, night.  This man is being symbolically raped with miscellaneous fluids resembling septic waste pumped down his pried-open orifice.  We can surmise the aliens would experiment on us the same way we do them (Area 51 conspiracies) or any other organism, a primary fear being that the aliens may not hold any moral stipulations against live experimentation, much like actual interactions between fairies, elves, whatnot towards humans.  Though, we don't entirely know what they're after.



No one seems to have uploaded the full scene so I may as well link to an earlier part.  Doesn't this all look very Giger?  Giger too was influenced largely by his own nightmares, in addition to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.  Incessantly mortified, yet in awe of what had been revealed.





What majestic, sublime beings they are, truly.  And what of their chariots, their noble steeds?






Don't these look oddly familiar?





"Bible-accurate angels!!!"

If I were Anno I would have seen to connect the Angels in some way to the aforementioned preexisting notions of daemons.

As for Modern Conspiracy Culture, much of this has been sidelined in favour of ruminations on the Evil Government and some cosmic horror story where Saturn is evil, the Earth is flat, the moon is fake, 5G towers fry children's brains, and liberals who worship the Devil rape and eat kids at a third-rate pizza shop.  Oh, and every decision that has ever been made, down to your masturbating in a public restroom, had already been foreseen and planned by the shady Illuminati and RAND Corporation in fulfilment of their goals.  There's no mystery to be had any longer.  Of course, this is largely due to Western governments becoming more overt in their hostility towards their host population, and thus it is natural for us to react in this manner.  Jews are genetically predisposed towards molesting and eating children, this is verified fact and has been observed countless times across history, so it's only fitting that Pizzagate is a modern reiteration of medieval blood libel conspiracies.  Again, these accusations are largely true, inasmuch that the world we live in is ugly and hostile to the senses.  Of all people to capture this angle, I believe A. Wyatt Mann, Alex Jones, and David Dees to be among the best at displaying such horrors, particularly Dees whom I adore, and my hero PIGSAW expounds more upon in the Art thread.

For those who continue harping on about alien encounters, discussion hasn't evolved much beyond what had already been firmly established by the 1990's.  Largely old guys and female mystics continuing to tread the ground which had been laid by Zecharia Sitchin(Jew), Immanuel Velikovsky(Jew), Billy Meier(German), Erich von Däniken(German), and David Icke(English).  Of particular interest to me is stuff like exopolitics.org and others, which posit that space Aryans from Aldebaran abduct people and are conscripted into super soldiers not unlike the SPARTAN program from Halo to fight the Reptilians.  Of course, you may be familiar with Aldebaran as established by primarily German figures such as Axel Stoll, Jan van Helsing, Wilhelm Landig, to be the homeland of the Aryan race.  I firmly believe in the coming days that Leftists will exclaim that White people be aliens n shieet as an evolutionary abnormality as we don't seem to be legally indigenous anywhere.  Nazi breakaway states and colonies are another common theme that's only gotten more popular in the decades since, with interpretations from both political sides.  Leftists generally believe any instance of racism in America is because of Operation Paperclip and Nazis still run the elite corporations that unanimously support Trump, and the Republican party program is lifted wholesale from the NSDAP.  Conservatives simply believe Paperclip gave the US government an impetus to exert more authoritarian power, instead of the obvious culprit of Communist infiltration and ZOG.




Very friendly people, aren't they?  I accidentally pressed the ENTER key earlier than expected and am bored from writing so I'll take a break here, I may have more to write on later.  Perhaps on more media.

[Guest]

Recently I watched the movie Communion, 

It's very insightful about this culture, as it was based on the autobiographical book describing a real experience of someone dealing with an alien abduction by someone (Whitley Strieber) who would also act as screenwriter and close consultant. It's a bit of a silly film - Christopher Walken didn't take the real person he was playing as very seriously and that makes for an hilarious performance, but I can understand why Whitley Strieber was so resentful towards the film.

Ah, I saw that movie too. I was planning to read Strieber's book at some point to get a different angle, since Walken's performance (as you mentioned) is immediately off-kilter from the beginning. I mentally tend to compare the scenes in Communion with the one in Fire in the Sky:



In the earlier scenes where Walken/Strieber wasn't as reconciled with the contactee experience, there's a subtler form of fear before the explicit "rape". The effect is dulled a little since Walken does not portray a credible character from the start, but the sudden intrusions of the extraterrestrials evokes mystery and dread.



It straddles the line between collective hallucination and reality, the participants unsure about which option to choose. Most accounts about meeting extraterrestrials tend to rely upon a dreamlike setting: it resembles sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucination, or simply occurs during the nightly hours. It's the time when the standard stimuli of real life (e.g., chirping of birds, sounds of distant moving cars, active conversations happening outside of the home) are reduced. This may be why there's such a strong connection between owls and UFO-related phenomena.

"The Magician longs to see a chance between two worlds", he's a man with a feeling for the supernatural and a supernatural willpower which makes him able to pursue it. He's eccentric and unable to understand much of society, but he's not an outcast inside of it. There's a holiness to him. He's very similar, in a way, to a child, and the outer world of secrets and inexplicable phenomena is for him like the world of adults would be for a kid - both in its promise and in its horror. 

The Magician appears on Drowned God ("Like the Magician, you're skillful, and determined", says the Tarot card) as the player character, who is mostly defined by his will: the game also features this sort of outside reality and underground/unconscious one. The journey to find out the truth is a mental one and a physical one at the same time, and very real places you visit are also symbolic and metaphysical ones. In this places, even when "grounded", laws of time and space don't apply - locations are in different time periods at the same time, as well as being two places at the same time or connected to others in ways that wouldn't make sense geographically.

Great connection. The image of the Magician is very profound. Like with the Magician, who must struggle to become adept (c.f. Mozart's Magic Flute: "Oh, eternal night! When will you disappear? When will daylight come?"), many who engage with the subject of extraterrestrials may find themselves deceived and misdirected. Usually this is due to material causes.



The book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception is centered around what Vallee thinks to be infiltrators of the UFO community:

But the current proliferation of spurious material that confuses the real issues bothers me. It should be analyzed and exposed for what it is: at best, a dangerous delusion, the germ of new cults that would extinguish the light of reason and free inquiry; at worst, an attempt to draw attention away from the real nature of the UFO phenomenon, a deliberate effort to drive serious research into the quicksands of speculation.

Organizations with mysterious sources of money are now springing up with dozens of local chapters all over the United States and Canada, and indeed, all over the world. They hypnotize witnesses. They hold seminars and conferences; they edit expensive books and video-tapes; some even run their own presses. Their activity blurs the real nature of the phenomenon and complicates its study. It adds another factor of confusion to the bewilderment of sincere witnesses who wonder what they have seen and who are looking for a helping hand.

Those who spend time in the field—analyzing traces left by the UFO phenomenon, interviewing witnesses, and assembling a study of the underlying patters—have now stumbled on evidence of a quite different sort: some of the most remarkable sightings are actually complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered for our benefit. The witnesses are merely the victims and the instruments rather than the authors of the hoax. Who is perpetrating such deliberate fabrications and what is their goal? There is no single answer to this question because there is no single source to human fantasy, no single reason for the deviousness of those military or civilian agencies that are spending our money to conduct secret psychological experiments—as the mind control projects of the Sixties and Seventies have abundantly demonstrated.[...]

This bears emphasizing: some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public. And some cases simply did not happen. The stories about them, numerous rumors of crashed saucers and burned aliens, were not so much the result of delusions as the product of deception: rumors deliberately planted in the eager minds of gullible believers to hide more real facts about which it was felt that the public and the scientific community had no "need to know."

Richard Doty is mentioned in the book, who later appears in the documentary Mirage Men about essentially the same topic: men who are attempting to deceive certain individuals about the existence of aliens and alien aircraft.



You will notice in the documentary that Richard Doty has an incredibly unique physiognomy, one that's very repellent to the eyes.  [EDIT Note: Also, his surname is apparently of "unknown genealogical origin", which could explain the uniqueness]. He is a person who, when recorded, gloats about making certain people insane through his deception. Those who believed in UFOs, after interacting with him, would suffer from acute paranoia after what he told them. Usually it had to do with some malevolent extraterrestrial presence, also giving them the notion that they were specially chosen by the government to receive certain classified info about UFOs. Now, Jacques Vallee would be invulnerable to these types of deceptive scenarios because he did not believe in the regular consensus about aliens; similar to John Keel, he thought they were occupying a different dimension from us, or maybe were a type of life-form that our current science is unable to comprehend.

It is curious to observe that even scientifically trained researchers who accept the idea of multiple universes, or the few ufologists who understand the idea that space-time could be folded to allow almost instantaneous travel from one point of our universe to another, still cling emotionally to the notion that any nonhuman form of consciousness is necessarily from outer space.

In this respect my ufologist friends are making the very same error they denounce so strongly among SETI researchers: they are only willing to accept aliens that originate very far away from us.

The simple truth is this: if there is a form of life and consciousness that operates on properties of space-time we have not yet discovered, then it does not have to be extraterrestrial. It could come from any place and any time, even from our own environment. It could certainly come from another solar system in our galaxy, or from another galaxy. But it could also coexist with us and remain undetected. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time itself. They could even be fractal beings. The earth could be their home port.

---

I agree that the 90s Conspiracy Genre is fairly secular. There is still a heavy presence of the supernatural but it uses a secular worldview to explain it all. Like with the Ancient Astronaut theory. Instead of dismissing ancient mythology as just made up, the proponents of the AAT believe that everything that ancient societies believed is true but just misinterpreted. What ancient people thought were gods were actually aliens and the powers they held were actually some sort of advanced technology. The AAT is very compelling. Even though there is a fair amount of confirmation bias it still makes more sense than Mexicans building the pyramids. Libtards get really upset about the AAT. They say its white supremacy and imperialist and whatever. Maybe they are right:

A part of what has intrigued me about the Vallee/Keel ultraterrestrial believers — meaning those who theorize aliens to occupy a dimension or are an unknown lifeform that has existed among us for our entire history — is that it seeks to solve a similar issue to something like Julian Jaynes and his bicameral consciousness theory: why did the men of antiquity "hallucinate", and what does it imply about the hallucinating madmen of today?

One of the most interesting problems in hallucinations is their relation to conscious thought. If schizophrenia is partly a return to the bicameral mind, and if this is antithetical to ordinary consciousness (which it need not be in all cases), one might expect hallucinations to be the replacement of ‘thoughts.’ In some patients at least, this is how hallucinations first appear. Sometimes, the voices seem to begin as thoughts which then transform themselves into vague whispers, which then gradually become louder and more authoritative. In other cases, patients feel the beginning of voices “as if their thoughts were dividing.” In mild cases, the voices may even be under the control of conscious attention as are ‘thoughts.’ [...]
Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories and knowledge than the patient himself — even as did the gods of antiquity.

Of course, like the meeting with ultraterrestrial or mysterious beings, the return to the bicameral mind sends a person into similar states of despair and perplexity:

Most of us spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia.

The rift between the ancient and the modern leads contemplative men to seek out what guiding causes once thrived in past, what impelled Man's mastery over nature. I will link this video because it's how I interpret the Ultraterrestrial Theory. It was written by Mark Frost:



AAT seems to me like a similar theory insofar as it attempts to explain the events of ancient history through a force outside our immediate knowledge.

Blood is a great episode. It's very weird.

Subliminal messages, mind-altering chemicals, and an ex-mailman going postal. 

The best part about the 90s Conspiracy Genre is that it's weird. Even the 'tame' stuff like The X-Files is weird. Weird is good. It used to mean 'having the power to control fate'. 

You are right that the genre is an amalgamation of things. It's a mix of the supernatural with politics and science. It's a union of opposites.

Exactly. The X Files and Twin Peaks are very unafraid to pursue these matters. I don't know if this is 100% true but I remember hearing that the original plan for a 1990s Season Three of Twin Peaks was supposed to have Major Briggs as the main character, making Twin Peaks a connected anthology of sorts. X Files is basically an altered form of that vision. What troubles me today is the thought that people trying to write similar stories have thought-terminating obstacles in their way. Something might prevent them from creating a real weird story with its own internal logic, or someone with greater authority in the business would actively prevent them from realizing the story if it did come out right. The 2010s-2020s Conspiracy Culture is definitely, as Anthony said in the Video Game General, more ugly. That being said, I still can imagine possibilities where weird fiction could be crafted out of our present material. The question is if people actually want to see it anymore, or if they would prefer mediocrity.

I will be watching X Files now .

Just taking a cursory glance at images of Doty, I can see exactly why he is so physically repulsive. He resembles a typical "grey", with the recessed chin, large, watery eyes, strangely lipless mouth, and general facial structure. I could see him being used as a model for one of those Sumerian idols with obscenely enlarged, detailed eyes.

[JohnTrent]

Just taking a cursory glance at images of Doty, I can see exactly why he is so physically repulsive. He resembles a typical "grey", with the recessed chin, large, watery eyes, strangely lipless mouth, and general facial structure. I could see him being used as a model for one of those Sumerian idols with obscenely enlarged, detailed eyes.

Many have commented before about the appearance of eyes in our time — that they are not sharp enough, that they do not retain a piercing appearance — but Doty's eyes are striking for a different reason. His eyes are not sharp but probing: the stare is not completely empty, there is life expressed through them, yet they are detached. The image I shared has a quality of self-restraint to it. Perhaps that image is too obvious of an example, so here's one when he was younger.



Here he has a head of hair, a mustache, and generally less definition. The picture isn't close enough to capture any freckles or marks. The stare is still mostly unchanged. It looks as if he is making judgments about the cameraman. It's the kind of expression you would want for an interrogator.



This is the youngest photo I could find of him (I did not search too strenuously) from a newspaper announcing his entry into the Air Force. It's also the most normal one so far, and doesn't really resemble the previous photos shared. Make of it what you will.

I did not want to stress it in my original post but you are right in pointing out the associations to grey aliens and the Sumerian idols. A lot of his photos aren't ominous, per se, but the features are unique enough to remind you of those things.

[Albicacore]

https://archive.org/details/richard-horn...s/mode/2up

This provides some backstory to Drowned God. 

The game was commissioned before the X-Files, suddenly what had seemed a left field minority interest was propelled into $3 million dollar flagship for Inscape.

There are a lot of interesting details in these letters. It's worth reading if you are at all interested. The second letter is particularly interesting.