3/24/04 8:14:37 AM Pacific Standard Time

Dear Kent,

I don't have time this morning, but it might surprise you to learn that I have heard from very sound sources that you might find that you have more in common with the some of the folks running the government's UFO program than you would assume.  I've been told that lying at the heart of what motivates these guys is some sort of long-standing (we're talking thousands of years of passed-down secret tradition here, flowing right into the prosaic hallways of Langley, VA and Dayton, OH) quasi-religious notion that we are connected to (and perhaps controlled in some overarching sense) by one or more ET cultures.  These elitist assholes regard themselves as the Keepers of the Flame, so to speak.  You would have thought this sort of shit would have died with Ezekiel or whatever, and not have a chance for survival in the Modern Age, but apparently not.  The idea seems to be that the ultimate elites in most countries have some version of this outlook, which is closely guarded, but which explains a great deal of the otherwise irrational behavior on the subject.  And, yes indeedee, they have no desire for the rest of us to get the notion that these guys are nothing but a bunch of Quisling caretakers for ET overlords . . . might give the cud-chewers ideas about storming the government house and terminating the agreement.  At the very least, it might undermine governmental authority in a more subtle way, with many of the same detriments to their power as violent revolution, only without the bloodshed.  In fact, there is a Brookings report that says just that (a rare show of the ankle by the elite, who must have assumed that none of cud-chewers reads Brookings reports - of course, they did classify it for a time, like the Robertson Panel report which said the same thing).

My friend who is alum of the UFO program said as much.  In fact, it was that weirdness in the motivation of the folks at the top that was part of her motivation to separate from the program and go back to "normal life."  Since she told me all of that, I've always had this image of cabalistic meetings deep in the Langley CIA headquarters, or at Wright Patterson USAFB or at the Battelle Institute, with the guys entering a secret room done over in an ancient Egyptian motif, wearing robes and burning incense to Amun-Ra or some damned thing.  It's hard to imagine that there really is some old tradition underlying what we take to be our modern institutions, but it is hard to square all of the other squelching nonsense that goes on without such a secret society rationale.

The more you probe into it, the weirder it gets.