Conundrums In Cognitive Dissonance "Part II"

Conundrums In 
Cognitive Dissonance ... 
Part II of II

by Alfred Lehmberg

            Last issue we explored why candidate astronauts can't see UFOs, that hypnotism can work in reverse, and how 25 or 30 professional people, some genuine scientists and their intelligent wives, used cognitive dissonance to massage an uncomfortable personal reality back into uneasy control.  We pick up at the Ash Creek flying model field in Northern California located at co-ords 40 degrees 25 minutes 26.03 seconds North by 122 degrees 10 minutes 7.85 seconds West... Find it on Google Earth.

I observed the odd thing in the sky above the flying field and didn't shout or jump, but nudged my nephew Mason... "Hey there, Mace . . . what's that about"?  I quietly pointed out the anomalous object flying languidly South around 45 degrees elevation to our east.

Mason looked, his mouth fell open, and he called out to his Mother, who got right up and even took a decisive step in its direction as if to see it closer, still.

The attention to the first appearance of the object spread like an airborne virus and soon everyone was looking at this apparition of the highly strange.  All other activity stopped. I believe I recall one guy losing his feather-weight rubber model to the distraction.

The UFO is flying slow, too slow my guess, to be a jet or plane. It floated along like a balloon but against the prevailing wind, at first enchantingly confounding those watching. It looked like a BB held at arms length, but squash it a tad flatter—and make it bright white.  Flying south in a peculiar nose up attitude, it coasted by looking like a TIC-TAC rather fat in the middle but tapered on the ends.  Then it drifted out of sight, though seeming to make a very slow, very wide, turn to its left and East. 

Picture the object flying in a huge circle, and some distance outside that big circle to the West the east-looking observer only gets to view a tiny arc.  The turn was barely perceptible.  Big circle.

There was general amazement.  There was, "...What the hell is that"?  No one mentioned UFOs.  Sorrowfully, at that point I was an "apologist ufologist" and still a little embarrassed by my newfound ufological interest. I kept my own silence.  

Someone mentioned—"Aircraft"! Others offered: "Blimp." I whispered to Mason that I thought it was, decidedly, not what was conjectured by the crowd.

Well, the *thing* flew by again, for the second time of FIVE times that it would make its apparent circuit, and fewer people watched it sail ephemerally by. The third time fewer still looked up to wonder what it was; the fourth was even less than that — the fifth, just me, because... how can one not look, I'd suppose...

Interview these persons and ask them why they stopped looking. Most would not even remember, I suspect.  Cognitive dissonance (1), remember, provides for the memory adjustment of those things disrupting one's piece of mind or status quo.  

But there's a problem with Cognitive Dissonance, reader.  While it may be true that a little might contrive to keep one from going crazy, a continued use, or just a little bit more of same can drive a person no-pants and wall-crawling insane!  Our society is psychotic to a degree already, I suspect, because of its decided over-application of the Cognitive Dissonance mechanism with regard to UFOs... and other things.

See, a UFO is an unwelcome distraction  to these people from their "personal fable." This is a fable reinforced with the models they bring out to fly. These are are representations of things we Human beings, only, fly up there in the crystal air... ...This includes everything from lost rubber powered featherweights to aging space shuttles...  The preceding assumption regarding who-flies-what is a likely falsehood.

The ETIs conjectured discount all that, see?  They invalidate a lot of twitchy presumptions, assumptions, and resource consumptions cognitively lugged by infant humankind, too, I'm betting.  Moreover, these intellectual fallacies regarding our corporeal and intellectual "singularity" in the cosmos may prove to be irrelevant and invalidated items of psychological baggage imposed upon our own futures... imposed entirely of ourselves!  Out of that intellectual disjunction must come the imperative to preclude even the memory of seeing a UFO? 

I suspect so.  See?  Even affected perception of our hoped for UFO-less-ness is the default "reality," reader, where perception, howsoever flawed, is the reality.

I'll make my own presumptions, thank you very much.  The craft that flew that fateful day was not contrived by humanity. Human beings didn't sand the fuselage, or build it with thin sheets of fresh smelling balsa or toxic smelling and exotic composites. They did not spin the wooden or plastic prop they bought at the local hobby shop.  Instead, they were threatened by what they did not control; they were unable to countenance what was not their own construction. 

Where do we learn this cowardice?  How do we justify our betrayal of our own humanity... fail to avail ourselves of a future looming with the greatest promise of potential, EVER!  No, our progressive inventiveness in an underused brave science and technology puts us on the edge of forever, reader!  We must embrace that.  We must embrace that... or perish squalidly. 

The conundrum that we face is like a pustule, gentle reader,

And the cause of its neglect we should decry.

Those who push away the truth to save invalidated egos,

We should vilify—respectfully despise.

That pustule skin is very near to breaking, Sir and Madam.

The skin of it is hot and tight and dry.  

Any little touch could have it blow up in our faces,

But I'd like to clean it out—and I suspect that we must try.

What happened?  Self-hypnotism?

            ...Tell yourself enough times that "something's" not there?  Pilgrim!  It's not there!

             I  would suggest that my two fellow aviators, all those aforementioned California modelers, and I... dutifully followed obligatory hypnotic programming of "polite" society, and collectively ignored a sighting that should have been VERY interesting to two military instructor pilots, a host of educated professional people, and a candidate astronaut!

            But no... ...in the aggregate, we were less than properly interested; we ignored genuine UFOs as non-events, reader!  The preceding is behavior that now seems inexplicable to me on this end of my considered ufological investigation!  Remember, even I forgot it for a period of years!

           What strange Hypnosis is this?  Let's look at that a moment.

           Hypnosis, indeed, has a strange history shrouded in chicanery, hum-buggery, and a little something extra one can't put a finger on. That little something extra is what keeps it around, makes it useful, and justifies that harder look by science...

            Many times, it works.

            Distractingly, one hears the word "hypnosis" and is overcome by images of stage personalities facetiously suggesting to people that they can be transformed into barnyard animals, dance the "grand ballroom fandango," or be compelled to quit smoking—lose weight or some other mundane prosaic... like the abuse of research subjects, but the program of hypnotism can be more insidious than that...

            See, apart from coercion and manipulation imposed by anyone else?  You impose your own.  You can't even trust yourself.

            If two-thirds of the population can be affected by phenomena that science can quantify (if not qualify), this seems to be a ready mechanism for control... that's right ...by manipulative suggestions delivered via a daily bombardment from a very tightly controlled corporate media—news print, radio, and television— devices contrived to direct the innocent mammalian individuals to ape a corrupted reptilian mass. I say true.

            Individuals buying into the unceasing manipulations of this contrived, distorted, and corrupted mainstream might even take the next step in their own "control" by hypnotizing... ...themselves! Let that sink in.

            In effect, reader, they render themselves incapable of perceiving what is there, plainly, to be perceived... ...NOT, conversely, seeing what is not there to be seen... See the difference?

            Individuals of the mass, we've hypnotized ourselves—followed our social programming—perhaps, but we rejected the unsettling enigmatic for the comforting mundane! We ignored what our eyes were reporting to us and replaced it with an "accepted" routine!  We turned our backs to the unexplained, likely occurring around us all the time (unseen... or seen and subsequently ignored), and made it fit into what we are trained to find culturally tolerable... "socially acceptable"!

            Where do we learn such cowardice; I ask again? What is that provenance of same?  In concert, why does Culture persecute the individual (Mothman Futility Syndrome) for perceiving reality?  

             Culture is not your friend, reader.  Believe that. 

             I suspect, moreover, that the best, brightest, and most progressive of those contrary true-seeing individuals are routinely "suicided" out of hand or otherwise murdered as a result of contrived mechanisms mendaciously applied by same...  Hicks, Lennon, McKenna... a host of others.  You know it's true, don't you.  Not a question.

            Summing up, I've watched this process of ufological denial (through self-hypnosis?) at work twice now, then. At a rubber-model airplane meet in Northern California dozens of us watched a UFO fly by five times with fewer and fewer people looking up to watch it fly by with each succeeding pass it very queerly made!  Previously, one decade earlier, three high-time aviators at an outside party saw and subsequently ignored same.

            ...Tell yourself enough times that something's not there, reader, and it's not there, even if it is... especially if it is!  Perception, including lack of same, is the reality.  That it's a false reality is beside the point... not germane.

            Every indication is that science accepts that the human brain is capable of convincing itself to perceive what is not there to be perceived. I would suggest that it can also very handily do the inverse of that.

            It can also mask what is there to be seen as plain as gleaming day.  

           We won't pay enough attention to that (another suspicious point), given that we have to overcome so much programming from our myopically conflicted culture to do so. But we must, reader, ultimately, if we ever expect to see anything 'really' there, at all. 

Read on.

(1) Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon referring to the stress incurred as a result of 'discrepancy' between what you already know or believe... and some new information or compelling new interpretation of that old information.  Seeing startling new evidence that 'black' is really 'white' on any level you care to name.  Good is found to be evil?  Evil, good?  How is that processed?