The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

In Volume II of UFOs and the National Security State, historian Richard Dolan speculates about the possibility of a “breakaway civilization,” by which he means (as I understand it) essentially a secret society of government and business elites who have access to what is known about UFOs and may even possess technologies back-engineered from crashed craft, etc. A society that is reaping the benefits of perhaps the most explosive knowledge in history, including advanced technologies, and has a strong interest in keeping this knowledge from the rest of us little people.

Dolan acknowledges that we don’t know what intelligence or intelligences UFOs represent, although he appears to strongly favor the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis). But the notion of a breakaway civilization could be expanded, I think, and is worth speculating about as not only a society that “knows the UFO secret” but may overlap with the secretive intelligence responsible for them—the “aliens” themselves.

Assuming UFOs do represent something real, the best rival hypothesis to the ETH is the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis formulated by Mac Tonnies and that I have speculated about in this blog. That is, the idea that aliens are actually a more advanced or more intelligent hominid species—cousins to us, originating and living in secret on earth.

However, another variant of the CTH would be that these crypto-men could be merely a separate, secretive society—not a separate species but a breakaway civilization, using the term in a somewhat different sense than Dolan means: An old or even ancient society commanding technology in advance of the rest of the world and keeping that advantage hidden. A human society whose advanced aerospace technology, nanotechnology, and even genetic engineering skills came about through their own efforts over centuries or millennia.

But think about it, there really would be little difference between such a society and Dolan’s more contemporary ‘breakaway civilization.’ A breakaway civilization like I’m talking about would likely have always interacted with select elites from the mainstream and inducted them into their advanced society—a continuous process of recruitment.

Such a secret technological society could have ‘broken away’ relatively recently—say, at the beginning of the age of electricity. Think of the stories of Nicola Tesla and the suppression of his ideas by Edison; think of the numerous conspiracy stories about inventors of free-energy devices meeting tragic fates.

Or, in keeping with the long historical record of encounters with UFOs and mysterious ‘others’ (angels, demons, fairies, gods and godlike beings, etc.), such a civilization could have broken away millennia ago. Think of the invisible secret societies alluded to by alchemical adepts, and the purported secrets of material transformation such societies supposedly possessed. The legendary origins of alchemy in ancient Egypt, for example. More than just legends? Fun to speculate about, at least.

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