Yes, We're living in Upside Down World
There's plenty of money and fame to be made on alternate realities
“I am going to talk to you about something I’ve never talked about,” conservative political commentator Sara Carter teases at the beginning of her latest podcast. “Literally, you will be on the edge of your seat.”
There are bigger things in the world than politics, Carter goes on to say. And one of them is the Pentagon’s new UFO program, she said, referring to the Defense Department’s recent announcement that it had formed a task force to investigate “unidentified aerial phenomena” reported by U.S. military pilots. What this might be (drones? weather balloons? Russians? Martians?) was impossible to discern from the Pentagon’s vague, three paragraph statement. But Carter, like much of the media over the past 75 years, knows how to hype a fresh UFO story. “This is a topic that could change all of human history,” she enthused.
Perhaps it was even bigger than Michael Flynn’s plight, which she has written about 142 times, according to her website, or the treacherous “Deep State,” (139 times) or the “Russia hoax,” (51 times). As for the pandemic (which, to state the obvious, is way bigger than politics), I’m just glad to see that Carter is no longer spreading doubts about it to her 1.2 million followers.
But back to UFOs, which Carter, in her latest podcast, said (with an apparent straight face), “is the most important topic right now, I believe in our present modern world.” To help listeners grasp the significance, she turned to Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence veteran and former Pentagon official who she holds in high regard. I guess not all members of the so-called “Deep State” are evil.
Elizondo, you might recall, left the Pentagon in 2017 to blow the whistle on its apparent negligence regarding strange UFOs. It’s a dubious story for various reasons, starting with Elizondo’s claim that he once ran a secret UFO research unit for the government—all of which I scrutinized here a year ago. But hey, Elizondo now has his own UFO-hunting show on the History Channel and keeps getting invited back by Tucker Carlson to talk about crashed flying saucer debris, so who am I to question?
That said, everything you need to know about the merits of this UFO narrative, including the seriousness with which Sara Carter treats it, can be boiled down to what she says just ahead of her interview with Elizondo. She starts out by lauding him as an “incredible human being” and for his role in bringing UFOs into the mainstream. Then she digresses:
But before I even get to him [Elizondo] and the Pentagon’s [UFO] program, I want to know if, sometimes, at night, you guys don’t feel safe. You think a UFO might be hovering over your house, you think someone could sneak through the backdoor or get in through your window. If you do, you need to get Simpli Safe. It’s got everything you need to protect your home, with none of the drawbacks of traditional home security. I can tell you this. It is important to keep you and your family safe. And now that I’m talking about UFOs and alien abductions, it’s even better because I’ve got a deal for you. It’s an arsenal of cameras and sensors…
After the pitch, Carter has the chutzpah to say that “this isn’t some gimmick.”
Riiiiight. As if super-advanced space aliens who can fly to earth undetected and then elude the world’s finest militaries are going to be deterred by a home security system you can purchase for less than $200.
Fortunately, my family and I have a furry four legged creature who snaps to attention at the slightest foreign sound outside our abode. She’s too cute for words and all bark, but that should suffice. Space invaders, beware!
Despite Carter’s inane interview with Elizondo, there is something she got right. “We live in a world that is completely upside down right now,” she says at one juncture. Amen to that! Of course, anyone who knows of the alternate reality Carter inhabits will surely note the irony and her lack of self-awareness. To cite just one recent example, here she is amplifying the Houston physician who says masks are unnecessary.
Maybe you heard about this person last month after Trump also promoted her? It’s the same doctor who warns against having sex with demons and witches in your dreams. Yes, that doctor—the one who also believes that some of her colleagues use alien DNA to make medicine.
So I’m not surprised to see Carter jumping on the UFO bandwagon.
In the entertainment world, UFOs are a lucrative cash cow business and in the media, reliable clickbait. And now they fit perfectly in the upside down world we’re living in today.