Defcon 21 - The Government and UFOs: A Historical Analysis

Richard Thieme, a former Episcopal priest has been giving his witty and amusing talks at the large Def Con hacker conference held yearly for nearly two decades. He has become somewhat of a "father figure" to many in the hacker subculture. This is the entertaining conference that he gave in 2013.

In 2012, Thieme contributed to the non-fiction book UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, which examines the government's treatment of UFO reports, going back to World War II. The book was praised by the magazine Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries for good sourcing, and recommended as "a useful resource for the study of a controversial topic".

The most interesting aspect of this talk is when Thieme explains how the defense implications and the sheer inexplicableness of the UFO phenomenon ultimately resulted in the CIA appointing itself as what he calls to as the "Ministry of Culture."

This is a role, which has recently been laid naked and bare before our eyes, with the (Project Artichoke) Mainstream Media's roll-out of the "Fake News", "Russian Hacking" and "Trump-cavorting-with-Russian-prostitutes-peeing-on-hotel-bed" memes. These canards are ringing very hollow to most sensible people. The CIA has become unable to control the narrative anymore. They fail to understand how information works in the Information Age – and "They're fired!"

Here's a direct quote Thieme's insight, here:

"The media is...cooperative, at best and complicit, at worst in amplifying what it needs to amplify, according to the people that feed stories...and that's a whole other talk I'd like to give some time, about how we appointed ourselves the Ministry of Culture – the CIA did, in the 1950s – and what they did around the world, with the wholesale creation of newspapers and magazines and periodicals, in order to make them seem independent and different points of view could be articulated and then magnified and then repeated by other magazines, which they also influenced – things are not what they seem. They REALLY are not what they seem..."