During America’s “space brothers” phase of the 1950s, when atomic bombs were belching radioactive poisons into the stratosphere, a cult of “contactees” was spreading a new gospel – extraterrestrials were here to break the cycle of civilization’s history. There would be no winners in the age of nukes, only auto-annihilation, and the visitors’ mission was to guide humanity into the light. It was an attractive proposition, at least until its top disciple, George Adamski, was exposed as a fabulist whose tales and photos of Venusian spaceships collapsed under cursory scrutiny.
Still, the creation of nuclear arsenals was a major transactional shift that rattled even the old master of war himself. The Atomic Energy Act (AEA) of 1954 created new opportunities for trusting private-sector stewardship with state secrecy and exclusive patents, famously flagged in President Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech in 1961. Citing “huge costs” and the galloping pace of technology, Ike warned that “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Recent events are tracing the full arc of Washington’s dysfunction all the way back to the Fifties. The AEA was the first domino in the erosion of the legislative branch’s obligations to hold this unelected elite accountable for taxpayer dollars. In the decades that followed, tsunamis of cash capsized the fragile Constitution and took American democracy with it. Consequently, one could be forgiven for wondering if a 21st-century version of a space-brother intervention might be the last hope of saving us from ourselves. And it’s beyond irony that the most promiscuously corrupt administration in U.S. history might well have blundered into an unintentional confrontation with the bona fide Deep State, with which it is deeply overmatched.
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