Alienated: Peter Levenda on the alien 'threat' narrative

There has been some Twitter controversy lately over a tweet from Tom DeLonge concerning the UFO Phenomenon and the threat it poses to human life on Earth. It seems that people have definite ideas about all of this, and they do not hesitate to make them known in response. This is my attempt to clarify my own position. I do not speak for Tom, of course, but I do believe that too many assumptions have been made by critics of Tom and of To The Stars that confuse the issue unnecessarily.

First of all, it seems that one of the major criticisms of Tom's position is that he is somehow a shill for the Pentagon or the CIA or some military group or cabal. I have seen the term "war monger" used, as well. If one takes the position that the Phenomenon is dangerous to humans, it stands to reason - according to this critique - that the person taking that position is a government stooge. What is the purpose of being a government stooge, then? Why, it's to increase US government defense spending, of course.

There are a few things wrong with that theory when it comes to the Phenomenon, however.

In the first place, US spending on defense far outstrips those of the next nine countries combined (and that includes China and Russia). No one needs Tom talking about UFOs to have any appreciable effect on the defense budget. The amount of money spent so far by the US government on UFO research is minuscule. If it were to double or triple, it would still be minuscule and not approach the cost of, for instance, the cheapest single line item in the 2017 Defense Budget of $89 million for rolling airframe missile systems (a surface-to-air system for defending ships against missile attacks). If we are not talking about UFO research, though, but defense systems against possible UFO attacks, then we have another problem:

In the second place, everyone is assuming that what the Pentagon would need to defend the United States from the Phenomenon is more or better guns and that is why Tom is said to be shilling for the defense establishment. That all we need is more guns is a dangerous assumption to make. It implies that the UFO/UAP is nothing more than a weapons platform that can be neutralized if we had more or better missiles. It is entirely possible that conventional weapons - up to and including chemical and biological weapons and nuclear weapons - would have no effect at all on the Phenomenon. If the Tic-Tac and other footage has shown us anything, it's that the Phenomenon can control our communications systems and even predict what our complex computer algorithms will display in advance, thus effectively neutralizing our capacity for attack. There are reports from both the United States and the then Soviet Union that they have the capacity of turning on and off our missile launch systems, and even of appearing as incoming missiles thereby eliciting a military response, only to have the incoming "missiles" disappear off radar screens at the last moment and thus averting disaster...<<<Read More>>>...