Mind-Bogglingly Good Article on the Issac/ CARET/ Chad Issue
In other posts, I may have laughed at the Chad “probe” photos, and questioned the provenance and issues behind the CARET posts, but Colin Bennett has done an incredible job of dissecting the issue as an example of 21st century storytelling and meme-spread.
His article at Reality Uncovered is a tour-de-force of critical thought on this issue. Bennett weaves together strands of themes from mythology, the JFK assassination, Paris Hilton, even Stanton Friedman and Marilyn Monroe. He presents a view of the post-internet world, where ideas and image are everything, and damn the “facts.” The beautifully-rendered “blueprints” presented by “Issac” are examined in detail, as he compares their intricate appearance to the work of a watchmaker.
A couple of quotes:
The question of the structure of the objective-real bedevilled Western philosophy until Plato solved the problem with his Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic. The Allegory describes prisoners so chained and masked that they could never see a fire lit behind them. What they saw as “real” were the shadows thrown by the fire onto the cave wall in front of them. Because of their situation these shadows were interpreted by the prisoners as representing the substance and actions of the real world.
The merest fraction of a second contains an infinity of associations. Only the powerful image, and not intellect, can grasp and control this stream of consciousness. This is the reason why Paris Hilton plus SERPO and CHAD memes may in the end have far greater power than boiler-house science of MUFON.
This is a very important essay which all readers of this site should study. A whole course in 21st century communications, psychology, and sociology could be based on the SERPO/ CARET enigma.
This is one reason why I now suspect that this “probe” business is not the work of government agents, and if it is, I believe that they may have recruited private business or contractors to do the detail work. For what purpose, we may never know.
Where is Dr. Mario Pazzaglini when we need him?
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Aug 05 2007 
August 5th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Hey thanks Greg. I noticed that article on Colin’s website last week but the beginning extended quotes kinda through me off. I didn’t know that this stuff had been on Coast to Coast but doesn’t surprise me. Let’s not forget the “Fire the Grid” you-tube meme about which ONLY Dr. Steven Greer and Art Bell would help….how convenient. Then there was Tuesday’s show about how reality now will be controlled by manifestion of luciferic images. I don’t normally listen to that show but coincidentally the work radio was on that station and I flipped the switch at 2:30 a.m. only to hear how Mothman was really satanic or some such….
All part of the Stargate-Matrix CIA psi-plasma vortex conspiracy.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:49 am
My mind wasn’t exactly boggled. It was just a post-modern take on ufology. While it has some interesting insights, if you take the line of thinking to its logical conclusion then everything is merely a meme that someone else can deny. I personally like to have some measure of objective reality to keep myself grounded.
Or maybe I’m just presenting and selling an anti-post modern image & meme, who really knows
August 6th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Drew,
Of course, you can find evidence almost anywhere you care to look, but the producers of C2C are counting that people will simply want to be scared night after night-conveniently forgetting all the things that never come to pass.
August 6th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
uth,
Good insights.
To me, it’s just as interesting to look at the effects of the UFO subject as any objective “facts” we can glean from cases.
Bennett says some of the things I think and that I wish I’d said, albeit more eloquently. I’m not anti-post-modern any more than I am anti-ETH, it’s just that image, trends and beliefs are things we can get our minds around. Who knows, part of an understanding of the UFO enigma may come from this.
“Objective reality” in the UFO field seems very hard to come by, and the little we have has not changed much in over 50 years. Ultimately, since we cannot produce UFOs on demand, just about everything associated with them is a theory or a meme.
August 6th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I was going to read the whole lengthy article, but at the very beginning I stumbled with this:
“In June of 2007 there appeared a web site http://isaaccaret.fortunecity.com/ apparently authored by one Isaac Caret…”
and then I decided to stop reading. The so called “Isaac” never mentioned that his last name was CARET; that was the name of the program that was supposedly developed between the Army and civilians in Palo Alto. And this is supposed to be good research?
August 6th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
A great article thanks for drawing attention to it.
” . . . Learning how to make sure that the level of the CHAD story is just above that of schlock fiction, adjusted so that it whets credible appetites and is quickly absorbed. CHAD represents nothing less than the launch of the cutting edge of prototypal Matrix politics. It is far more dangerous than memes of Icke or Hoagland because its agenda is directed at high IQ levels, and its Fortean percentages of “reasonableness” are much more carefully managed. . .”
Not familiar with the Caret/Chad material but with the Serpo/Seinu stuff. As Mr Bennett observes in the quote above, a small percentage of the releases certainly had high plausability ‘readings’.
But at the end of the day whether they place it in your mouth, in your armpit or elsewhere it only ever spells thermometer.
I.M. Schnarpicus
August 6th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Mr. Red Pill,
It’s a good essay, which deals with issues of perception and cultural assimilaiton of ideas. If that one problem is going to stop you from reading it, that’s too bad.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Snappy,
The point of the essay, I think, is to point out that whoever is perpetrating the Issac story is a sharp cookie, and that the spread of strange ideas continues to be an act of faith, albeit faith confused and conjoined with “critical” thinking. By looking at what it attempts to do, we may be looking into the “why.”
Not all posts here are about things seen in the skies. We should be concerned with the audience as well, whether the magician is non-human, or a conman.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:37 am
I’ll give it a second chance Greg.
But another thing that bothers me, is that the writer dod not use some of the “Chad” photos or others posted by arthfiles, but an image that was made by a third party. Why?
August 7th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Another error found:
“Before being blown apart (project SERPO), this story spread vast confusion on the Web as a fine old tale of how a number of Americans were abducted by aliens in the 1960s and taken to Planet SERPO…”
In the story the people that went to Serpo were NOT abducted. They were volunteers in a supposedly joint collaboration between the military and the aliens that crashed in Roswell.
I’m sorry if I seem so nitpicky. But I think it is important to get the details straight, even if they seemed trivial at first glance.
August 7th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Ok, I just finished reading the article.
Overall, I liked it. Eventhough I kind of recent the author made the mistakes I stated in previous posts. Also, the fact that he finds Isaac’s prose style too well constructed and “professional” to be real, like implying that tech geeks can’t write; of ourse the style should makes us skeptical (along with the story of course!!), but playing here devil’s advocate (or in this case, Isaac’s advocate) for the sake of argument, the dude claims to have worked in the CARET program in the mid 1980’s, therefore he had 20 years to make a draft of his experience and “polish” it. Also, the writing skills fit well in Isaac’s story, since he claims he had a management position (although not a very important one), so that would mean writing reports and memos would be part of his daily routine.
Also, when the author writes:
“If this was a page of instructions from a mechanical workshop (the graphics shown in the CARET pages), the letters would not be so beautifully done; on machine parts they would be engraved with an electric scribe, or stamped on a fixed plate in a rather rough and ready manner.”
I would not be so sure to that. I believe that by the 1980s industrial techniques like laser cutting and laser engraving, along with cutting metal with high-pressure water jets were already available, although mind-boggling expensive. These technologies allow engineers and designers to directly transfer very complex geometrical drawings from the computer to the production material, be it wood, polymers or metals. If (a big IF I admit) what Isaac claims is true, that the “alien” diagrams were to be copied EXACTLY in order to perform the desired function, then it would be understandable why the CARET manuals were so careful to painstakingly reproduce the diagrams as precisely as possible.
But enough defending Isaac. I agree with the author that it appears to be a very intelligent hoax, devised to appeal people like me, who don’t waste time watching American Idol (I suppose I should feel flattered?).
Also I agree completely that reality cannot be 100% attainable (hence my nickname!), that thinking is a pretty noisy, messy process, and that Ufology makes a big mistake if it sticks to rigid Victorian/Newtonian methods to try to assess and make sense of what could be considered the biggest test to our undestanding of reality: The UFO phenomenon. That’s quite paradox if you ask me, blatantly evident with the examples of the Caret and Serpo stories, and the UMMO story if we go deeper in the past.
Look forward for the 2nd part of the article.