Jarod's Organization

Commenting on our previous reports about our source "Jarod 2," the simulator designer [DR#24 | 27 | 32], reader Ufojockey@aol.com writes....

OK, Psychospy, ya know I love ya, but I'm gonna ask the tough question: Jarod says he was given permission to speak out by his boss. I have a friend who is currently on the inside and he wrote to me after reading all your Jarod material. He had a couple of problems with the story, most notably the bit about revealing this information with the blessing of his supervisor. He wrote: "Something fishy there. Supervisors aren't in a position to declassify information and are required to report any suspicion of security violations to a guy called a Chief Security Officer".

What about it? This has to be either information authorized for release at the highest levels, or pure-grade disinformation. Anything on this from Mr. Jarod you haven't passed along to us?

1. No matter how tight security may be, how could the program exist for so long without some disgruntled employee leaking it to the press?

2. If the government possesses such advanced technology, why has it continued to devote so much money and effort to conventional military technology that flying saucers could easily replace?

Jarod says the satellite government lives by its own laws, completely separate from the conventional government except for an interface with the military. It is not controlled by any other agency, so it does not have to obey the security regulations of other agencies. The fact that Jarod is allowed to speak does seem to imply permission from a higher level than the supervisor, but perhaps a word from management, without any paperwork, is all it takes to make something secret or not secret. Security could be both more intrusive than in any conventional defense program and more informal to those who are used to the structure. Consider the special circumstances....

1. This agency was separated from the rest of the government over 40 years ago. Thus, it would have had an opportunity to evolve in its own way, adapting to the unique requirements of the subject matter.

2. The organization is largely composed of older men who have worked with each other for decades. A worker's supervisor and his security officer are assigned to him for life.

3. The organization is extremely hierarchical, especially given the needs of compartmentalization. A worker reports only to his immediate supervisor, and direct contacts with members of other departments and higher management are rare.

4. The subject matter is so outwardly bizarre that even if parts of it were known, they would not be believed by the press or public. Most leaks and minor breaches of security would be so incomprehensible to an outsider that they would have no real effect.

The security officer still visits Jarod occasionally (he says). His power to intrude into Jarod's private life is unconstrained by what we would regard as "civil rights" and is more like how a father treats his son; e.g. No warrant is required to search the boy's room. We sense that the security guy has the power to make the employee's life a living hell, but Jarod is so used to the constraints that it does not bother him much. The visit from the security guy seems more like a friendly conversation than the intrusive interrogation others would regard it.

But the supervisor, not the security officer, is the ultimate authority in Jarod's world. If the security guy were to tell Jarod to do one thing and the boss said something else, Jarod would talk it over with his boss and do what the boss tells him to. Jarod knows very little about the structure the boss belongs to or who he reports to. Jarod has only one boss, and the wishes of any superior above him are only implied. If there is any debate taking place at the boss's level or higher, it is not something that usually filters down to Jarod. If you ask him what the agenda is or what the higher ups want, he cannot tell you because he does not know, and a lot of what he does know has been pieced together by various incidental events over the years. Jarod is as curious as anyone about what is happening. He feels comfortable asking his boss about things he does not know, but his boss will often reply, "Don't ask."

That Jarod is speaking to us or anyone else is at his own initiative, not the boss's. This appears to be a hierarchy where each person is given a great deal of autonomy within their given role--which is the way any efficient organization should work. Jarod has earned the trust of his boss. The boss offers polite direction from time to time, but he does not direct everything Jarod does. In this case, Jarod asked his boss if he could talk about certain aspects of his simulator work before a small UFO group, and the boss said it was okay--within certain constraints. As Jarod writes in DR#24, he cannot reveal "technical data, drawings, photos, sketches, illustrations, procedures, all documents relating to personnel, companies, related associate military groups, code names, types of classifications, names of people, etc."

So he can talk about many of his personal experiences, no problem, but he is not supposed to talk about specific links between his organization and the outside world. If any area seems dubious, he asks his boss about it, who says either "Okay" or "Let's hold off on that a while." For example, his boss said it was okay to mention Nixon as the founder of the satellite government, because "Nixon is dead." Playing by the rules is very simple for Jarod. He is not working from any rule book or security classification system. What started out as a rigid "Above Top Secret" security system has probably evolved over the years into a more flexible, unwritten understanding between a worker and his boss. When each worker is dealing with only a single superior, more subtle communications can develop than the hit-'em-over-the-head approach of military security. As long as Jarod gets permission first, than his actions becomes his boss's responsibility, and if a head were to roll it would be the boss's.

The fact that Jarod has been allowed to talk either means the supervisor was acting on his own, or there is a desire at higher levels of the SG leadership to make this information known. But there are different kinds of information, and not all of it can be released at once. One kind is what UFO buffs always seem to be seeking: undeniable proof. They want the "smoking gun" that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that UFOs are real and that the government knows more than it is telling. Jarod certainly hasn't provided that, because everything he says is deniable. He is just an older gentleman with unpolished speaking skills who does not attempt to prove anything he says. Opposing him is the conventional wisdom of a whole society, which usually wins in an intangible issue like this.

Another kind of information is emotional--to reveal the general impressions and ideas of alien contact without the specific proof. This gets people used to the pending event without triggering hysteria or a premature release. We assume that Jarod is allowed to talk because it fits this agenda. We doubt, however, that anyone at the top has a rigid plan about how the release is going to be accomplished, because society is unpredictable. We think their plan is more like, "We want to go in this direction, so let's look for opportunities."

Psychospy is not too worried about obtaining proof or putting together the big picture right now. That will emerge with time, like sitting in front of a big jigsaw puzzle and gradually noticing where pieces go together. True to our name, SIGH-KO-spy is more interested in how the smallest family unit operates. Jarod's family is very simple: Mom (the boss), Dad (the security guy) and siblings (his co-workers). Jarod does not worry about the big picture, just about obeying his boss, and he has internalized the relationship so well that he does not have to talk to his boss to know what he should and should not be doing in most cases. Sometimes months go by without contact between the two of them, but his boss is still there, in spirit, looking over his shoulder.

It is Psychospy's belief--call it "faith" if you want--that everyone in the organization wants the story to get out eventually, and that this was part of the plan from the beginning. Forty or fifty years is not a long time in the cosmic sense, and perhaps this was a reasonable transition period. We choose to believe that the satellite government was an interim program designed to study the alien information and prepare a plan of action to lessen the impact on society. Building our own flying saucers could be largely a political move, so the government can say, "Look, we earthlings are not helpless." The craft themselves have to be the most trivial aspect of the alien presence, however. It is like studying humans solely by looking at their cars, but having this hardward could be important to public relations.

The SG must know that the secret cannot be kept indefinitely and that humanity must eventually come to grips with the truth. The only question is how should the release be done and on what schedule. The conventional scenario in the UFO literature is that an angry mob of ufologists, armed with FOIAs and sighting reports, batter down the government gates and force the organization to come clean. Ha! Do you think that any two of our most prominent ufologists could cooperate to such an extent? No more than a handful are competent researchers anyway. The rest of the mob is too busy fighting each other and promoting their own peculiar religions to even agree on their goals.

The other scenario is not that the organization will be forced to change, but that society will change to meet the organization, so there are not longer any major walls or gates to knock down. Psychospy believes the secret will become known when society is so used to aliens anyway that everyone says, "So what?" and goes back to work. Jarod seems to fit into this agenda of acclimating the world to the outlines of the story without actually confirming it.

As mentioned in DR#30, we offer two possible candidates for this kind of acclimation program: The MJ-12 documents and the recent alien autopsy film. Both came from nowhere and have largely been dismissed by ufologists, but they have still reinforced the ideas in the eyes of the public that similar secrets must be real. We know this sounds like the usual conspiracy blather about everything being "part of the plan," but this method of gradual release is how Psychospy would handle it if we were given the job, and it requires only limited resources.

Anyway, we do not worry much about whether Jarod's claims are "information," "disinformation," "truth" or "lies," because this knowledge would not change our behavior much. The philosophical issues are interesting enough, regardless of the underlying truth, that we choose to behave "as if" Jarod's story were true and proceed from there. If the story turns out to be a illusion, then we have still explored some interesting philosophical questions, much like you can do in a novel, and we have gained more knowledge than we have lost.

Jarod's "Family"

People like myself, we signed away our constitutional rights at the time [we joined the program]. We took the secrecy oaths and signed those documents. We basically worked under a dictatorship but a benevolent dictatorship. But I want to say this: I enjoyed myself, had no problems. As a matter of fact I just enjoyed my work. As far as dictators, we were told what to do and we were good boys. Nothing went wrong.

But there were some who necessarily didn't make it. I don't know what happened to them. I never heard of anyone being put away or put to death. They were transferred to other places.

If the rest of the organization is structured like Jarod's family, then it is strictly hierarchical and non-contentious. Everyone in Jarod's group reports to the Group Manager (our word), who might report to the Section Manager, who reports to the Technical Director, who reports to the Big Cheese. Ultimately, a strict hierarchy means that a single person at the top controls the direction of the organization. After 40 years of absolute secrecy in an organization with little turnover and no meddling from the press or politics, all the internal power struggles are going to have shaken out long ago.

We believe there is no "committee" at the top, because committees imply dissent, which eventually ripples through the organization and results in some member of one faction leaking information to the press to further his political aims. That is what happens all the time in Washington, and it is to be expected wherever there are parties or factions within an organization. If the satellite government has kept its secrets all these years, we think it implies that there is just one person at the top "manning the helm," and significant factions are not allowed to develop.

Who is this Big Cheese? Maybe he is that "bioastrophysicist" the aliens first communicated with [DR#24]. (Jarod calls him an "astrophysicist in the quote below.) Having one guy at the top means decisions can be made quickly and conveyed down the chain of command with a minimum of overhead. This is the kind of organization the conventional military pretends to be but really isn't, since their hierarchy is crippled by accumulated regulations, and few people at the top are really prepared to lead.

The trouble with a "benevolent dictatorship" in any human-run environment is that there is no guarantee that it will stay benevolent. Usually who ends up at the top is a Bresznev or Saddam, interested only in power, not leadership. In the absence of a healthy level of external chaos [DR#25], any selection process on earth tends to favor cloddish bureaucrats or smooth-talking tyrants who will allow no morality to interfere with their ascension. Although putting on a good show, these people make poor leaders, and the organization begins to self-destruct as soon as they gain power.

A hierarchical organization will work efficiently and keep its workers happy only when each member has a basic faith in his boss. Without this goodwill, people start sabotaging the organization from within, even if direct dissent is disallowed. They start stealing the pencils and reporting for work without accomplishing anything, and the structure eventually disintegrates into incompetence. All the security regulations in the world cannot force people to work efficiently or make them enjoy their work; only positive leadership can make that happen, and this implies a much more honorable organization than UFO buffs give the government credit for.

A common criticism of any government UFO cover-up scenario is that all the secret police in the world aren't going to keep some disgruntled workers from talking to the press anonymously. "Deep Throat" sources are bound to come forward, leaking documents and information to outsiders to help further their own internal agendas. But what if there aren't any disgruntled workers? What if nearly every person in this particular organization trusts his boss, with a basic confidence that leads all the way to the top of the heap. This ridiculously utopian scenario would be beyond belief in any human environment if not for the possibility that more than just humans are involved.

The Big Cheese himself could have his own boss in whom he has a basic faith and who gives him occasional instructions when he strays from the way of truth. The Cheese is Big only because the aliens chose him as their interface. He was a smart-ass white boy (Hungarian, we suspect) who they felt they could do something with. Jarod says (May 1995):

The guy who was put in charge--I'm not going to give you his name--he was an astrophysicist. He wasn't a general; he was a scientist. At the time it was thought it would be a general that was put in charge. But [the aliens] were smart enough to put in charge someone who was technically competent. You get too many politicians and they don't know the technical aspects of many of the things that we're following today.

In essence, the program is controlled from off-world, but the head office--in Zeta Reticuli or wherever--is smart enough to give the local manager a lot of delegated authority. Since the aliens possess such advanced technology, they have a lot of negotiating power. They can dictate terms on certain fundamental issues, but like other good leaders they are not going to micro-manage how the Cheese or his subordinates do their job. The aliens have probably had millennia to develop their own organizational skills and to read all the management books. Evidently, they are hands-off managers. They may not say much to the Big Cheese, but when they do, it carries weight.

In a sense, the BC is the most powerful man on earth, but it is not a power he is free to abuse. He is bound, we hope, by a code of honor passed down by our Space Brothers, and whatever his purpose may be, we think it is fundamentally a moral pursuit. If it were not, the people immediately below him would stop doing their best and the integrity of the entire organization would start to crumble, leading to leaks.

This is not to say that the satellite government is without its failures. It is still composed of fallible humans solving day-to-day problems that the aliens can't help them with. In the building of the simulator, Jarod describes how his group worked for years on one approach only to see it abandoned as infeasible. The problem as he describes it was not understanding alien technology, which was accomplished early on, but learning how to implement it within our current human abilities. In this trial-and-error process, there is bound to be some interpersonal friction, especially between the organization and its interfaces in the conventional government. Still, the presence of some sort of guiding intelligence from the outside could lead to a more stable and efficient organization than comparable ones with exclusively human leadership. One should not underestimate the value of a few wise words and decisive actions from management for keeping an organization on track.

Implications

Our readers can rest assured that Psychospy will fiercely defend the freedom of all humanity, but we also recognize that the real world is composed largely of dictatorships, and often our only freedom is to choose how efficiently we will respond to things we cannot change. Life dictates the circumstances of our birth and when we will die, and many important events in between are also beyond our direct choice. Even when we can choose a path, we are certain to encounter unavoidable consequences we did not expect. You can, for example, decide to live without a computer, but if you choose to buy one then you must enter the dictatorship of accepted standards, currently dominated by the tyrant W. Gates. Entering this world can open new avenues of creativity, but your choices here are not unlimited, and your rights of privacy and intellectual property may be redefined in ways you did not ask for.

What everyone seems to worry about when they think of alien contact is whether the aliens will be good or evil. Are they here to enslave us or here to set us free? You can ask the same question about the internet or any other social or technological advance. The true intent is probably neither freedom nor enslavement, just the cold pursuit of business, but both will probably happen to some extent. Attached to any new knowledge or technology, there are usually strings. The aliens would be both foolish and irresponsible not to set conditions. They will say, "Sure, we'll let you have our saucers, but here is what we expect in return." Your choice, then, is whether to play the game and accept the terms or go back to your cave.

At election time in countries outside the U.S., politicians often rail against American "cultural imperialism," which has replaced corner cafes with fast food restaurants and wiped out the local film industries of many nations. If the aliens invade earth, this is how they will do it, not by zapping us with their death rays and stealing our women but by offering more attractive consumer products. What the aliens promise is technology or information not otherwise available on earth. Our only choices are whether to buy these products and, if we do, how to manage them within our human traditions. As long as the aliens remain more technologically advanced than we and are willing to feed us this technology bit by bit, then they will hold great power over the course of our society. This is not an invasion or conspiracy in the traditional sense; it is just the way commerce and technology have always shaped our planet--mindlessly and without malice.

The Firewall

We can think of three possible answers....

1. Flying saucers, although advanced, are simply unsuitable to conventional military purposes. They could be analogous to our stockpiles of nuclear weapons, which are certainly powerful and technologically sophisticated but remain useless in current world conflicts.

2. Flying saucers are not withheld from military purposes at all, but are used only in operations where they can be kept secret. In this scenario, spy satellites and stealth aircraft might be sham programs designed only to provide a cover story and divert funds to other purposes. Alleged military failures due to poor intelligence might be disinformation, supported by the real deaths of soldiers who did not have the "need to know."

3. Flying saucers are not used for military purposes because the aliens have forbidden such use.

The second alternative, suggesting that other secret weapons programs are an empty charade, also stretches credulity. Psychospy adheres to the "Minimum Conspiracy Rule" (MCR), which says that when faced with multiple explanations for government behavior, we must choose the one which requires the least amount of deceptive collusion and the smallest number of conspirators. Stealth aircraft, although secret once, are now real hardware open to inspection, including their manufacturing history, and any cooked books would have to be detected eventually. Spy satellites, on the other hand, might be a more attractive way of scamming funds, because no one can prove that a rocket taking off from Cape Kennedy actually contains the device promised. [See news article.] Still, the conspiracy involved in this kind of cover-up would have to be relatively massive, involving not only the people on the saucer program but also those on all of the secondary "sham" projects.

The easiest scenario for us to accept is that flying saucers have never been used for significant military purposes because some powerful disincentive has been imposed from the outside. There could be a "firewall" between the satellite government and the conventional military to prevent the release of alien technology except in a highly controlled manner. Human self-restraint alone could not do the job, because at the height of the Cold War the pressures would have been enormous to put every technological advantage into use against the Evil Empire. Only the aliens themselves would have the power to say, "No way!" and have the firewall enforced.

This theory has an elegance that Psychospy finds appealing, because it reduces the President, the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force and intelligence community to secondary players who have little control over the program they started and who might be groping for answers and insights as much as we are. We wonder how many analysts at the CIA, NSA, NRO, ONI and OSI are secretly assigned to figuring out just what the SG is up to. This theory portrays the aliens as smart little buggers whose understanding of our government and society runs far deeper than "Take us to your leader." They know us better than we know ourselves, but like any decent god they are willing to let us live and die without their intervention. Nonetheless, their willingness to give us their technology and teach us how to use it suggests that they do have a long term plan to take over the world. They will lure us under their control with all their neat stuff, and then they'll steal our women.

Psychospy's reaction is the same as Bart Simpson's: "Cool!"

1/31/96: J-2 reviews this article. Says he got a kick out of it. No changes.

They said we deserved to know what was going on, so they took us for a VIP tour of the ordinary above-ground base and then into the mountain for the really interesting stuff. We rode in an tram through a long tunnel to the underground saucer base, where we were shown both the alien models and the earth-built ones. We got to pilot one of the simulators and were briefed on everything we wanted to know about the aliens. Then the men took us to meet the Big Cheese.

He was sitting in the control room facing away from us toward a wall of monitors. Slowly, he swiveled his chair around, and we recognized him. It was Ernst Stavro Blofeld, scar across his cheek, stroking his fluffy white pussycat.

"So, Mr. Bond," said Blofeld, "we meet at last, and now you know how we will dominate the world."

Nooooooo!

Reader Responses

• A military officer replies: "SG personnel could easily and willingly adapt and flourish under a seemingly oppressive societal structure. Over 900,000 Americans do it day-in day-out in the DoD."