Centre Of Inertia

Confessions of a conspiracy theorist


“Mind if I sit here?”
“Be my guest.”
“Sure?”
“No-yeah, go ahead. Strangers are just people you haven’t ghosted yet.”
“You looked a bit jumpy?”
“Jumpy?”
“Yeah, jumpy as a roo on the razzle-dazzle I reckon.”
“One must be careful what one thinks these days.”
“Too right. This yours?”
“Yeah, taking a break. Thinking about stuff.”
“Mind if I?”
“Sure.”
“The centre of inertia...three letters...third letter x.”
“Rex.”
“Rex?”
“As in king or queen.”
“Serious?”
“The centre of inertia is the letter ‘r’, often an abbreviation for rex, or regina for that matter. But it’s only three letters. And a constitutional monarchy is inert, so...”
“Wow.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“Reckon it does. Are you a monarchist?”
“Um...probably. 51%. You?”
“Don’t suppose it matters now.”
“No. Very diplomatic.”
“Did you stay up last night? See the new year in?”
“Nah. I’m 78.”
“78 is old?”
“Some wear it well. Not me.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Our family don’t live to be ‘old’ old.”
“Didn’t think you’d see 2054 then?”
“I never thought I’d end up in Australia. Spiders, snakes, crocs. No thanks.”
“You’re a bit of a celeb in these parts. Can’t have you living in a swamp.”
“Touché. So you...know me then?”
“Came especially. ‘The Stargate at Pine Gap’ is one of my favourite albums.”
“Mine too.”
“Annoying question. Is the stargate at Pine Gap a thing?”
“Well, what say you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know” is a sound philosophy. Once, I was a barman in a pub talking to a regular about life, the universe. I’m for the afterlife, he’s ‘you live, you die, you rot.’ This goes back and forth, da da da. Then a pisshead called Barry pipes in with, ‘Nobody fucking knows.’
“So you don’t know?”
“About what?”
“Pine Gap.”
“If asking questions about aliens and secret bases is your bag remember to price in the whole equation.”
“What do you mean?”
“So, imagine aliens are here but their presence is top secret and that status quo has to be maintained. How would I even convince you?”
“I don’t think you can keep things like that a secret…”
“So why ask if Pine Gap has a stargate if you think stargates can’t be kept secret?”
“Guess I love wild theories. Part of life’s rich tapestry.”
“So many people think they would know if aliens were here. All the jigsaw pieces would be nicely assembled on MSM. But the jigsaw pieces aren’t assembled, some don’t even belong to the puzzle and most are missing. That’s the machinery maintaining the status quo.”
“K.”
“You can’t imagine a scenario where aliens don’t want their presence to be formally announced?”
“Sounds a bit unlikely.”
“You think of all the agendas aliens could have and what Earth’s place could truly be in the galaxy- laboratory, prison planet, place you can stop off to surgically mutilate nice juicy cows- you would know them?”
“So you believe in aliens?”
“What’s your name?”
“Greg.”
“Greg. I sit on this bench every day in the heart of old-fogey-ville watching the world crawl by. If a spaceship landed with little green men who ate Kit-Kats and danced on roller-skates I’d be on a breakfast show later on blabbering about it. And I’d be damn sure about what I saw because I don’t see shit like that everyday. But for balance I’d have to sit opposite a celebrity sceptic telling me I’d no idea what I’d seen. It was a cloud, or Venus or swamp gas or something far more improbable than aliens. And I’d be no different to countless others. Policemen, military personnel, schoolchildren. If the weight of anecdotal evidence holds no sway with you perhaps we’re wasting our time.”
“We’ve had disclosure, no? Don’t you remember Brian Cox announcing they’d found primitive jellyfish on Europa? He won the David Attenborough award. So yeah, I’m sure there’s intelligent life out there somewhere.”
“But not here? Plus ça change. We had a false dawn in the early 2020s. Whistleblowers in congress swearing the US government had alien bodies and spacecraft. Barely made the news in the UK.”
“Aliens crashing spacecraft?”
“Just probes with soulless biologics inside. Done deliberately. Everything is smoke and mirrors.”
“K. And you think Brian Cox is shadow government?”
“Actually, no. The point is a population’s attention is easily diverted. Stories easily killed. Take the 2020 pandemic.”
“What about it?”
“Actually, maybe I shouldn’t say. It might be an infringement of China’s National Security Law, which as you know has global reach.”
“I reckon anything potentially subversive can always have a disclaimer tagged on.”
“Yeah, but. Ah, screw it. I had this mad fever dream that China lied about transmissibility, openly menaced the UK into keeping its borders open during a crucial window, then had the most draconian lockdown itself and refused to co-operate with an investigation of the virus, which bore all the hallmarks of….not being zoonotic. And for that it got scant scrutiny while the UK went bonkers about why a man called Dominic Cummings went to Barnard Castle. How’s that?”
“Yeah, that works. Why would the UK have not held China to account?”
“They had our ass on a plate. By that time China had cornered most of the world’s medical supplies and they weaponised the asset. Plus America was involved in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and they didn’t want that can of worms- ”
“It’s a bit of a stretch from that to Pine Gap.”
“Look, I couldn’t even convince the doctors that a strange mystery illness I had as a child was an allergic reaction to Benylin. I’m on a hiding to nothing, I get that. But you keep asking so I’m trying to help you conceptualize.”
“A secret alien presence on Earth. It sounds like a TV show.”
“You can learn a lot from TV shows. You remember the Traitors?”
“My Great Aunt was on that show.”
“You know why it was great TV? It showed how hidden hands can manipulate the majority. It also revealed how those on the right track are often afraid to stick their neck out, and when they do…”
“Yeah, best way to win that game is to keep your head down.”
“You’re not convinced, are you?”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“You know, sceptics tend to be Sherlock Holmes fanboys, his being an evidence junky. They don’t realise they’re actually Watsons and Lestrades who can make neither head nor tail of the ordinary evidence hidden in plain sight.”
“Maybe if you give me an example of a conspiracy theory that was proven?”
“If the powers that be do their job there’s never any grand exposé. Canonised conspiracy theories are trifling ones. The Gulf of Tonkin, the Reichstag Fire-”
“Any examples of your own country being involved in one? Even a small one.”
“The Horizon scandal was a conspiracy theory, of sorts. Until it wasn’t.”
“Never heard of it.”
“No, well. The Post Office are hardly deep-state but...almost got away with mass false-prosecution. It took a TV drama to expose it after the usual apparatus failed. It’s not aliens but it demonstrates how easily people are gaslit. And if a minnow like the Post Office can do that- extrapolate accordingly.”
“You could use this argument to justify any conspiracy theory.”
“Not without smoking guns. A sudden spike in light-fingered sub-postmasters made no sense.”
“Any examples of conspiracy theories you don’t believe?”
“Some are bananas. The ‘Paul McCartney is dead' theory was genuinely conspicuous by its lack of evidence. And I was never on board with the moon landing hoax, the controversy was astronauts being muzzled about the aliens they saw on the moon. But something like 9/11 has smoking guns. When I was a whinging pomme I saw a BBC documentary debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theory that picked all the low-hanging fruit and ignored the serious points. That’s a strawman argument.”
“And what are those serious points?”
“Now there’s a rabbit hole! The thing about 9/11 is the quality of people who sacrificed good jobs and marriages to question the narrative. Lots of senior pilots said they simply couldn’t fly a plane into a building at that speed if they tried.”
“How was it was done then?”
“The Boeing Honeywell Uninterruptible Autopilot. Not actually patented until 2006 and for good reason. As you may recall, one of the planes didn’t make it to New York but they pulled WTC 7, the tower that plane was intended for, anyways. Not many people noticed three towers collapsed into their footprints that day.”
“You think America would kill thousands of its own?”
“I’ll give you that. That’s quite the stumbling block. But the lives of ordinary civilians have always been expendable and what 9/11 ultimately led to was the Iraq War- launched on the flimsiest of pretexts. Many more people died there.”
“I don’t really know much about Iraq or 9/11. It’s all a long time ago.”
“That’s the thing. One day TWA 800 is downed by a navy exercise missile, it’s all over the news, air traffic controllers seeing it on radar, eyewitnesses jamming television networks, loose-lips, amateur footage. It’s a tragic friendly-fire incident. Then the FBI step on the NTSB’s toes, the networks flip the narrative, Boeing do a sweetheart deal to take the rap, witnesses are intimidated, footage confiscated...tick tick tick- given time TWA, 9/11, MH370 and countless other controversies are deep in the bosom of the ocean buried. When Shakespeare said truth will out he was playing the long game.”
“What else d’you reckon on being covered up?”
“Look, it’s a long list. Who cares?”
“Me.”
“Why? What is this?”
“You’ve got an eye-opening perspective I’m happy to listen to.”
“Well, I talk too much.”
“One more story for the road, then.”
“This’ll scare you off, anyways. Animals are biological robots.”
“Biological robots?”
“The lights are on but no one’s at home, your pet is a biological cuddly toy. Well, some animals have souls, those will be family who want to be with you. So be careful. Your cat could be your mother.”
“So...could your Dad come back as your pet goldfish?”
“I see what you did there. Fish don’t get treats and belly rubs so what’s the point? Of course, none of this is easy to research. The wild west days of an unchlorinated Internet are gone.”
“I’ll add that to the list. Michael Gonzales, you’re under arrest for subversion of the Chinese state, misinformation crimes and conspiratorial beliefs for which there is no proof. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may harm your defence.”
“Oh crap.”
“Just kidding. You Gen Xers are something else. Last generation who grew up without Internet.”
“Funny you say that. My UFO quest began in 2000-ish when I, an Internet newbie, met an RAF reconnaissance pilot in a Yahoo chatroom. She didn’t talk shop but I asked her offhand if she’d seen a UFO and she told me a craft tracking her jet took off as soon as she went weapons warm. She and her co-pilot chased it from Scotland down to French airspace and were debriefed by three big wigs the next day, who said NASA tracked the thing leaving the atmosphere above Brazil at 38,000 miles an hour.”
“And you believed her?”
“Someone says they’re raped we take them seriously, someone saw a UFO there’s no evidence.”
“Right, just lots of stories.”
“I think it was Stalin who said quantity is its own form of quality.”
“Don’t you think you might be wrong?”
“I wish I was. I’ve lived a lonely life. Don’t YOU think you might be wrong?”
“I believe we choose our illusions, John. And I believe in kindness.”
“Good project. Respect.”
“Gotta go. Great talking to you. Stay lucky. And...get a shave, man. You’ve let yourself go a bit.”
“Will do.”
“Which way is the bus station?”
“That way.”
“I’m walking. Oh, and John? John’s your real name, isn’t it? Remember, we’re watching you.”