What follows may at first glance seem a bit tangential, but bear with me . . .
In the splendidly titled I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me, author Trevor Paglen talks about the hidden language behind United States military patches.
Through a combination of touring bases, interviewing military and intelligence types, and using Freedom of Information requests, Paglen amassed a wealth of patch images and information.
These encompass everything from the American Civil War onwards.
However, it’s the patches relating to the Pentagon’s “Black Projects” that interest us here. These are the secret projects based out of places like California’s Edwards Air Force Base and Nevada’s Groom Lake complex, and involving contractors such as Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works.
Oddly, even though the programmes themselves are secret, the personnel involved do seem sometimes to use patches to indicate membership, and perhaps to warn that there are things about which they may not speak.
So here are one or two examples of black-world heraldry, together with a few tentative notes . . .
DRAGON
According to Paglen, this is an Area 51 US Air Force Black-Ops Sigint [signals intelligence] patch.
Ok, so here we have a patch showing a pretty scary winged dragon in full-on aggress mode apparently bestriding the Earth. There are 5 + 1 stars (Area 51?).
There’s also a slightly iffy-looking snake underneath, and a Latin phrase “Omnis Vestri Substructio Es Servus Ad Nobis” (“all your [underground] bases belong to us”)
Dragon legends are deeply embedded in almost all world cultures.
According to Wikipedia, they include the mušḫuššu of ancient Mesopotamia; Apep in Egyptian mythology; Vṛtra in the Rigveda; the Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible; Grand’Goule in France; Python, Ladon, Wyvern, and the Lernaean Hydra in Greek mythology; Jörmungandr, Níðhöggr, and Fafnir in Norse mythology; and the dragon from Beowulf.
Add in the likes of England, Wales, China, Iran, India, Korea, Albania, Russia, Ukraine and many others, and you get an idea of the ubiquity of dragon lore.
But the reputation of dragons is inconsistent across cultures. For some they are enemies to be feared and—where possible—killed. For others they are welcome bringers of wisdom and power.
The word itself derives from the Greek drákōn and the Latin draco.
Which brings us to the star system Alpha Draconis and a species believed by many to have originated there: the self-serving and power-hungry Draco.
We’re well into the (currently) unprovable here, but some say that many hundreds of thousands of years ago the Draco were the original inhabitants of Earth. And that when noisy, fecund humanity arrived on the scene, they retreated underground, where they still exist to this day . . .
This may or may not be connected with the so-called Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs), hundreds of which are said to exist around the world. These would be miles-deep, many-layered secret installations, with humans occupying the first few levels—often in partnership with other species—and with the Draco in the off-limits lower levels.
So do our underground installations really belong to the dragons?
Ex-military whistleblower Corey Goode has spoken of an encounter with a fearsome white “Ciakar”—an all-white winged Draco royal some 30-feet (9 metres) tall, with ferocious telepathic powers that he says can feel like mind-rape to humans. Artist Vashta Narada has portrayed this encounter here.
Coming back to the verifiably archaeological, statuettes have been found from the pre-Sumerian Ubaid period (c. 6500–3800 BC) that have strong reptilian characteristics—one even showing a mother with her distinctly reptilian infant at her breast.
Well, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the dragon here. If you want to find out more, why not do some digging and research of your own . . .
SNAKE / SERPENT
Paglen says this is a National Reconnaissance Office Program patch, but confesses its meaning is “entirely obscure”.
The image of the serpent is just as prevalent as that of the dragon, and again their reputation is mixed.
For some, the most common point of reference is the serpent in the Garden of Eden who led mankind astray against “God’s” wishes. And equally, the Book of Revelation speaks very ill of the creature in chapter 20:
“1 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that [hmm, interesting] he must be released for a little while.”
But on another reading, the serpent in the Garden is actually doing man- (and woman-)kind a favour by putting them on an evolutionary path—giving them “the knowledge of good and evil,” letting them reproduce, and making them self-aware (and therefore needing clothes).
Other cultures have a similarly positive view of the serpent, including the Aztecs, whose Quetzalcoatl deity is often translated as “feathered serpent”; also in India and across Asia, where the Nāgas are a semi-divine race of half-human half-serpent beings, often considered beneficial.
A reflection of this positive view can be seen in the Rod of Asclepius, a staff with an entwined snake widely used to signify medicine, and to be found on the WHO (World Health Organization) logo.
So what’s the story with the Latin inscription on this snakes-over-the-world patch, which translates as “Never Before, Never Again.”
Does the National Reconnaissance Office know something we don’t? . . .
ALIEN GREY I
Here we have the US Air Force logo surmounted by a recognisably alien head of the type usually referred to as “Grey.”
According to Paglen, TENCAP is an acronym for “Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities”—basically programmes that develop battlefield applications from reconnaissance satellite intelligence
“Special” in this context usually means “highly classified.”
The phrase “Oderint Dum Metuant” is often associated with megalomaniacal Roman emperor Caligula, and translates as “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
So presumably it is the Greys who are the “they” referred to in the inscription.
ALIEN GREY II
There’s a lot going on in this patch. According to Paglen, the superscript originally read “Classified Flight Test,” until the US Air Force objected and insisted it be changed.
The Grey is here holding a B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber. The Greek sigma symbol refers to the aircraft’s very low radar signature. The “509” refers to the 509th Bomb Wing, the United States’ first nuclear bomb squadron, originally based at Roswell, New Mexico (now at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri).
It was at Roswell in 1947 that one of the first publicized alien captures was made—an initial press headline at the time read: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.” This was later subject to official contradiction, and all subsequent information classified.
However, the first military man on the crash scene, Major (later Colonel) Jesse Marcel—who initially went along with the official cover-up story of a crashed weather balloon—kept diaries about the affair, later published by his son under the title The Roswell Legacy.
It seems there was indeed a crashed extraterrestrial disc, and many of the technological innovations in the years that followed—including the stealth technology incorporated into the B-2 bomber—were the product of reverse-engineering from that find.
Hence the alien-bomber-509 link-up on the patch.
In his 1997 book The Day After Roswell, the late Col. Philip J. Corso listed some of the other technological developments which he maintains were similarly seeded by reverse-engineering the extraterrestrial craft—from lasers to integrated circuitry, from fibre-optics to particle-beam devices, vastly improved night-vision scopes (an earlier version had been in use by the German army during WWII), Kevlar and even Velcro, his list is long . . .
Whoever thought up the revised superscript sure had a sense of humour and/or knew a thing or two: to the right and left are a knife and fork, and the inscription (in a sort of dog-Latin) translates as “Tastes Like Chicken.”
This is a reference to a Twilight Zone episode (S3E24), where the tag “to serve man” turns out to be a play on words, the punchline being “it’s . . . it’s a cookbook!”
So. A sneaky way to get out a few otherwise classified truths? Or just some tongue-in-cheek US military mischief?
I’m not here to convince, just to highlight some of the things that have interested me during my own research journey.
If they interest you too and encourage you to do some delving of your own, well great.
If not, well that’s fine too.
As always, dig for yourself, think for yourself, decide for yourself . . .