One thing a bureaucracy does well is follow simple directions,  The outcome may be horrible, but that is not a concern. Asked to generate more money, the bureaucrats will concoct more taxes, no problem, it isn’t their money- yet. Consequences are a separate matter for others to worry about.

Regarding this Space Conspiracy, the bureaucratic wing just did what it does best.. The Prime Directive was Secrecy, so everything kept getting more and more compartmentalized. Since the starting position was one of almost complete ignorance and that fact was one of the important details to be kept secret at any cost, the need-to-know protocol was taken to new extremes. Internal cover stories had to be written to mollify various Departments so that they’d think they knew enough to do their jobs, but still not know what anyone else was doing. This kept the Whole Picture restricted to a very small number of people. That part worked fairly well, but meant that very little progress was made toward attaching any true meaning to what was Out There. Why was the entire Solar System covered with not-quite ruins of benign content but troubling aspect? Why were the expletive-deleted EBEs (the various Alien Races) so interested, and yet their stories and motives so contradictory? Where were the Useful Artifacts?  

	R8799389 from Pathfinder. They neglected to mention to the public that the peculiar "skies" were actually walls. Probably just an oversight.

Some of the Elite insiders knew that the Visitors, and probably most of the other aliens, were lying much of the time, so their council was unreliable, but it was hard to expand the range of perspectives without compromising the essential secrecy. Fiction writers were solicited to speculate on various permutations, and the resulting stories studied, but that hardly constituted Good Science. From the earliest days, some writers had been brought into the think tanks, and some of them had grasped the Big Picture better than the Conspirators themselves. Read Heinlein’s  Stranger In A Strange Land.  But even that book is less accurate than the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had gotten his inspiration from esoteric texts about the Ancient Mysteries and Native American myth.  

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The answer to the truly Big Questions, namely what had happened to the Martian civilization and how, eluded even the writers. The links with Earth were obvious, and well detailed in myth and legend, once one realized they were there, but in that particular area of the specific Fate of the Old Culture, even the ancient accounts veered in all sorts of directions. So the Conspiracy stuck with the plan, promulgating a Scientific View of the Solar System. Mars  was not a place where Man had ever been, nor could he live there now. Thus, any SF saying otherwise was just “quaint”. Nonetheless, Malin Space Science Systems, responsible for many of the cameras, secured the website URL of www.barsoom.com. Dreams die hard. And, of course, they knew better anyway.  

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	Sometimes you see things on Mars that are so ordinary, so easy to relate to in familiar emotional terms that it almost has more impact than the scenes reminiscent of ERB or Lin Carter. In the lower left. we see an extremely annoyed woman glaring at a very smug fellow- who is wearing a collar. We don't know if it is of the shirt, clerical, or marital variety. But he is in trouble, that is clear.

The Brookings Institute was commissioned to produce a study that “concluded” that the ramifications to Society of disclosure of any extraterrestrial civilization would be Bad, Very Bad. As contemporary political polls demonstrate almost daily, you can easily get the results you pay for. But the Brookings Report continues to be cited as public justification for secrecy in such areas. The absurdity of this  is seldom addressed. If it is a public document , and it says some people would be disturbed to find out they were not alone, and that others had preceded them, then the embedded presumption of the argument is that those things are in fact true. The putative disturbees therefore already are aware. Lalalala, I’m not listening, lalalala, I can’t hear you, lalalala. Fine. If you’re going to walk around with your fingers in your ears, why should anyone worry about you anyway? It has never been about that. It is all about protecting the Establishment, not the citizens. If a manufacturer makes rotten cars, they go out of business, but there are other cars to buy. Better cars. Do I need to spell out the analogy?

If you are religious, then relate to God, not your church/temple/synagogue/mosque. He’s been waiting to hear from you.  Goddess worshippers already know that part, so I’m not being sexist- the Establishment is very patriarchal. Anyway, you lose nothing- it’s that CTSM which tries to isolate you, for no better reason than to perpetuate itself. God loves everybody. If you are Atheist, just stop being so sullenly existential and realize the Universe is not meaningless after all. You can die broke and alone, but it won’t be over. Oh, Scientists? I’m sorry you worked so hard and long on analysis of bogus data, but NASA has paid your bills for many years, so get over it. OK, all fixed. See? You can handle the Truth after all. You are about to learn what an amazing Being you really are.

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