Thursday, April 07, 2011

Beautiful, wonderful interwebs

I've expressed my love of the internet before. I think it's great. There are so many genuinely life-improving elements to the web that even as a den of iniquity it is still a thing of wonder. It connects me with things I'd never have known about, and has expanded my interests and improved both my writing and my drawing capabilities. Fan-blinkin'-tastic.

It's also good for opening your eyes, be that in regard to political or social injustice or simply to the musings of a group of people who are genuinely convinced of the existence of extra-terrestrials among us. I'm not for or against the ET crowd, because it strikes me that I only know a very small corner of the world, the corner which I inhabit. Oh, I learn fragments of other things when I can, but I have hardly scratched the surface of the rich diversity of human life.

Whilst scanning around the Google Analytics stats for our company's website I found that we had been visited by the Navy Network Information Centre (NNIC). Curious about this traffic source, I popped over to Google and had a quick search. One of the first few hits directed me to a site called abovetopsecret.com, which appears to principally deal with the concept that the US government has a lot to cover up. Fair enough, they probably do. Perhaps it's their business, and they did what they did for the right reasons, and perhaps it isn't, and they didn't. Who am I to say? I've not seen the facts. However, from this website I followed a link to another site, ufo-blogger.com, and this page (clicky).

The page contains a traffic source report from the site highlighting the visit of the NNIC to ufo-blogger, having apparently followed a link from Google, generated by the search term "bob dean and wikileaks ufo". Apparently, this means that the NNIC is "Crawling Internet Ahead of Upcoming Wikileaks UFO Disclosure". Now, if like me you study the report carefully, you'll notice one visit for the day - and three in total - with the latest lasting 1m22s.

I don't really want to burst their bubble, but I can't help feeling that perhaps this was someone who works at NNIC having a surf of the internet over a coffee. You can almost hear the conversation now.

Jim: "Hey, Bob, those wackos on the internet reckon they're going to leak some filers about UFOs. Haha!"
Bob: "Really, Jim?"
Jim: "Yeah, Bob. Hell, all you have to do is search for 'bob dean and wikileaks ufo' and you'll see what I mean!"
Bob: "Haha! Yeah, I'll do that while I'm drinking this cup of coffee."

Somehow three hits hardly seems to be conclusive evidence that the US government is after our souls. Of course, it might just be cleverly designed to make us think that way...

The truth is out there. In a box set of the X-Files.