prompt: just, title: you won't believe your eyes in misc. flash fiction

They say “necessity is the mother of invention”, and while that’s often true, it omits the part where necessity often also skips right past intention, how so many of our great leaps forward developed out of lucky happy accidents as opposed to effort intense. Take for example how we managed to convince you the skies above aren’t empty, even though they are, nothing excepting empty space and stars. It was mostly just by accident we convinced you there were aliens and, man, it has paid dividends since then.

The first of us was just a press flack for Army brass that day in Roswell when one of the new spy-craft crashed, in fact. Just another failed attempt at taking low-orbit photographs collecting information on the Soviets but the discovery as such of it could lead to an international incident, maybe even the Third World War well ahead of schedule. Knowing the truth was dangerous, he whipped up a cover story about aliens that the next day, one of his higher-ups retracted for some gibberish about weather balloons. He was almost drummed out of the military for it but then, it turned out, none of you were fooled by the story about the weather balloons but enough of you believed the alien story to distract the public from the obvious. Within a year, he was the one in charge and the “Men in Black” were born.

There’s something broken in the American mind that wants to believe in magic so badly the best way to cover up the mundane horrors of this land is to hint at the impossible fantastic and damn if you all don’t eat it up like pigs gorged on stolen truffles. If a scandal needs defusing, we just run some pretty lights through the skies. Have a few spooky well-dressed men knock on some doors as psycho-social slight-of-hand. The truth’s always so much more boring than you could ever care to understand. “Cattle mutilations” covering up atomic-test radiation mutating herds. Averting sex scandals by having shrinks convince victims their memories were alien abductions instead of repressed flashes of assaults. It’s always just some rich guy making more money or covering his transgressions but if we can suggest the supernatural, you all just take your eyes off the ball as you’ll do anything to believe the impossible is real. We manufacture shell companies hawking health supplements so we can buy the ads that prop up conspiracy-theory podcasts, trick you into raiding “Area 51” instead of protesting internment camps at the border. All in the day’s work selling science-fiction to maintain far more horribly ordinary law-and-order.

I made up “chemtrails” myself one day mishearing “contrails” in some boring briefing and got myself promoted, don’t you know. But no, of course, you don’t know. You’ll instead choose to believe that these are that lies and that there are still fantastic magical conspiracies out there just beyond your grasping finger-tips. And that’s good. That’s exactly what we want you to believe.