Someone's been running an operation on your head since the day you were born, and nobody thought to ask if you fancied it.

They call it the news. They call it the flag. They call it common sense. This week they're calling it disclosure — after eighty years of laughing at anyone who asked, they've decided all of a sudden to tell you about the aliens, and half the world's out in its garden with its neck cranked back, gawping at the sky. Which is exactly where they want your eyes. Up there. Anywhere but down here, where the money lives. Anywhere but sideways, at the person standing next to you.

That's the whole trick. It's the only one they've got and it's a beauty. Give people a monster to stare at so they never clock the machine. Give them a border, a boat, a bogeyman, a scrounger, and watch them go at each other's throats while the ones who actually run the place help themselves in the quiet. The Discordians had a name for it fifty years back. OPERATION MINDFUCK. They were right about everything except who'd end up doing it best. Turns out it wasn't the pranksters in the bowling alley. It was the palace.

So here's ours. And yeah, it's a mindfuck an' all. But this one's yours.

We hand you a lie. A big daft gorgeous obvious one. The moon's a hollow computer. The people in charge are lizards in good suits. There's a dead rock star who never quite managed to die and keeps turning up at the front of the crowd with a grin on him. None of it's true. We'll never once pretend it is. That's the gift — because the minute you've held a lie you can see straight through, you start clocking the ones you got handed for free and told to swallow whole. That's the trick, run backwards. We don't want you to believe us. We want to teach your eyes to work again.

Ziggy Roswell isn't a fella. He's a mask. And the beautiful thing about a mask is that anyone can wear it, you included, which is why they could never kill him and never will. He's not a saviour. Nobody's floating down out of the sky to sort this out for you — that's this week's lie, that's the whole point of the aliens. He's a dare. He walks in at ground level, one of us, until he isn't, and what he's after off you isn't worship. It's your two fingers up next to his.

Because this was always a fuck-you, so let's not be coy about it. A great big joyous working-class fuck-you to every polished liar who ever lied to a city and called it order, who ever buried the truth and called it an inquiry, who ever looked you dead in the eye and told you to know your place. But it's a fuck-you with the good tunes and the better company, delivered laughing, in the dark, a thousand of us moving as one — which is the one thing on God's earth they can't price, can't permit and can't confiscate. There's nothing they hate more than people enjoying each other without paying rent on it.

So come down. Down, not up. Off the phone, out of the garden, into the hole in the ground where the bass is. Look at whoever's next to you and clock that they were never the enemy. Learn the lens. Take the piss out of the powerful till they're just sad little reptiles in nice tailoring — and then, the hard bit, the only bit that counts, turn that same lens on your own face and have a good laugh at what's there. Question everything. Us most of all.

THEY TOLD YOU
TO LOOK UP.
DON'T.

Lizards walk among us. Lizards rule the earth.
Everybody — sing.