The Politics of UFO Disclosure
True UFO Disclosure is only the first step; it’s the second and third steps that are scaring decision-makers
Written by Justin Scott Snead - 22 February 2022
Imagine if reporters for the New York Times ever get the receipts - all of them - on the 2004 Tic-Tac incident, or just one of the rumored UFO crash retrieval operations.
By creating a nondescript explanatory category that the report calls “a catchall ‘other’ bin” the UAPTF report makes clear that we (at least publicly) are nowhere near an official consensus on what is causing these sightings.
Many of the public statements made by government officials in 2021 were designed to push meaningful action far into the future. The thing to watch in 2022 is whether this stance changes or becomes entrenched as the new company line.
To move out of the current crouch, a new mindset might be needed. - it’s a simple idea: withholding this news from the public for another day is simply wrong.
Photo by Dyana Wing So on Unsplash
Ever since “flying saucer” reports first made U.S. national news in 1947, the public has wondered when or if the truth would ever be disclosed.
Well, if Luis Elizondo has anything to do with the matter, we can expect a positive outcome.
Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's UFO investigative unit, has the following promise pinned to the top of his Twitter profile:
“I will always push for full disclosure”
In one sense, UFO (otherwise known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP) disclosure is simply releasing available information. And Elizondo seems to be counseling a rip-off-the-band aid approach to his former colleagues in the defense and intelligence agencies.
Elizondo said recently,
“We need to make sure that we provide relevant information to our senior leaders … Let the chips fall where they fall.”
But doing that, especially publicly, will trigger the need to build consensus and take some form of collective action.
Those hurdles might be the reason why information is not being shared in the first place.
A Long Commitment
Politics was once described by German Political Economist Max Weber as the “slow boring of hard boards”. What Weber meant is that meaningful change takes commitment and patience measured not by years but decades.
Social change is hard because it requires two expensive, labour-intensive social inputs: widespread consensus and concerted action.
Those who have studied UFOs know all about long-haul commitment and patience.
In 2022, change is definitely in the air.
But let’s take a look at those two essential components of social change--consensus and action--and see where we are. We may be further away than we’d like to think, at least in terms of our unelected officials.
First, let’s define our terms.
Consensus occurs when a truth has been established. An issue has coalesced into a single story that is generally accepted by most people in society. Leaders can expect that few people will challenge the story. The time for debate is over. Usually, this story is captured in a written document, either an investigative report by an authoritative newspaper or the summary of a blue-ribbon commission.
Action is when elected leaders or heads of organizations commit to meaningful and concrete measures that address the issue around which a consensus has just been formed.
In January of this year, a front-page article in The New York Times conclusively proved that in 2017 a U.S. Special Operations unit bombed a dam in Syria that was on a no-strike list, risking the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.
Two days after the strike occurred, the commander in charge of the mission against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq ascribed stories about the bombing to “crazy reporting” and suggested ISIS was responsible.
Though it took them five years, The New York Times got the receipts. One week after the article was published, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III ordered the military to completely change its mindset and policies regarding civilian harm on the battlefield.
The consensus was forced, action followed.
Imagine if reporters for the New York Times ever get the receipts - all of them - on the 2004 Tic-Tac incident, or just one of the rumored UFO crash retrieval operations.
Consensus: the entire Congress on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for the 9/11 remembrance ceremony in 2011
Consensus Denied: only Democrats attend a vigil on the one year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
After 9/11 the federal government completely reorganized how law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and air travel operates in the USA.
The terrorist attacks were not the direct cause of this change. Congress created an independent commission that was charged by law to create a “full and complete account” of what happened on that day.
The consensus was formed, action followed.
Imagine if Congress created a commission of independent experts to provide a full and complete account of UFOs in American skies since 2004, or since 1947. Imagine the changes to our society that would flow from that report, that would be demanded by it.
I wager that even veteran ufologists would have a hard time imagining all of those changes, and there lies the problem for our risk-averse political leaders.
Disclosure Generates Consensus
The United States Air Force (or USAF) took its first stab at drafting a consensus-forming document about UFOs in 1948.
Project Sign’s preliminary Estimate of the Situation detailed 375 UFO sightings since 1947 and concluded that extraterrestrial visitors were the most likely explanation.
But the Air Force Chief of Staff stopped this consensus in its tracks, pulled the report from circulation, and chastised Project Sign for not having nearly enough evidence to support their conclusions.
The USAF went on to try to manufacture the consensus that UFOs were caused by tricks of the eye, hallucinations, and mass hysteria.
True consensus on the UFO question has been elusive ever since.
Another preliminary report, written 73 years later, reached for a more narrow consensus. The “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” released by the Director of National Intelligence in 2021, succeeded in mainstreaming the idea that UFOs are physical craft with inexplicable capabilities.
This is a remarkable advancement of the UFO consensus, and it spurred significant actions by Congress to continue the investigations.
But other elements of the report suggest that in the long quest for disclosure these seventy-odd years might be only the end of the beginning.
Of the 143 unexplained UFO “incidents” covered by the report, the authors refuse to speculate on what they might be.
By creating a nondescript explanatory category that the report breezily calls “a catchall ‘other’ bin” the authors make clear that we (at least publicly) are nowhere near an official consensus on what is causing these sightings.
The “GIMBAL” UFO was captured on the USS Roosevelt’s radar in January 2015. In 2020, the Department of Defense authorized the release of three UFO videos and vouched for their authenticity, which contributed to the consensus that UFOs are real craft.
What’s more, the public summary of the report withholds any of the evidence that would support one of its highlights - that UFOs are real craft and could represent breakthrough aerospace capabilities.
This omission blocks consensus of this fact from becoming incontrovertible, hampering its ability to spread widely.
The report’s allergy to consensus-formation is evident not just in what it leaves out, but in what it does say. It defines the “Other” category this way:
“Although most of the UAP described in our dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them.
We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them.”
This language strongly implies that UFOs won’t be openly acknowledged as whatever they are until new laws of physics are written that explain their observed capabilities.
On one hand, this level of cautionary judgment is admirable.
On the other hand, it may absolve government agencies from ever having to make a definitive public judgment.
Acquiring the requisite “additional scientific knowledge” will take a very long time indeed. Are we to expect that no one in the government can draw any conclusions about UFOs until the next Einstein or Hawking is born, goes to college, and invents the next theory on quantum gravity? Until then, they could not possibly comment?
Reread the last sentence of the report quoted above and note the would verb tense. None of the 143 UFO cases are categorized as “Other” in the report.
They are free-floating, unknown, inexplicable mysteries. The authors are essentially saying that only after the next Einstein or Hawking does come along to tell them what’s what, will they feel confident in officially calling UFOs “other.”
Only then will they be merely unidentified. We are left to imagine some distant future scenario that would allow them to feel confident enough to call UFOs off-world vehicles. We may have our own UFO technology by then.
Consensus Necessitates Action
Current high-level government employees seem to have taken their cues from this aspect of the UFO report, and it has made them adept at tiptoeing around the big question: what are UFOs?
One reason they may sound so cagey is that revealing more would require them to take actions that they may not be prepared to take.
Many of the public statements in 2021 were designed to push meaningful action far into the future. The thing to watch in 2022 is whether this stance changes or becomes entrenched as the new company line.
In November 2021, David Ignatius interviewed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson together. He asked about the UAP report’s “Other” category. Haines replied:
“That basically indicated that we were not going to be able to characterize every single one of these reports, in the various categories that we’d identified, because frankly, we were not able to understand everything about it.”
In other words, we’re not going to say that UFOs are true unknowns until we understand everything about them. Even if she did not mean literally everything, which would be an impossibility, the clear connotation points toward avoiding classification.
Then Ignatius asked a softball version of the big question: “how will we know if the Earth is being observed?” Haines then gave the same cautious line first laid down in the UAP report:
“We do our analysis as we normally would… But it doesn't mean that we are definitely going to be able to tell if we are being observed under the circumstance. I mean I think there’s a lot of different ways that might be revealed.
But certainly, we’re working to make sure that we understand what we do see, what phenomenon is identified, and otherwise, we’re going to have to wait for Bill’s [NASA’s] science work I think to actually reveal some of these additional possibilities. Not to mention some of the other people [Avi Loeb and Jeff Bezos] that I think you will talk to later today.”
And what about Bill Nelson’s “science work” at NASA? Whenever he is asked what he thinks UFOs are, Nelson gives some version of this pleasant-sounding non-sequitur:
“Who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
After he became NASA administrator in May 2021, he stated to the press that he had asked NASA scientists to investigate UFOs. When CNN pressed for details, this is what was reported:
“NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness said Nelson did not establish a formal task force to begin investigating UFOs. However, he did direct researchers to move forward with exploring any lines of questioning around the topic as they see fit.”
So far as we know, NASA has not taken any public formal, concerted action to tackle the “science work” that Haines and the UAP report say is necessary to explain what is going on in our skies.
In an August 2021 interview with Politico, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall was even franker, some might argue reckless, stating:
“I would have to see evidence that [UAP] was something worthy of the attention of the United States Air Force as a threat. Our job is to protect the United States against threats. I have a lot of known threats out there that we’re working very hard to protect the United States against. I’d like to focus on those.”
All three of these government managers are giving different versions of the same message.
These are not people signaling intent to take strong action.
However, we must also note that there are indications that Haines is now working hard behind the scenes to ensure appropriate investigative actions are taken in line with Congress’s intent as included within UAP sections of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.
Nevertheless, knitting these previous public statements together, it’s not hard to imagine that a kind of internal prime directive has been applied within the military and intelligence agencies, including the former UAP Task Force.
It goes something like this: ‘We’re never going to go out on a limb until it’s clear to everyone what these things are. Defining these things is not our call, not our job, not our duty. We’ll collect the data, and provide a framework for research. That’s it.’
Unless something changes, this approach could persist for years, no matter how clear the next UFO video or picture is.
The Department of National Intelligence or Pentagon could release a simple press statement:
Yes, that is a UFO; it’s flying Warp 2 over South Dakota; we still don’t know what it is.
In 1951 Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was assigned to lead the office that became Project Blue Book
If you doubt this, the military has followed the same aloof approach since it was codified in 1951 by the USAF’s very first UFO office.
Edward Ruppelt established the policy that if they…
“Could not identify the reported object as being… one of half a hundred other common things that are sometimes called UFOs, we would mark the folder ‘Unknown’ and file it in a special file.”
Ruppelt admitted in his book that any “wild speculating” about spaceships was a firing offense in his office.
In the summer of 1952, during a rash of UFO sightings across the country including over Washington D.C., Ruppelt attended many heated meetings in the Pentagon where, “there was a group of officers in intelligence fighting hard to get the UFO ‘recognized” as “interplanetary spaceships.”
They were overruled, and the consensus they were trying to spark never materialized.
The Leader’s Role
In fairness to Haines, Nelson, and Kendall, it’s not their job to project a consensus-forming narrative onto UFOs.
The only group within our government whose job and skill set it is to craft and present narratives to the public is the political class of elected leaders.
Building consensus and giving calls to action are political acts. They are the province of the political, moral, and intellectual leaders of society.
For change to happen, leaders must step out in front of the crowd and point the way forward.
The problem our leaders face is that once they tell us ‘UFOs are the result of non-human intelligence visiting the Earth’, they will then have to follow that statement with, ‘and here is what we are going to do about it.’
The fact that our leaders may not know what to do, or if they do, not want to commit to it, is making them hedge on the first part.
How might we move beyond this impasse?
Since 2017, the national security tactic for disclosure has been successful in shifting the conversation from giggle-inducing UFOs to a more serious focus on unidentified craft in our airspace.
But to move out of the current crouch, a new mindset might be needed. It’s a simple idea: withholding this news from the public for another day is simply wrong.
In my line of work as a history curriculum developer, Foundational Documents are produced whenever leaders set pen to paper in order to forge consensus on the most important issue of the age.
The Declaration of Independence.
The Gettysburg Address.
Letter from the Birmingham Jail.
These authors provide a searing, clarifying account of reality as they see it, followed by a call to action.
They are not concerned with tactics, scientific truth, and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. They make moral arguments.
The exigencies of the moment, or perhaps some higher spirit, have put a pen of fire in their hand, and thunder in their lungs.
As it always has been, for better or worse, our future is in the hands of our politicians.
Of all the questions about UFOs, the most pressing is this: who among them will rise up?
If the leadership of Senators Gillibrand and Rubio (among others) are matched by actions, then 2022 could be a very positive year.
Both are ambitious politicians who have staked their political capital on the UFO question. Both Rubio and Gillibrand are public servants who appear to hold the interests of the American people above whatever lesser concerns have driven unelected officials to obfuscate on this topic for decades.
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