UAP Secrecy: The Magician’s Democracy and Our Managed Reality
Photo by Hamidreza Ardalani on Unsplash
Opinion
Written by Kevin Wright - 4 October 2024
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.
“We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17th, 1961.
For generations, we’ve believed that our democracy epitomizes transparency and accountability, where elected officials represent our will.
But what if our democracy is only a façade with a far more disturbing underlying truth: the real power in Washington is not necessarily always held by those we elect but sometimes by a cadre of unelected bureaucrats, indifferent to the public, especially those who show up to vote every election cycle?
These Machiavellian actors, deeply entrenched within government institutions over the course of decades, see elected officials not as the ultimate authority to seek council with but as temporary employees who can be manipulated or ignored.
Perhaps then, the democracy we were taught about in school or the one we were led to believe we lived in is instead a magician’s democracy, where the public is distracted by the illusion of democratic control. At the same time, the actual decision-makers hide in the shadows, pulling the strings.
Nowhere is this illusion more evident than in the secrecy surrounding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), or what is still more commonly referred to as UFOs.
The extreme lengths to which specific Executive Branch departments and agencies have reportedly gone to conceal the truth about UAP speak volumes about the nature of the underlying power structures and dynamics at play.
To reveal the whole truth about UAP would be to pull back the magician’s curtain on a broader managed reality carefully constructed and maintained by those with a specific illicit control.
We’ve been led to believe the people we elect to Congress and the White House have their hands on the levers of power in Washington.
However, it appears this assumption is increasingly naïve. Over the years, a permanent bureaucracy—composed of long-embedded career officials, particularly in the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense—has quietly amassed power.
These officials are rarely held accountable, often outlasting the comings and goings of multiple presidential administrations, and they answer not directly to the people but to the internal hierarchies they’ve constructed.
One of the primary reasons unelected bureaucrats have consolidated so much power is the slow, steady erosion of Congressional authority. Over the last several decades, the Legislative Branch has surrendered much of its constitutional power to the Executive Branch, often by delegating regulatory authority to executive departments and agencies.
This power transfer has given rise to what we now call the Administrative State, where executive agencies staffed by unelected officials have the authority to create, interpret, and enforce regulations without meaningful oversight from Congress.
To an extraordinary extent, lawmakers have frittered away their power, allowing the Executive Branch bureaucracy to grow and operate autonomously.
The power structure of the Administrative State has become so entrenched that even Congress and the President are often kept in the dark about critical issues, especially concerning matters like UAP.
Reports have alleged that some Presidents have not been fully briefed on UAP, including crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. At the same time, members of Congress have been routinely denied access to critical information despite their constitutional oversight responsibilities.
When the most powerful elected officials in the country are left in the dark, it becomes clear that those who control the flow of information, not those we elect, are the actual power brokers to an alarming great extent.
The decades-long struggle over government transparency and UAP disclosure is a perfect example of the dynamic I just described.
Despite growing public awareness and recent Congressional efforts to shine a light on this issue through hearings and legislation, the Administrative State continues to resist.
Full UAP disclosure threatens more than just government credibility and accountability. Such disclosure threatens to expose the very structure of how our reality is partly managed and manipulated behind the curtain, potentially altering our understanding of the world as we’ve come to know it.
In The Prince, Italian Renaissance diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli championed the principle that a ruler should seek to control the perception of his subjects to maintain authority.
Today’s unelected bureaucrats have mastered this principle. These Machiavellian actors promulgate narratives, some of which are false, to preserve their authority while keeping the public largely in the dark about the issues that threaten their status quo.
Indeed, UAP secrecy is not just about hiding technologies of unknown origin or the existence of non-human intelligence from public view or Congressional oversight.
No, the secrecy is also about maintaining a carefully curated version of reality where the government appears to be in control. At the same time, deeper truths remain obscured, as uncomfortable or unnerving as they may be.
The carefully managed reality we experience extends beyond UAP to encompass many other spheres of government operations. Full UAP disclosure would reveal not just the phenomenon itself but decades of institutional manipulation of public perception, including illegal disinformation campaigns against the American people.
Full disclosure would raise questions about other closely guarded secrets, such as intelligence operations, covert military programs, and perhaps instances of corporate-government collusion, i.e., crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs.
Now that some in Congress have been made aware of this managed reality, the UAP secrecy issue has placed the Legislative Branch at a crossroads.
If Congress does not act decisively, and soon, it risks altogether writing itself out of the UAP debate.
While legislative efforts, such as the proposed bipartisan Rounds-Schumer Unidentified Anomalous Disclosure Act (UAPDA) amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, are steps in the right direction, these steps must be bolstered by sustained civic action and political will. Otherwise, Congress will cede even more ground to the magicians who hide UAP-related information.
We are not merely engaged in a battle for government transparency on UAP. No, we are also in a war to restore Congress’ constitutional role in overseeing the Executive Branch and ensuring the American people know the truth about our lived reality.
Congress must recognize that its role in this debate is not just something to be polled or considered at a future date but crucial, and the active participation of every able and willing citizen is vital in this process.
At its core, the UAP issue tests our American democracy.
Will we continue to allow unelected officials to determine what we can and cannot know, or will we exercise our right to know and demand the truth?
The consequences of our inaction may be profound. If we allow UAP secrecy to persist, we consent to live in a continued managed reality where democracy is an illusion and much of the real power rests in the hands of those beyond the public’s reach.
The American public must participate to see meaningful change because this is not just an issue for our elected officials to reconcile against the Washington insiders; it is an issue that touches every citizen.
Suppose the public remains passive, waiting for disclosure to happen on its own. In that case, we risk the possibility that the only disclosure we’ll ever see is “catastrophic,” the kind that occurs too late when the consequences are beyond our control.
The public must take action to avoid the potentially devastating effects of such a disclosure.
Together, we will have to encourage our elected representatives (many of whom want to say yes), calling them, writing letters, and demanding answers. We have to write to the editors of our local newspapers, turn UAP transparency into a political issue, and make it clear that this is not a fringe concern but a matter of national importance.
Without sustained public pressure, elected officials will have little reason to challenge the entrenched bureaucratic interests that prefer to keep the truth hidden.
Though it is highly improbable at this point that the UAPDA, in part or its entirety, will be included in the Senate’s version of the FY25 NDAA, nothing is yet set in stone.
The Manager’s Package of 93 amendments (out of nearly 1,200 proposed) has already been filed. But as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said a little more than a week ago, “It is now too late for the Senate to discharge a fundamental obligation of this body—to provide for the common defense—and debate the annual Defense authorization and appropriations bills before the election.”
The Senate will not begin debate and vote on the NDAA until after the election, when it reconvenes on November 12th. Committees in the House and Senate will each hold a UAP-related hearing in November. Negotiations between the House and Senate over a final Conference Report on the NDAA are expected to continue past the Thanksgiving recess and into early December.
There is still time to make our voices heard and demand that the UAPDA, or critical elements of it, be included in the final Conference Report.
It’s time to pull back the curtain, end the magician’s tricks, and experience direct reality.
We must demand government transparency and responsible disclosure not just on UAP but on all matters where secrecy has shielded the powerful from accountability; only then can we restore a democracy that genuinely serves the people.
