Is Disclosure Still A Myth? [Trenchant Edges]
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 49 seconds. Contains 2965 words
Three years ago on this very newsletter I said UFO Disclosure was bullshit.
I’ve read dozens more books on the subject, listened to thousands of hours of audio about it, and read thousands of pages of government documents relating to the subject.
Do I think it’s still bullshit?
Let’s find out.
This is the Trenchant Edges. I’m your humble narrator Stephen. If you’re reading this, I love you.
Welcome.
UFOlogy’s Diet Apocalypse
Disclosure is the word UFO fans and researchers use to describe the end of government secrecy around UFOs, presumably with the revelation that UFOs are real and what they are.
Why should you listen to me? Well, don’t maybe. But I first got into this in middle school in the late 90s when I found David Jacobs’ books on alien abductions. That sparked an interest that lasted for about a decade until the late 00s when I stumbled on an old MUFON speech by Bill Moore, one of the guys who broke the Roswell story.
Bill admitted that he’d been a confidential informant on the UFO community for the feds and specifically worked with Airforce Counter intelligence officer Richard Doty to help mislead Paul Benewitz. This happened in 1989.
Realizing that CIs were admitting their affiliations meant that, for sure, a whole bunch of others who’d made the same “Hey maybe I’ll get some secrets out of it” deal with the very orgs tasked with keeping those secrets soured me on UFOs.
At best this was profoundly foolish shit of them. At worst, it was proof the entire field was itself government disinformation. Hard to know for sure but easy to figure out who not to trust: Anyone loudly calling themselves a UFOlogist.
Which brings us back to my earlier writing on the subject: The Myth Of Disclosure is OK. It’s very obvious that I hadn’t gotten my teeth into UFO history in a while, but I think the overall points hold up.
At the time I continued to think the most likely outcome by far is that UFO disclosure is more or less a nothing burger. Like the Panama Papers or the other big financial leaks that did very little to move the needle on ruling class corruption, we’re not going to be saved by finding out aliens exist.
I reasoned that if you have a secret machine that keeps everything it can secret and hates to be embarrassed or to admit when it does crimes… you can’t then assume that their holding secrets and doing crimes are for the reasons you imagine.
The secret machine, borne out of early cold war paranoia, would keep anything it thought was a weakness secret.
And those instincts have passed down to the institutions who still keep all their secrets and crimes away from the public today.
This much we can say for sure: We do not know, and may never know, the full extent of the crimes of the US government, The Department of Defense, The Department of Energy, or the Intelligence Community.
Lue Elizondo’s Imminent
Since things kicked off in 2017 with that NYT article, we’ve had a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Contrary to a lot of the news, reputable military pilots have been reporting weird crap in the sky that defy physics since at least WW2.
(I’ll probably have to start it with Tom Delonge from Blink 182’s emails with John Podesta so it’ll have to begin before the NYT article)
Part of why this newsletter has been delayed (alongside just the crazy shit this month has been), is I was trying to read through Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent and I just really dislike the man.
Elizondo claims to have lead AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program from 2010-2017. The DoD says the program closed down in 2012. This may seem like a contradiction, but Elizondo’s book actually clears it up: he used his authority as a civilian contractor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence to make the program a special access program under his control.
So, to know the program existed at all you’d need to ask him about it.
Lue’s book is pretty good actually. Not because it gives any answers, but because it lays out the thought process of a career bureaucrat doing military industrial complex shit: “OK, I want to get X done, so I need to hide it from anyone above me who might disapprove”.
To be clear, I view Lue as an extremely untrustworthy person. He’s maybe the highest profile liar in the UFO world at the moment. Which is funny, because as I’ve said before I feel like David Grusch (the main UFO whistleblower who shares his exact claims) is sincere or a spectacular liar.
Luis is merely good. I’m unsure his overall goals but I see some core problems with his story. Or rather, less his story than his intentions. I don’t get the sense in his book that he’s trying to get the reader to believe things he doesn’t, I get the sense he wants those things framed in a specific, highly motivated way.
The big one is he wants to be worshipped as a hero. There’s not really any other way to interpret the self-mythologizing in this book, kickstarted in the foreword by heir of the Mellon banking family Christopher Mellon. Mellon’s introduction literally starts by describing the Great Man theory of history and ends by saying that Lue has been pivotal in changing the context on the greatest question in all of human history.
Very subtle.
What makes me distrust him more in this book is about what he doesn’t say. He claims to have read all the classified files on Project Bluebook, the third of the Air Force’s UFO investigations and he treats it in a way I find very odd. First, he treats it just like many UFO researchers do: Purely as a disinformation campaign.
Which is odd because I’ve read enough of their documentation (most notably Special Report 14) to know that There was an apparently sincere internal effort to understand what was going on that clearly states that some shit is actually happening.
Why would a DoD guy not want to point that out?
It gets weirder: There are three levels of classification in the DoD: Confidential, Secret, and Top secret. Bluebook was a Confidential program that explicitly didn’t handle cases where threats to national security were suspected. There was another program also based at Wright Patterson that handled those.
We don’t know what that more secret program was called but we have a pretty good idea, thanks to declassified documents, who was doing it: The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC).
ATIC was active in the 40s and 50s and did the heavy lifting on reverse engineering Soviet equipment and technical capabilities are fucking fascinated as a student of the cold war. And UFOs were absolutely in their wheelhouse.
These were some of the best of the best in the DoD, the most knowledgeable people tackling the toughest problems. They were folded into some other department in 1960 or so and there’s a decent chunk declassified about them.
So why doesn’t Lue talk about them? Not even in passing.
These guys absolutely are American national heroes unsung because their work was too important. Soldiers love talking about that kind of shit and even I walked away from reading the documents I could find thinking they ruled.
At best, ATIC is just a weird digression that doesn’t serve his point.
He only ever talks about “The Legacy Program” which is obviously vague and not intended to be, like, a specific code word program.
I have a lot to say about ATIC… just not here. It’s a rabbit hole I rarely see people going into and one of the more fascinating stories in the whole field.
Anyway, Lue also claims that he has psychic powers from a brief training with the guy who headed Project Stargate, the US Remote viewing project.
I literally have all 6GB of Project Stargate declassified documents and if you ever want me to get to it, please subscribe so I can afford to not work. lol.
But the main thing that bugs me about Lue is his staunch hypernationalism mixed with him committing to undermining the core value of the institutions he once dedicated his life to: Secrecy.
His main stint with the military was doing counter intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fundamental job of CI is protecting your secrets from other spies.
This is a career secret-keeper who’s now very loudly telling people he wants everyone to know some secrets.
That is… unusual.
And he doesn’t address any other issues of secrecy within the national security state. At best he touches on overclassification once or twice, but never as a systemic problem. Like, none of the UFO secrecy problems are unique to this issue. It’s pervasive and it drives up how much public money the DoD needs and ensures much of it is spent on bullshit.
This is actually a very important problem at the heart of the military industrial complex.
Secrecy buys our “betters” the space to do whatever they want and a lot of what they do would be crimes elsewhere.
He comes back again and again to how secrecy, in the context of UFOs, is toxic to our nation’s character. And he’s absolutely right about that.
But he either doesn’t notice or denies how general the problem is or how much it’s harmed the American public both directly, like when the military poisons our own people or indirectly by siphoning money away from public goods. Secrecy creates the empire.
He’s not a dumb guy.
But he presents himself as a true believer in the American project, which is the right affect for this kind of whistleblower. I buy it from Grusch who repeatedly states that the secrecy is important and good. I don’t buy it from Elizondo when he tries to play both sides of security here.
He’s selling a line.
I don’t know what his actual intentions are but I don’t think he can be trusted for shit.
There are a bunch of other rabbit holes in this book but most of them just come back to this point.
Many of them he doesn’t really come back to at all. Like, there’s a whole thing about strange maybe devices being implanted by… someone?
“My former training in microbiology likely made me a bit of a nuisance to Will, kind of like a Cub Scout asking an Army Ranger to be his mentor. But Will was always the gentleman, and if he felt that way, he never let on. My specific interests involved alleged alien implants found in humans. From what I read, often living tissue grew around implants, but such growths never contained anything but the patient’s DNA in them. The growths sometimes sprouted multiple brightly colored hairs or filaments, similar to Morgellons fibers. When researchers scrape away the human tissue, they find objects that resemble a technical device in size and shape but without any circuitry whatsoever. I once handled one of these implants myself, provided to me by a hospital in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where it had been removed from a US military servicemember who had encountered a UAP. The material, no longer or wider than a joint of one of your fingers, looked more like a microchip encapsulated by a slimy semitranslucent casing of tissue. It looked very similar to mother-of-pearl. Under a microscope, it was still moving somehow. The doctor hypothesized that it had its own metabolism. AAWSAP/AATIP had also obtained photographs of these sorts of tiny objects from living foreign military pilots. Some of the specimens that have been removed from individuals were allegedly sent to various medical institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where some of the most deadly viruses are under lock and key and the watchful eye of armed guards. Although I asked often, Will never commented to me about any involvement he may have had regarding alleged implants, but it didn’t stop me from asking whenever I could.”
Institutionalizing Weirdness
In my original piece on UFOs on the DNI’s declassified report on UAP back in 2021 I said I thought this was mainly just trying to freak enough people out to siphon some of that sweet defense money.
My thinking on that has, well, shifted a bit.
Steve Greenstreet and others have argued that Grusch, Elizondo, Mellon, and others represent a kind of DoD UFO cult. True believers trying to push their weird ideas onto the institution.
I agree with his distrust, but not their conclusion.
My working hypothesis, which we’ll be investigating at length over the next year, is that this represents a kind of counter intelligence blowback. In the 80s, airforce counter intelligence used Paul Bennewitz to reshape a lot of the UFO community’s founding ideas.
Things took on a darker and more paranoid edge than they had in the 70s.
These guys all grew up in the wake of UFO culture and had their beliefs shaped by it. This is probably irrelevant to whatever their predecessors in the 80s were trying to hide.
I think UFOs are a really interesting way of viewing how the National Security establishment deals with what’s more or less junk data.
Even if UFOs are real, their sightings don’t really fit in well with shit. Unless it’s true they actually have crash material, which I generally don’t believe, all they’ve got are weird pictures and some ghost stories.
I’ve read so many attempts at making sense of those it’s hard for me to even be interested in trying. I know they claim there’s a reverse engineering program with lots of materials but as best I can tell as of writing this a ton of that is just dudes vouching for dudes who heard it from someone they trust.
That’s a lot of telephone for me to trust at all, even if I was in the business of just trusting the intelligence community.
It seems both possible and probable that a bunch of people got their minds blown at the premise there are UFOs and trusted more than they should have. What standards can you hold classified information you can’t access at all? Even when you could otherwise evaluate it.
They wouldn’t be the first or last to find themselves in that position.
Despite the complexity of the subject I think we can shrink it down to two simple questions:
Are UFOs real alien craft?
Are these whistleblowers sincere?
That let’s is cheat the complexity a bit by reducing it all to a nice 2x2 grid:
We know this cohort isn’t being fully honest with us or else they’d have done the hard thing and leaked every classified document they could.
So the question is if they’re sincere enough to trust their own descriptions of their motivations. I know where I stand on that. You kind of need to decide for yourself.
I want to tell you a story that could be true given all we know.
I think these are, by large, defense insiders who don’t like being told they can’t know something. They believe the “Legacy Program” is somewhere out there, behind some nameless door in the DoD and in the private sector.
I think they’re offended by that. Not that you and I aren’t allowed to know, but that dedicated insiders aren’t allowed to know. I think they’ve called their hurt feelings at being snubbed by the secret lords of America an injustice.
I think public support is a weapon they’re wielding against their bosses and this whole thing is convoluted bureaucratic infighting between this “UFO Cult” and… well, that’s the question isn’t it?
Is the “legacy program” still going? Who runs it? I don’t think Elizondo or any of his friends knows.
They’re just attacking shadows, assuming that being attacked means they’re on the right track. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re just fighting their DoD’s own instincts to hide embarrassments.
Just my two cents.
Wrapping Up
The central question I have around disclosure is: How would we know if it happened?
I still don’t see UFO communities taking much that we’ve gotten declassified seriously. They want THE PROOF.
And what if the truth is already out: Many people see strange things in the sky and on earth. Sometimes they show up on sensors. Some of those witnesses are military. People claim crashed remains but no one knows where those remains are.
All of this was true by 1955 at the latest.
The nature of disclosure is defined by the nature of what UFOs are and as best I can tell nobody has a fucking clue about that.
So whatever people are seeing it’s more likely than not something that doesn’t mesh well with conventional understanding in the US. Sign me up, tbh.
Fuck conventional understanding.
When it comes to the DoD it’s always going to be easier to imagine an even deeper, darker hole for people to kick secrets in.
I was going to talk today about the most recent UFO hearing but didn’t have a chance to finish it. So far my sense is that disclosure isn’t any closer. We’ve learned a ton more but none of it has really changed the game.
It’s neat that the taboo is weaker but that was never my problem.
So, maybe not bullshit but something far more nebulous than what disclosure dreams imply.
Alright. That’s about it for today. Hope you’re well.
I’m going to be aiming for a sustainable 2 of these fucking things a month.
See you soon.
And let me know what you think.
-SF