Disclosure or distraction?

To those who (like me) follow the UFO story, Friday's release of formerly classified material from the Pentagon was a bit 'meh'. Yeah, we know all this stuff. Nothing groundbreaking from this (rather small) data dump that's destined to enter UFO lore, and enrich the cultural mythology. Nothing that will shed new light on the UFO phenomenon. So how should we see this: as a further admission from the US government that we share our planet with alien beings? Or as a distraction from the fact that the war Trump started is a mess which he can neither end by either force nor diplomacy, and is driving up the cost of living? 

Or could it be both?

Before diving in, let me start with a few words about terminology. The term 'UFO' – 'unidentified flying object', was devised by the US Air Force in 1952 to supplant 'flying saucer', which by the late 1940s had entered mainstream usage. And, since around 2020, the term 'UFO' is itself being replaced in official sources by 'UAP', or 'unidentified anomalous (sometimes 'aerial') phenomenon'. The word 'phenomenon' is more accurate than 'object', as it also covers non-material occurrences. And 'anomalous' is a broader concept than 'aerial', as it includes everything that cannot readily be explained, wherever it is witnessed – in space, under the water or on the ground.

Similarly, 'non-human intelligence' (NHI) is the new and more accurate term for 'aliens', since there's no evidence that these alleged beings are extraterrestrial. They could be extratemporal (from a future Earth) or extradimensional (from a fifth dimension of which physics is currently unaware). Or cryptoterrestrial – the intelligence associated with these anomalous sightings might co-inhabit the planet with us (under the oceans, for instance).

Having cleared that up – what have we got?

In February, on a TV interview, Barack Obama seemed to admit that aliens were real, prompting Trump to weigh in and say that Obama shouldn't have been giving away classified information. Trump then went on to promise that he'd start declassifying UAP material from Pentagon and CIA archives. And so it proved to be. Compared to the Kennedy assassination or Epstein dumps, which numbered into the millions of files, this upload of formerly classified documents was modest.

Let's start by assuming that the Trump administration is not sufficiently smart to make up a lot of CGI/AI videos and upload them to a gullible public. There is track record. There is form. Investigative journalists and researchers in this field know what's out there in the classified world, and simply making up a whole bunch of phony UFO videos wouldn't cut the mustard.

So is this disclosure or acclimatisation? Getting humanity ready to accept, without a mass freak-out, that Homo sapiens is not the only form of intelligent, technological life on Planet Earth, has to a decades-long process, not an overnight announcement. This is another step in confirmation, a confession from (primarily) the US military that there are anomalous phenomena across all four domains – space, sky, land and sea – that it cannot explain, and rather than covering up that they don't know what they don't know, at least to come out and say "here's what we cannot explain".

What do we know, what do they know, what do they pretend they don't know?

The key thing is lore and what is and what isn't accepted in lore.

UAP have been around since the dawn of human history, showing up in the Bible (for example Ezekiel's Wheel), in the Middle Ages, as pixies, elves and fairies; there was a spate of mysterious airship sightings over America in the 1890s. However, the current spate of sightings really began to build up concrete lore around them after WW2 – the Kenneth Arnold sightings and the Roswell incident (1947). Historically, the sightings have been closely correlated to military or civilian nuclear sites. Roswell, for example, was the site of the world's first (and at the time only) base for atomic bombers.

There are four main components to UAP lore. Each is tightly interwoven with eyewitness accounts that corroborate, they have internal narrative structure that's logical and hard to undermine.

1) Earth is being visited by non-human intelligence. This has been going on for millennia, but the visits have become far more frequent since H. sapiens learned to harness the energy of the atom. The visitors may be short bipedal creatures with large heads and big eyes. Or they may be tall, blond, Nordic-looking humanoids, or giant praying mantis-type insects, or ghostly interdimensional 'shadow people' that pop in and out of existence. Lore suggests that multiple alien species may be visiting us, with different agendas, some benign, others not, perhaps even at war with each other.

2) NHI craft have crashed on multiple occasions, the wreckage recovered, and (to a greater or lesser degree of success) reverse-engineered by the US (possibly also by the Russians and Chinese). The testimony of Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked at the classified Area 51 on the Nevada Test and Training Range in the 1980s, has been backed up by other whistleblowers since then. But here the lore is split. Some ufologists claim that the US had long possessed working craft based on alien tech; others say that science is still a long way off (imagine the top geniuses of the Renaissance trying to reverse-engineer a mobile phone).

3) Human beings are being abducted by the NHI, possibly with the aim of creating a hybrid species. Alien abduction lore dates back to the early 1960s (Betty and Barney Hill). In the 1980s, academics John E. Mack and David M. Jacobs claimed that alien abductions were a mass phenomenon. Author Whitley Strieber's account of his alleged alien abduction,Communion, topped US non-fiction book sales charts for six months in 1987, and was made into a movie in 1989. By 1991, 3.7 million Americans claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

4) The US government has been covering up all of the above – Projects Sign(1947) Grudge (1949) and Blue Book(1952-1969). It is said to have had contact with alien races since the mid-1950s; a shadowy group (Majestic 12) knows the full truth which only some US presidents have been privy to; the secret is maintained by the men in black who intimidate UFO witnesses. Within the government there are those who press for controlled disclosure, while other groups are intent on keeping the whole thing above top secret. Controlled disclosure means acclimatising humanity to the idea, with a steady drip of media (films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and official confirmation.

The current UAP era began in December 2017 with the publication in the New York Times of an article by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper (behind paywall). "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program".The article added vast amount of new information to the corpus of the lore; the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which ran from 2007 to 2012 to analyse classified reports of UAPs from the US military. AATIP came up with the notion of the 'five observables': anti-gravity lift; instantaneous acceleration and manoeuvres; hypersonic velocities without sonic booms or vapour trails; low observability or cloaking; and trans-medium travel (moving seamlessly from space to air to water). In December, I was talking to a British lawyer here in Warsaw about UFOs. His reaction to me raising the topic was knee-jerk: "Only nutters believe in that sort of thing". Outright dismissal, a total lack of curiosity. Despite the fact that the US military has whole programmes investigating the phenomenon (currently the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office). Despite the thousands of verified sightings by pilots, radar operators and other trained professionals. It people such as this lawyer that will experience the greatest ontological shock when confronted with solid evidence – scientific proof – that humanity is indeed sharing this planet with another species of intelligent being.

This time six years ago:
Things will never be the same again: Pt III – Risk

This time nine years ago:
En Marche! [Polish regional bus 'network']

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki spring pictorial

This time 13 years ago:
Kitten time

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw – Centrum to Jeziorki by train with super-wide lens

This time 15 years ago:
Loose Lips Sink Ships - part II

This time 16 years ago:
Jeziorki in the infra red

This time 17 years ago:
Some rain, at last!
[could do with some right now...]