Dangling the disclosure carrot
NIGEL WATSON is unsurprised by the wild speculation stirred up by the Pentagon’s UFO report
The promise of apparent UFO disclosure by the US Government in the form of the Pentagon’s UAP report (see p2) has seen all manner of experts, sceptics and flying saucer fans crawl out of the woodwork. Robert Sheaffer, on his Bad UFOs blog, as usual put this in a wider context: “...the media elite and Congress are being played by a small, loosely connected group of people with bizarre ideas about science. It’s easy to dismiss UFOs as a fantasy or a fad, but the money, the connections, and the power wielded by a group of UFO believers – embedded in the defense industry and bent on supplanting material science with a pseudoscientific mysticism straight from the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens – poses a danger to America more real than a flying saucer.”
Most of the people Sheaffer is referring to are well known on the UFO celebrity circuit and there is no need to give them any further ego-boosting publicity. Some claim they have official insights into the subject, but continue to play the “sworn to secrecy” card. You have to give credit to retired Navy physicist Dr Bruce Maccabee for laying his cards on the table; he predicted “that the US Navy’s Special Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will confirm what civilian investigators have long suspected: some UAP are vehicles controlled by non-human intelligences (NHI).” He added that: “The origin(s) of these NHI is (are) unknown but they may come from other planets using transportation technology based on very advanced physical principles.”
This, though, is a long way from the stated aims of the report: “The Department of Defense established the UAPTF to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs. The mission of the task force is to detect, analyse and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security.” In other words, the report is more concerned with collating UAP data – especially anything relating to the threat of unmanned terrestrial drones or other terrestrial aerial objects (see FT406:38-43) – than hunting for aliens and their ships squirrelled away in Area 51, or the unveiling of NHI UAP operators. Indeed, the Pentagon attempted to cool expectations by giving information to the New York Times in early June, to the effect that after studying 144 reports from the past 20 years, including aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years (see FT403:40-47), they found no evidence they were caused by either US secret technology or extraterrestrial craft. Some sightings were probably caused by enemy governments experimenting with hypersonic technology, yet because of the ambiguity of the sightings, the possibility of alien spacecraft in our skies could not be entirely ruled out. In other words, the authors of the report have not come to any firm conclusions and are pandering to the alien lobbyists and believers by dangling the ‘alien possibility’ carrot.
Jack Brewer, writing on his UFO Trail blog, noted that in the 1960s the CIA operated Project Palladium to create ‘ghost aircraft’ in order to fool enemy radar systems. Since then, the US has evolved more sophisticated technology, including the Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors (NEMESIS) system, which employs swarms of networked aerial and underwater drones working with ships, submarines and aircraft to fool the enemy. As Jack puts it: “There is a large variety of exotic devices and classified aircraft populating our skies. Adding to the complexity are cuttingedge technologies designed to limit and confuse abilities to monitor and accurately interpret those objects.” Understandably, the report will have a classified appendix that will deal with advanced technology of this nature.
All is not lost for the ET faction, as – rather surprisingly given its previous coyness about UFOs – NASA’s new administrator,
Bill Nelson, told CNN: “We don’t know if it’s extraterrestrial. We don’t know if it’s an enemy. We don’t know if it’s an optical phenomenon... And so the bottom line is, we want to know.” NASA has not set up a formal task force, but NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness stated: “There’s not really a lot of data and... scientists should be free to follow these leads, and it shouldn’t be stigmatised. This is a really interesting phenomenon and Americans are clearly interested in it [so if] the scientists want to investigate, they should.” This is a very refreshing new attitude towards the question of UFOs, one in which they are integrated with NASA’s search for extraterrestrial life.
However, Global UFO Disclosure Project Founder Steven Greer is not impressed, arguing that: “The latest Pentagon report
BELOW LEFT: NASA’s new administrator, Bill Nelson: “The bottom line is we want to know”
continues a 75 year-long disinformation campaign.” Gary Heseltine, Vice President of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research (ICER), is equally unconvinced: “The bottom line is that the US do not, WILL NOT, admit that UFO/UAP is the most logical theory to explain the objects seen, and the mainstream media, if left unchallenged, will let them get away with it. Be prepared.” ICER thinks the objects are definitely ET/ non-human craft. Other theories are that this is all an elaborate plot to make us think there is an alien threat in order to galvanise and unite humanity, or that, due to their religious beliefs, the authorities do not want to admit that UFOs are evil and demonic in origin. Another theory suggests that for the report to admit that other countries possess technological superiority would make the US military look weak and incapable of dealing with the UAP threat. Luis Elizondo, who had a debatable role in previous UAP research (see FT363:28 and passim), states categorically: “I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology.” He concludes that the UAP sightings represent “a different paradigm completely”.
The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board put things into perspective: “So while it’s all very well to sit around the campfire and watch the assorted clips of stunned pilots or read eyewitness accounts or imagine objects travelling ultra-fast and turning on a dime, let’s also keep it in context... What we have is a mystery, not a 1960s science fiction TV show.” Nonetheless, they predict: “We are headed for a summer of X-Files...”
https://badufos.blogspot.com/; Bruce Maccabee website: www.brumac.mysite.com; Q&A with Bill Nelson: www.politico.com/ news/2021/06/10/nasa-bill-nelsonq-a-493288?; Steven Greer website: SiriusDisclosure.com; ‘Establishment of UAPTF’: www.defense.gov/Newsroom/ Releases/Release/Article/2314065/ establishment-of-unidentified-aerialphenomena-task-force/; www.baltimoresun. com/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-0603-ufo-report20210602-adk6g3ypubhedmj3r47a2m7demstory.html; https://americanmilitarynews. com/2021/06/ufos-took-us-nuclear-systemsoffline-repeatedly-former-pentagon-ufo-officechief-says/