Can you tell the people?
JENNY RANDLES prepares for disclosure – but what exactly is being disclosed and to what purpose?
Some years ago I was asked for an online interview about the infamous 1980 Rendlesham Forest case by the late writer Georgina Bruni (obit. FT234:30). It was for her book about the case, which she later called You Can’t Tell the People and, after she explained this unusual phrase to me, I agreed.
While I have my reservations about that book – not least that she got wrong basic facts about something I wrote, which ended up upsetting another researcher – I would not hold that error against Georgina Bruni. We all make mistakes when dealing with complicated, nuanced matters such as the UFO mystery – I have made a few of my own in print. Moreover, her book remains very popular with UFO researchers and rightly so.
However, it was the book’s unusual title that is my point here. It came from a time when former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher used those words to her about the disclosure of Government UFO knowledge. But why can you not tell the people? And, if that was once the case, what has changed? Because plenty of people in prominent positions do seem to have been breaking that rule and expressing thoughts that seem rather like… disclosure. The latest is Barack Obama, who openly revealed that UFOs were real on 18 May in a CBS TV interview, admitting that there was evidence he was privy to when US President. There are certainly some big questions about what he said. Would you really expose such a great secret in a TV interview? What did this admission actually mean? And was it laying the foundations for even bigger revelations? That assumes that there are bigger revelations to come. After all, admitting that UFOs exist is hardly the big deal it appears to be; it all depends on what you take the term ‘UFO’ to mean. Obama’s words were actually fairly guarded. Notably, he did not call them UFOs but UAP, using the terminology employed by many credible UFO researchers and adopted by both the US and UK governments.
So it is not a given that when the exPresident admitted UFOs are real he meant what you are assuming he meant. Even ‘UFO’ is a loaded term that means different things to different people, and Obama was fairly clear in what he was referring to here: the kind of evidence caught on film from military pilots tracking unidentified things in their airspace.
He actually said: “There is footage of objects in the skies... we cannot explain how they moved... we don’t know exactly what they are.” It is a statement any rational person should make on the evidence – and a long way from saying the aliens are here.
Consider someone asking you if you believe in heaven. If you are an atheist, you would answer no, citing science and the nature of human biology; but if you have any kind of religious faith, then you likely would answer differently and understand what you meant by your reply in the context of your own religious perception. A Buddhist, who might see heaven as a stopover before the next lifetime of learning on Earth, would have a very different concept of that word to other religions, where heaven might be a glorious rest or some kind of reward.
Terms like UFO (or, indeed, UAP, however less emotive we try to make it) are always going to create an impression that varies depending on the audience. We take meaning at least as much from what we think a word means as from what the person speaking it might actually have intended it to suggest. It is very possible Obama’s real concern about the UAP footage shot by US pilots was of some terrestrial military breakthrough of non-US origin, or even the work of some rich tech genius – nothing to do with little green men.
As such, disclosure – if indeed that was the purpose in any sense of Obama speaking on TV – might here have had the opposite intention to what many might think. In other words, it was not to prepare the public for some grand revelation that we are not alone in the cosmos (a likely reality we may one day indeed have to deal with, regardless of UFOs) but to explain a reality that both UFO researchers and governments have slowly figured out over the decades
Barack Obama talks UFOs on US TV.
of studying data: that UAP are here and real and baffling and very likely the result of more than one phenomenon that we have not quite figured out. Some of them are probably rare events that lie outside of our science because they have been misinterpreted for centuries. Indeed, our current ‘little green men’ interpretation will be seen years from now as akin to how an early human saw an eclipse and assumed a monster was eating the Sun. It’s hard for us humans to think we are not all-knowing – but we’re really not.
Of course, it is possible that aliens do exist, covertly observing us and wisely staying out of the way of trigger-happy Earthlings. Maybe there is a government awareness of that, and the sharing of footage that cannot be denied, given its military provenance, is part of some plan to ease us gently into the Earth-shattering revelation of ‘disclosure’.
Time will tell. But I think the big thing to take on board is that Mrs Thatcher, from today’s perspective, was wrong. Not telling the people might have seemed sensible when nobody really knew what was going on, as admitting ignorance of a potential threat is harmful to any government that has to create at least an illusion of being in control. However, once the evidence for whatever is going on becomes overt and incontrovertible, then saying nothing is also like admitting you have no control.
So I suspect one of two things is going on here. Either UAP are really something nobody yet understands and that until that changes – as a sort of holding statement – we are allowed to think whatever we want to think; again, at least an illusion of it all being under control is created.
The alternative is that this is step one of a gradual move towards disclosure of the knowledge of an intelligence beyond our own – not necessarily even one originating in deep space. If they are co-existing in some way here on Earth or in a parallel reality, then in some sense this may actually be worse news than invading aliens: “Hey all of you – we just wanted to let you know we are not actually the dominant species on Earth as was previously believed…”
If so, then what we get told will be limited to what we can handle. So perhaps Maggie wasn’t so wrong after all. Maybe you can’t tell the people the truth – at least not all of it at once…