New developments on the UAP disclosure battle

I think the most likely possibility is that there indeed are crashed and retrieved UFO debris and perhaps even whole vehicles, and there have been intensive efforts to back-engineer them, but the key factor is that all these expensive retrieval and reverse engineering efforts have been unsuccessful, for reasons already detailed in other posts having to do with the extremely advanced and impenetrable nature of the alien technology. Analogous to expecting engineers of the year 1800 to analyze and understand and then duplicate and utilize a modern smartphone.

Perhaps...but so far there has been no evidence of debris or corpses?

Right now it seems to me the most likely worry among those blocking the legislation is exposing something that would be considered unethical/illegal regarding US military operations.

Right now it seems to me the most likely worry among those blocking the legislation is exposing something that would be considered unethical/illegal regarding US military operations.

That's one possibility. Another is an unwillingness to disclose all of US military capabilities for open perusal by potential hostile states.

A new opinion piece in the prestigious NY Times by leading columnist for the Times and The Atlantic Ross Douthat, at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/opini...nment.html (paywall).

It’s Time for U.F.O. Whistle-blowers to Show Their Cards
Dec. 16, 2023

A few opinions of my own first. There is clearly something going on, and I am personally inclined to believe it is not a prosaic answer.

What's most shocking and sad to me, is the ease with which most people completely dismiss this issue. Despite everything Douthat laid out (there is much more to it than that).

There's something going on, and it's been going on for a while. I'd encourage people to actually do work if they want to know more. Leslie Keane and Ross Couthart among others have written excellent, scholarly, well-researched books on the topic.

I agree with Douthat here that it is time (perhaps long past time) for the whistleblowers to make good on their claims of beyond top secret crashed UFOs/UAPs and NHI, and disclose some real evidence, or just fade away into the distance.

I disagree with Douthat over his concluding there never was any substance to the claims, if going on indefinitely, there is no disclosure by the whistleblowers. I think there are too many other indications that something big and extremely well hidden is and has been going on.
 
A few excerpts from the article:

"Last week on the Senate floor two senators rose to express disappointment with the House of Representatives. This was by itself routine enough, but the senators, Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and the New York Democrat and majority leader, Chuck Schumer weren’t complaining about Ukraine funding or border policy. They were complaining that the House was impeding transparency on U.F.O.s.

The back story, for those who don’t follow every twist of what we’re now supposed to call the unidentified anomalous phenomenon (U.A.P.) debate, is that the National Defense Authorization Act, on Schumer’s instigation, included provisions to establish a presidential commission with the power to declassify a broad swath of records related to U.A.P.s, modeled on the panel that did similar work with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

But this disclosure effort was watered down by some House Republicans, making it more of a collection effort by the National Archives, with a weaker mandate to declassify and release.

As ever with this issue, the Senate discussion of these developments veered from the banal to the superweird. One moment, Rounds was talking as if the whole legislative effort was just an attempt to “dispel myths and misinformation about U.A.P.s” — sunlight as a disinfectant for conspiracy theories. The next, he was complaining that the House had stripped out a requirement that the government reclaim “any recovered U.A.P. material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.” Which is an odd thing to emphasize if you don’t think there’s a possibility that, say, Lockheed Martin is keeping something strange inside its vaults.
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Meanwhile in the background you have the continuing media tour — through Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson and beyond — of David Grusch, the former Air Force intelligence officer whose dramatic-but-undocumented claims helped accelerate the current disclosure effort. And you also have the continuing intimations from other former officials, a mixture of hearsay and speculation offered on the record and wilder claims sourced anonymously.
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My personal hope, as someone fascinated and frustrated by this business ever since the military first started acknowledging that its pilots have seen some weird things in the skies, is that we are nearing a point of real clarity — not necessarily about what U.A.P.s are, but about whether some faction in the government really knows much more about the mystery than what’s in the public record.
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We have, in Grusch, a credentialed whistle-blower making public claims on a variety of platforms without being hustled away in a black helicopter. We have an important group of lawmakers expressing strong interest and frustration with obstruction. We have a network of mainstream-adjacent media outlets that are fascinated with the story, and establishment organs (like this one) at least open to the conversation.

There is no better time, in other words, for anyone who has documentary proof to figure out how to be a hero of disclosure and democracy. If you have the goods and you want the public to know more, and if you think the Schumer push for transparency has been fatally wounded (as many U.F.O. believers seem to think), then this is the hour to bring your secrets forward.

If no such revelations occur, it will strengthen my default belief that no multigenerational government cover-up was ever plausible.

Should shocking revelations come — well, honestly, I would still worry about deceptions and misdirection, since the disclosure of a cover-up would make paranoia much more rational.

But that’s no reason not to share the truth if you think you have possession of it — trusting that the American people have a high tolerance for weirdness, and that in the long run only truth will set us free."

Yeah we really need some real evidence, not merely claims.

Even a grainy picture would at least be something. 

Personally my guess is the government just has records of "Deep Weird" phenomena [with minimal footage] and maybe, at best, some odd samples of metal & bio material.

Faster-than-light travel is impossible, and therefore, the existence of physical, nuts-and-bolts aliens is unlikely (FTL contradicts the everyday technology used in appliances you might be wearing on your wrist right now). The idea of a multi-generational government cover-up is also not plausible. The intriguing subject here is why people have this need to be manipulated into believing in conspiracy theories.

From a new Tucker Carlson interview with David Grusch (at https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status...3050975277):

Grusch: "the Program will execute people (who break their NDA/oath) in a different kind of judicial process"

This implies some form of totally illegal extrajudicial process imposing a severe penalty for disclosure. I'm skeptical of this interview statement, regardless of what damage it may do to Grusch's credibility. But the fear of this consequence might explain the total lack of presented hard evidence despite a number of whistleblowers testifying about its real physical existence. 

I think this "explanation" might be helpful, but would still not explain why over the long history of these programs there wouldn't have been at least a few whistleblowers inclined to really spill the beans before death by disease for instance. The "deathbed confession" phenomenon.

Faster-than-light travel is impossible, and therefore, the existence of physical, nuts-and-bolts aliens is unlikely (FTL contradicts the everyday technology used in appliances you might be wearing on your wrist right now). The idea of a multi-generational government cover-up is also not plausible. The intriguing subject here is why people have this need to be manipulated into believing in conspiracy theories.

It's not clear FTL Travel is impossible.

That said I think Grusch is kind of a joke at this point with this talk of people being assassinated for disclosing any real evidence....that's the perfect grifter story...or that of a mentally ill person rationalizing things...

1) That's a link to a C-SPAN clip of the senate session on 13/12/23...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5097994/u...-2024-ndaa

2) The full text of: DIVISION G--UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA DISCLOSURE can be found here:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-cong...+act%22%7D

You can search for section 9001 to get to the right section.

What's clear from my brief reading, is that this bill provides the US government with the power to subpoena private individuals, and seize extraterrestrial objects (meteorites, rocks from space exploration) from private individuals and private corporations, for review. That review will decide whether to release (or not) such information to the public, but if it's in the interests of the US not to do that, they won't. Hence, this looks more like a vetting, seizure and gagging power, than anything else.

3) You can read a 2013 article on the scientific (commercial) value of such meteorites:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...r-asteroid

Are there legal or ethical implications to meteorite hunting?

There always are. Certain countries have passed laws. But when I was arrested in Oman, they actually had no law—they were just very upset that we were taking lots of meteorites. The only law they could charge us with was illegal mining operations—basically running a company in the country without government licensing. But I won on appeal because we had no mining equipment. We were picking up rocks off the surface of the desert. And a judge said, "If a child could do it, then it's not mining." And I was immediately released and sent home.

But there's always friction between the collecting market and the scientific market. There are scientists out there who believe that no meteorite should be in private hands. Well, I tell you, I've been on hunts all over the world and I've only run into scientists a couple of times. They don't have the time or money to do it. So if it wasn't for us, 99 percent of these meteorites would be lost to science.

4) Example of: Alien Minerals never before found on earth
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/sci...-meteorite

5) Example of: a non-peer reviewed paper which claims to have found a new protein within a meteorite, which has been disputed. The researchers speculate that the iron oxide grouping formed at the end of the molecule may be able to absorb photons, thereby enabling the molecule to split water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen and, as a result, produce a source of energy.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2002/2002.11688.pdf

Faster-than-light travel is impossible, and therefore, the existence of physical, nuts-and-bolts aliens is unlikely (FTL contradicts the everyday technology used in appliances you might be wearing on your wrist right now). The idea of a multi-generational government cover-up is also not plausible. The intriguing subject here is why people have this need to be manipulated into believing in conspiracy theories.

Arthur C. Clarke 
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.