Returning To The Basics

 

I am not entirely sure where to begin with this post, which comes to you (now perhaps an empty room) after many, many months of silence – at least here at Entaus. My silence has not, of course, been for lack of activity on my part, regarding the UAP subject. Indeed, I have been rather busy. Life has taken some, shall we say, interesting turns (and twists). But I continue to be deeply, profoundly, obsessively interested in the subject (sometimes so much so that I will withdraw from it as from a plate of sweets). As ever I was. My early convictions – that indeed there is a there here to be studied, probed, engaged, thought through, researched, analyzed, interpreted (the whole range of intellectual and empirical tools brought to bear on the enigma) – are if anything only further strengthened as I get deeper into the subject not, now, merely as a hermeneutic explorer (a “hermeonaut”?) but as an active organizer, a founder of a learned association of fellow academics and professionals who feel similarly about UAP and about UAP Studies qua academic area of research.

But I remain grounded in my other convictions: that such an enigma as UAP present (as is quite clearly demonstrated in the history of the subject – more on that in a moment, now that we have Prof. Eghigian’s important contribution) can too easily capture our desire – or is it a need? – for the speculative, to the extent that we forget the basics. Like that we do not yet study, and have not yet actually studied, UAP empirically much at all (there are, of course exceptions … and the work of scholars such as Dr. Teodorani and professionals like the eloquent Phillipe Ailleris remind us of the complicated landscape of strictly empirical engagements with UAP/UFOs). All that, so far, we have regarding them are the case reports – mostly eyewitness accounts, sometimes (in the best of cases) backed up by instrumented data which is frequently incomplete, ambiguous or otherwise inscrutable (because the case has gone cold) or inaccessible (because trapped behind the firewall of government/military secrecy and classification (more on that minefield in a moment).

It bears repeating: we do not yet study UAP themselves; we study (and interpret) the case reports of UAP. And here we are reliant upon witness testimony: first-person accounts (sometimes of what instruments recorded … more on this later, in due course). This persistent fact has a number of consequences that have trapped us in an epistemic loop for decades now, a loop that, we hope, it is now possible – but by no means assured – we can escape. But why have we so far been confined to the case report, rather than being free to study UAP themselves? Primarily, because they are ephemeral, transient, here-and-then-gone, with little trace (again, except in a very few cases). The trace that is left behind lives within the experiences of witnesses, who sometimes (and often at some risk, or motivated by the desire for fame, … etc.) report on their encounters. And here’s where things immediately get complicated by the social and cultural factors that modulate experience into narrative and elide pure (observational) facticity, if there be any, and leave us with the phenomenology of an experience. But it is not to the phenomenologists themselves which these reports have gone; no, the reports become the basis of a forensic investigation, eventually a cold case chase that, given the muteness and deathly silence of the vanished UAP, leaves us only with the liveliness of the witnesses’ accounts of these “strange things seen in the sky” (that’s Jung’s oft-used phrase), or having landed to Earth, for a moment, only to be gone by the time the investigation gets underway.

So, for decades we have had what the witnesses leave behind in testimony, carefully (and many times not-so-carefully) compiled, and then archived and “studied” (interpreted, analyzed) by the traditional “ufologist”. Not only have the phenomenologists not been consulted (is the suggestion ridiculous? I would say not … but then, how many of us know and appreciate this tradition, and ask, seriously, why does it not have a place in the firmament of professionals who take over where the facts end in pure experience … it’s an important question to mull over, and gets to a deeper point); but when investigations are undertaken, it is not even clear that a stable, and consistent, forensic framework has been deployed to the best extent possible, bringing to bear generally accepted methods of the science of forensics (and the traditional sciences which informs it).

And then there is the crisis in forensics itself.

It might even be surprising to realize that there has been an epistemological crisis in this field for some time, as it is not clear what its foundations are, and how it is – or is not – related to science more properly understood (just read around in the journals which try to tackle the subject of the methodological and scientific foundations of forensics). The lack of stable scientific foundations, and generally accepted standards across the field, arguably underpins the further crisis in the criminal justice system, where shoddy, shaky and inconsistent forensic practice has put many a person – without a cogent evidentiary foundation – into prison, where they may languish for years. What does this crisis say about what I like to call “classical” ufology? Has it managed to overcome the failures of this field? Has it rigorously implemented, debated and instituted sound forensic practice? Not to overstate the case, but it should give us great pause that the majority of what enters the public discourse on UFOs had come from such a fraught – and historically inconsistent – context of investigation.

Even so, with such a fraught history of case reports and forensic investigations into the UFOs alleged in them, it is clear that in the best of cases on record, what we do have is a motivating pattern, a definite structure of phenomena that do merit serious attention, and, more importantly, serious empirical research – not mere forensic cold case chases, but actual anticipatory, mature observational (and perhaps also experimental) science, leading on to theory and explanation.

That’s the argument of the Galileo Project, as I’ve pointed out before, in their seminal 2023 paper: the cold cases show us the character of the phenomena – how it appears, and what is apparent. And that gives us a clue as to what sort of observational (and possibly experimental) research program ought to be established that can (plausibly) yield the kind of confirmational data from which we might then be able to derive significant conclusions regarding the nature and possibly also the origins of UAP (at least for the UAP for which there would be that good data). And if we set this up right – with an eye towards the more “meta-logical” structure that might be in play (well, I mean, if some UAP are intelligently controlled objects, albeit of initially unknown origin, then we’re studying not merely a phenomenon of nature, but an object that is also a subject and therefore potentially reactive to the very act of empirical study) … if we set this up right, then we might also be able to derive data capturing any potential correlations of interest between UAP (as physical objects) and those human beings who witness them, or who are engaged in their study.

Though I have plenty of misgivings about the work of Vallée, we must recognize his important contributions to classical ufology – his attempts (again, about which I remain highly critical) to expand the range of conceptualization regarding attempts to conduct empirical research on the UFO phenomenon (more prosaically now: UAP) and finally to understand it in all of its (seeming) complexity. However, in the absence of actual data on UAP (as opposed to what “data” can be gleaned from the case reports of UAP – which is not the same as UAP, let’s not forget … and it’s something Vallée himself often like to remind those enthusiastic about UFOs), it remains profoundly unclear as to whether they do (or a certain subset of UAP, being careful not to generalize too soon) exceed our understanding of the laws of nature. As technological objects (of unknown origin – if that’s what the data eventually points to), they likely do exceed our understanding of applications of physical laws; but extraordinary applications of (ordinary) known laws of nature obviously doesn’t imply the need for new laws of nature. Without good data here, we just don’t know. And surely we don’t (yet) need to talk about expanding the dimensionality of physical nature, and so on. Or to talk about time travelling beings from the future (human or not). In short: we don’t need the speculation until we have solid data on which to speculate.

It’s a rather basic point. And by the way: mutatis mutandis for all the speculative excesses we want to fly into when confronted with the (vaunted, by some) “experiencer” accounts. Again, without a clear framework for study, and consequently without good data, we just don’t really know what to make of “experiencer” accounts either – with or without the association between them and any UAP (that is, strange things seen in the sky, etc.). We don’t want, of course, to dismiss them; but surely we don’t want to admit their accounts as veridical just because of their experiences. Both positions vis-a-vie “experiencers” are wrong-headed. But what’s the line of demarcation? Who’s experience counts as evidential – and when, and why? It’s a hard call, but one we have to insist on making … or at least, we have to insist on having a serious discussion about what to make of the “experiencers” self-reports and testimony that’s neither dismissive nor credulously accepting. But that’s a digression. Back to the basics…

Which are, it seems, rather lacking at this point. And that lack forces—and this is my fear—us back into the same epistemic loop that kept ufology in the land of the flying saucer fanatics, believers, warring with the more sober-minded data-hunters and traditional scientists that just wanted the facts. With no good data, we then turn to where it might have landed (!) … and that’s in the lap of the government—and the military. For, after all, they do have some of the best sensor systems up and running anywhere on the planet. So, almost in desperation, do we reach for it, for that which we (merest civilians) cannot possess, the forbidden fruit … and then is born the obsession, the call for “disclosure”. (It gets all very Lacanian from here on out.) Let’s talk about the damn disclosure thing already.

But before I do that, perhaps I should pause to explain what the hell I’ve been doing since my last post (maybe cringy in the end, it?) that was a travelogue of my experiences at the Sol Symposium of 2023. We have now seen their next edition, held just two months ago in late November 2024. For various reasons, sadly, I could not attend. Nonetheless, I want to explain what I’ve been up to, and finally to say why I was not really motivated to participate in the “Disclosure Day” thing (the New Paradigm Institute’s initiative of some weeks ago), even though I was personally invited to be involved in it. That will bring me to give my (hopefully principled) reason why I demurred. And it will bring me back to the topic of “Disclosure”.

Without the tedium of detail, following the 2023 Sol Symposium I needed to do some inner work. I really needed to regroup, to rethink—my own position, even. What did I have to focus on? I needed to study, to evaluate, to digest. So, instead of continuing to pour my intellectual/writing energies into this blog (with all due love to my approximately 1.5 readers who remain), I decided rather to shift to a focus on the organization I founded while making sure my writing projects (all in UAP Studies I can proudly attest) got some sorting. Manuscripts needed editing. Abstracts needed writing. Papers needed outlining. And applications (for fellowships—some deadlines of which I ended up missing, to my chagrin) needed finishing. I made a concerted effort to evade, ignore, abandon, avoid all things government UAP, as I deem it a somewhat (and now, very much) dangerous preoccupation—one not all that productive, really. Confronting government classification, secrecy and so on (and the closely associated jungle of conspiracy theories that all-too-quickly tend to grow like unwelcome weeds in the garden of delights) is really a quagmire in the end. It’s a merry-go-round of read-ins, SCIFS, SAPs, hearsay, speculation, … the great game of government tel-e-phone (aren’t we really getting, as Garret Graff rightly worries, a corrupted, twisted and tortured message at the end of it all?). I want none of it. I see it also as a waste of precious time and resources—unless the enthusiasts for this stuff can get some real payoffs (i.e., opening for the rest of us some much-needed funding) for the necessary work that is foundational to this whole post-2021 UAP affair. If we are not to further the circus act of those Deep State political actors now gaining power, wanting an explosive issue to explode Deep State Fears within the popular imagination and utilize that for their own (likely mendacious and nefarious) political purposes (and I am vastly underplaying and under-worrying about it here I think … more, perhaps, on this later), then we must simply, very simply focus 99% of our energies on the conceptual foundations and needed funding (did I mention funding?) for solid, academically legible, empirical (and humanistic) independent research on “the Phenomenon” (a term I’ve grown to rather loathe these days). To repeat for the n^th time: We need (and it’s becoming desperate at this point) a solid, sustainable foundation of and for independent (radically independent) empirical research. I have said it dozens of times. It’s the only way out of the government/secrecy quagmire … and it’s a desperately basic point: we need a secure baseline of data and sound conclusions derivable from it, to serve both as a bulwark against chicanery and a measure of credibility, or, finally, of what is likely true that’s being alleged by those whom we’d like to trust but whose testimony must be verified by some independent means. Having a sound UAP research corpus, produced independently of government and military forces, to which we can turn for a measure of the cogency and veracity of allegations coming from compromised informational sources (such as, unfortunately, all “whistleblowers” must a priori be assumed to be—a point on which we should comment further, in proper epistemological register to be sure) is the only way out of the infinite loop of uncertainty and the fallback of trust that only those already convinced offer to government and military “officials” who come forward with their testimony on UAP.

So, what the hell have I been up to (if you care to know)? Well, let’s see. I want to keep it brief, to bring us up to events that transpired this summer, and into the autumn, which now wears on into the uncertainty of this winter.

I’ve been doing stuff.

In December, of course, we (that is, the Society for UAP Studies as managing/publishing organization) managed to bring the first – the inaugural – issue of Limina together, thanks to our amazing production editor over at the great Simon Fraser U in Western Canada. I didn’t realize how much I truly loved being the chief editor, tediously going over manuscripts in consultation with authors and the production staff. We’re a small but, I think, effective, lean operation. Papers were ready by the last weeks of January 2024, and we released, finally, on 30 January with Editorials by me and Dr Rodeghier of CUFOS (who’s also a key member of the Society for UAP Studies’ Advisory Board). It was a somewhat quiet but, I hope, impactful release. I don’t want to make a show of it. Rather, I want the substance of our collective efforts to speak for itself. (Oh, and in August/September, we—again quietly—released the paper version, with cover designs by Andreas Müller, civilian UFO researcher/journalist and creator of “grewi”.)

By end of January, and into February, I was busy working on the first round of edits to my paper for Dr Alex Wendt’s volume of essays that came out of this workshop we did back in March of 2023. I’m happy to say that it’s passed the editors’ approval process (I finished the last of the edits only this past October), and will—unless there are more approvals needed from other editors at the publishing house—be included when the volume is finally published. It’s my fist official essay on the topic, and it’s a weird one, dealing (at somewhat a symbolic/interpretive level) with the strange conjunction (in my mind, at least) of UAP and the climate emergency.

As well, starting perhaps in December, I organized the first “departmental colloquium” for the Society: in February we had the brilliant investigative journalist and author Garrett Graff deliver a short talk, with a subsequent discussion/Q&A, on his recent (fat) text on UFOs and government (it should be required reading, in conjunction with Greg Eghigian’s recent global history, After The Flying Saucers Came, which was released in June of this year). I organized a few more colloquia: for April we had distinguished jurist and Durham U Prof Michael Bohlander on his recent book (reviewed by Limina here); May saw noted (“analytical idealist”) philosopher and computer scientist Dr Bernardo Kastrup present on his really well-argued essay making the (quite controversial, to be sure) case for the “Silurian Hypothesis”). Our colloquium series took a pause through the summer, as we were preparing (hard prep from June until August) for the Society’s annual UAP Studies conference (more on that below). It resumed for an October colloquium with Prof Greg Eghigian (also on the Society’s Advisory Board), on his academic history of (“human dealings with” as Greg puts it) the UFO phenomenon.

Where are we in the timeline? Well, March and April 2024 found me busy with those edits for my paper, along with my organizational duties for the various (and increasing) activities and events of the Society. I really made a concerted effort to shore up my paper’s argument, and expand it a bit, doing the necessary research in the theory and philosophy of technology; but, as sometimes happens, some of that got cut out on the editor’s chopping block. I’ll save my more philosophical reflections on UAP and technology for another piece…

By late March and into April 2024, I was putting together, with others of course, an invite-only Roundtable discussion on government regulations and the new (and growing) UAP research ecosystem. It was a really productive meeting, I thought. As well, I was working with the Society’s planning team to develop our Annual UAP Studies Conference (“Varieties and Trajectories of Contemporary UAP Studies”—somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek moment for me when I came up with the title). Then, into late April, I was helping to finalize preparations for another AAAF/Sigma2 workshop on UAP physical observables—this time, a two-day hybrid affair, not unlike the one I managed to attend (in Paris, in person) in June of 2023. And that brought me to the end of May.

I was going back-and-forth about attending IRL the second edition of the one-day meeting/workshop organized by IFEX and Prof Dr Hakan Kayal, over at Universität Würzburg in Germany. This second edition—now two days—was going to be held in early June. I finally decided to go—and to then stay in Germany until July/early August.

Mid-August 2024 saw the Society’s First Annual UAP Studies Conference, which I hosted, along with one of our colleagues Dr Christian Peters, live from Porto, Portugal. At the conference, which was a three-day affair, we found Dr Brenda Denzler give a keynote—a kind of follow-up to her seminal early 2000s text (which has really influenced me) Lure of the Edge (a text I consider required reading on the subject). Earlier in June and July in France, I managed to meet, and then invite for a keynote lecture, the fascinating French thinker Dr Bertrand Méheust (technically he’s a sociologist or epistemologist—although the French disciplinary distinctions can depart quite significantly from what they are in the Anglophone world). Méheust is often cited as a founder of the “social-psychological” school of thought on what had of course been called the UFO Phenomenon. His famous text on UFOs and Science Fiction (he prefers to use the term “flying saucer” and refer to “saucerists”) is said to have touched off this way of thinking (namely, that the UFO phenomenon largely derives from the superimposition of shared, social-cultural forms—in this case of course, deriving from science fictional sources—onto subjectively strange perceptions of things seen in the sky, a kind of extension of the Jungian view); but, as often the case with thinkers of his kind (brilliant, gifted, subtle), the “school” his thinking prompted broke from the real philosophical core of what it was he was trying to articulate (you can read his abstract, and others, here; and keep on the lookout for his talk, which should appear on the Society’s YouTube channel in the next month or so).

What I thought was unique in UAP Studies for our conference (well, the fact that it was on “UAP Studies” was itself unique since it wasn’t a “UFO” conference per se) is that we held a series of area-focused, closed-door (invite-only) workshops for academics/scholars only. They were organized around the key areas of academic scholarship: the natural sciences and engineering; the humanities; and the social sciences (which included history—although of course history can be include as “humanities” … the division is itself controversial or debatable). Our largest workshop was organized by one of the Society’s brilliant volunteers, Mr Dan Williams, on the topic of UAP Citizen Science. It’s something that doesn’t often, and properly, get highlighted as a thing. Namely, that (what I’ve called the forensic) investigation of UAP is one of the oldest citizen science ventures in the U.S. (and arguably in the world). Yet, it receives little attention in this precise sense—that it is a largely citizen science venture. And as such, needs to be thought about in the appropriate professional and scientific framework—something that, for UAP, does not really exist. (At the Society, and at our journal Limina, we are attempting to address this lack with various events and planned special journal issues; hopefully, with the help of the Sol Foundation, we will, at some point soon, get a range of academics, scientists and professionals organized to get thinking about this and, more broadly, about the required standards of evidence for the various modes of study of UAP (i.e., in the natural sciences, in the social sciences, in the humanities, and so on), quite beyond the pale of the mere case report, on which we’ve had occasion to ponder at the very beginning of this essay; even so, the passage from report to science, from testimony to observation, is a (critical) transition that requires careful study as an issue in itself, and the working out of the relevant standards of evidence that can secure the conceptual and methodological foundations of the forensic, and then the stricter scientific, approaches to the subject of UAP … it is the passage from the case report and witness testimony, to the realm of concomitant scientific facticity where instrumented observations correlate with, if they do not entirely substitute for, the testimony of witnesses in the best of cases.)

Our workshops were, I think, a great success, and something that all serious UAP Studies conferences (whether by the Society or organized competently by other serious academic or academic-adjacent groups like Sol in intending to be) should replicate and perfect. The rest of our conference talks covered the range of disciplinary approaches to (and interpretations of) UAP and UAP-related issues (such as “experiencers” and their first-person testimony). We had talks by physicists, engineers, scholars of information and communication, religious studies, anthropology, history … a rich array indeed. (Our final talk, which went very early into the morning in Europe, by the historian Alexey Golubev was an utterly fascinating account of the treatment of UAP in the former Soviet Union.)

By the end of August and into September, I was headed to Sweden to spend some weeks at the Nordita Institute of Physics (Stockholm University), as an independent visiting scholar. There I got to collaborate with Dr Beatriz Villarroel on a number of projects. Towards the end of that month, all the way up into the Arctic Circle at a remote mining town called Kiruna (an hour or so away from a European Union Space Agency rocket launch site), I gave a talk with my (Society) colleague Dr Wes Watters (also of Galileo Project). The talk, delivered at the 2024 meeting of the European Astrobiology Institute (which unexpectedly allowed a UAP session to be organized—a small victory in terms of developing key lines of professional/scholarly communication in adjacent fields of research), was an attempt to outline and develop a key distinction between what I call “classical ufology” (on which we remarked earlier) and the new science of UAP that is only now getting going (and being properly conceptualized, with some funding—Galileo has largely private funding, whereas Prof Dr Kayal of Würzburg University’s IFEX has managed to secure not inconsiderable EU science funding, as has Dr Villarroel of late). We argue that the crucial distinction is that between a primarily forensic modality of quasi-scientific rigor (what I like to somewhat jokingly refer to as the “forensic cold case chase” model of investigations, done as if a crime scene were being investigated) v. the stricter protocols employed by the (traditional) observational and experimental sciences, which form the empirical basis for hypothesis and more general theory. The former (i.e., the observational and experimental sciences) attempt to produce data for which an explanation, as with its forensic counterparts, of the causes of singular UAP incidents can be proposed (a “hypothesis”); but the latter—what we might call the theoretical sciences (of, e.g., physics)—attempt to explain and finally understand UAP as a class of phenomena (they often reach for unification or systematic unity of their target phenomena), or to explain the common characteristics of UAP considered in terms of their manifest physical, measurable properties … this latter endeavor of which holds the potential for new empirical discoveries in fundamental science (something Hynek would hint at occasionally, and which seemed to be his—and many others’—great hope for the science of UAP).

I returned, via Sweden, to the U.S. by early December to close out the year in the snowy, cold (well, vacillatingly cold-and-warm-or-balmy, as Climate Change would dictate) East Coast, where I am presently.

It is already snowy mid-January 2025 as I finished this essay (begun in late November 2024, to be honest). I am still overwhelmed with work both personal and for the Society, but I remain confident and committed to my projects (as much holiday-procrastination as I’ve had to manage has stalled me). I have talks and papers lined up like a firing squad, and my fears and uncertainties only grow—especially as January gives way to a new Presidential Administration (or, Clown Show, depending on the extent of your cynicism). I now labor to write up more systematically my thinking on the foundations of (and proper historical framing for the) new science of UAP. There is a paper coming out, on which I am co-author (along with more than 25 others … it’s a science paper, so long lists of co-authors are not that uncommon), where I begin to articulate my thinking (largely in the conclusion to this massive text: it stands at 150 pages, primarily edited and written by Dr Knuth of UAPx and the Society). The title we have given it is “The New Science of UAP” and it attempts a detailed characterization of the contemporary landscape of empirical study/research of UAP, and to give some relevant historical background (although the paper by Ailleris we published at Limina last year covers much of the historical territory already—which we’ve duly cited). It leaves out the other big issue on which I am working (or rather, sweating over): that of the subjective, the first-person, the experiential component of what Hynek once called the “UFO Experience” (for many reasons I still like this expression). I agreed to do a talk—they are calling it something like a “Fireside Chat”—at the next Archives of the Impossible Symposium at Rice in Houston this April. I want to be there, surely. I was comfortable as a somewhat ornery, unknown nobody academic in the audience, back in 2023. (I had a good time, and overall I like the event; I commented on it here, in due course.) Now, I’m part of the show. They are giving me a chance to present my thinking. And I see it as a necessary task, where I have to get more serious than I think I already am. I want to do a good job, while being true to myself: to my limits, my lacks and lacunae, where I am unsure and where I think anyone is unsure, but true to where I sincerely think we need to go, and how, possibly, to go (and get) there. I have a lot I’d like to say; but what can I reasonably defend in a public setting, being dutiful in my responsibility as an academic bound by an unspoken rule of fidelity to the craft of philosophical intervention, probings, soul-searching, and honesty … for the love of wisdom? I am scaring myself into shape (I hope), while I procrastinate my way into this talk. We shall see (and I hope what I say can be commented on and reviewed by my revered reader and interlocutor, with whom I’m disappointingly remiss in my responsibilities to keep up with his own thinking, Bryan Sentes of the famed—at least for me—Skunkworks blog … required reading and endlessly suggestive of themes, subjects, topics, notions of profound relevance to UAP, to be followed through on, systematically, carefully, critically).

So, what about that Disclosure Thing, anyway, to which we promised, very early in this essay, a return? I could have said—and it’s not untrue—that I was too busy to participate in this Disclosure Day thing. But I simply, and plainly, demurred. I am skeptical that it will yield the results that people hope it will yield. A deeper issue, which Disclosure doesn’t really address, although it appears to, is Truth. Above all: Trust. Faith, maybe. In government. That Faith has, over the last 60 or 70 years, been shaken to the core. And what Dave Jacobs once called the “UFO Controversy In America” (in the title of his classic historical text of the late 1970s) partly constituted that shaking of the faith in American institutions, of American Democracy, the miliary-industrial complex, the corporate-government nexus, and so on. We see this dramatic turn in UFO/UAP acceptance, post-2021, only at a most trying time in American political life, as the Nation literally and figuratively burns—with the fires of internal discord, broken repeatedly by profound sociocultural dislocations and fractures (some persisting since our Founding), strife on a magnitude perhaps not seen since the Civil War of the 1860s. All the while with wealth increasing, as measured by the narrow calculus of American corporations, the high-priests of Capital. The UAP topic is swept up, all-too-easily, into the current political crisis of our times, used now (again too easily) to further the paranoia of the Deep State.

So-called “Disclosure” calls not only for government transparency, but for systematic declassification in a special-interest driven desire for the release of information and data relevant to all things “UAP”—itself an epistemically fraught category of the anomalous for which there exists no anterior (and default) public consensus on what any of it is. Not having that consensus—on what it is that this category is exactly meant to contain—is a dangerous initial condition for this Disclosure Movement, which seems to be vacuuming precious few funding resources, energy, and time … and people-power. I see the passion of the faithful who act already out of a long-prepared loss of faith in American institutions, who see their cause as constitutive of a potential restoration of that very faith they have (as we all have) lost. The initial conditions, especially as they derive already from a passion for UAP, are set for zealotry, precisely at a moment in American pollical life that is ready to explode into actual, objective political violence. What I fear, and see signs of—especially upon witnessing the new Ross Coulthart interview with yet another military whistleblower (more anon)—is that the UAP issue, disclosure dreams/demands and all, is a mere pawn in a far grander game of (arguably, albeit somewhat quietly, revolutionary) political “vanguardism” (á la Steve Bannon), that aims to root out the so-called “Deep State” actors debilitating (supposedly) American Democracy from within (the “enemy within”). It’s more of this dangerous call to “Drain The Swamp” (as Trumpists wanted in Round 1), forgetting, of course, that they ask for precisely what we are supposed to have abandoned faith in for their sake: for the sake of the Republic, for them to do the job as agents of change for American Government (I hope that ironic but sad contradiction is painfully obvious: Trump, and his cabal, is as swampy as any of politics can ever get—and I say that as a disaffected Dem).

Who isn’t for transparency in government? But, where, when and for what reasons does that have to end when we’re talking about military and defense-department information … stuff related to “national security”? The problem here is a version of who watches the watchers watching us, who isn’t already one from among us? Those watching the watchers likely must themselves be governed by some principle, and held accountable—by someone or some committee charged with oversight. At what point can and does the Public become read-in on any of this as a matter of general concern? Should the Public be privy to such? And so on and so on. Disclosure fights against the deeply-embedded—and arguably rationally necessary—principles of secrecy on which the modern National Security State is founded. It’s not clear what headway can really, plausibly, be made on this score (although the Sol Foundation has written a number of White Papers on the subject, which need to be consulted, of course). I just don’t see this as a very productive cause, unless transparency and other related issues are tackled in a way that’s entirely decoupled from the specific demands of special-interest groups, like those organized around UAP disclosure. Perhaps, from a strictly strategic perspective, one might argue that only through the cause of a special-interest group can something like transparency and declassification be achieved; but I don’t really accept that, for it is clearly about this or that specific class or category of information about a specific issue that is at stake—and can’t be about transparency or declassification generally. Yet, that’s what’s needed: general principles, applicable across the board, which entail the relaxation of classification for the relevant sets of data on UAP. Can that be achieved? Perhaps only if a broad enough coalition is formed in which the specific targets (for declassification) get decoupled from the transparency and declassification push as a whole.

But now I repeat myself, which is a polite reminder, from within the depths of my (likely exhausted) unconscious, that I must bring the torture to an end, and move on to write the actual blog piece—a response to the Coulthart Interview on News Nation last night (18 Jan 2025)—that several hours ago, during a furious texting exchange with a colleague, I felt motivated to sit down and write up. So, let this blog entry be a testimony to the power of procrastination to motivate you to finish something, before moving on to that something else which feels so wonderful in thought but not necessarily in practice.

Now, let’s talk about that Egg…