Saturday, January 06, 2018
Disconnected from Disclosure
Disconnected from Disclosure
As I write this (January 2018), I am in the midst of
collating all the Canadian UFO reports filed with various organizations and
agencies in 2018. It’s too early to cite any hard numbers, and it usually takes
me and Geoff Dittman until about March or April to get data entered and
analysed, but it looks like 2017 will have been a “good year” for UFOs.
Some of you will think that’s been obvious, with the
announcement in October 2017 by former punk rocker Tom DeLonge that he had
formed the To The Stars Academy (TTSA) for studying UFOs and disseminated the
evidence for alien contact with humans. Then, in December came the revelation
that some individuals associated with DeLonge’s group, including former
Pentagon employees, had
worked within a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
Program (AATIP). It existed from 2007 to 2012 (although rumoured to have
continued secretly) to study “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
This announcement, through no less a media vehicle than
the New York Times, was hailed as the Disclosure about UFOs that ardent
believers have been waiting for all these years. The existence of a classified
government program to study UFOs had been assumed by many, but this was the
admission everyone was waiting for. Since Project Blue Book closed in 1969, it
seemed incomprehensible that the US government and military establishment would
not have continued to receive and study UFO reports, especially from military
personnel at the very least.
Along with this announcement, media were given access to
a former military pilot who described an
in-flight encounter with a UFO that had been seen approaching the USS
Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Two videos were also released,
neither of which were the “gun camera” videos taken by this pilot, but they
seemed to support the story that the American crew had an aerial encounter with
something strange over the ocean.
I won’t go into the details of the post-release analyses
of these videos by the more objective members of the ufological community, who
have tried to track down the true provenance of the videos and who have
painstakingly examined the videos for possible explanations. Debunking
skeptics, oddly enough, have simply brushed the claims aside and dismissed them
out of hand. “Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien,” said
science populist and UFO debunker Neil DeGrasse Tyson in a
CNN interview about the Nimitz claims. “The evidence is so paltry for
aliens to visit Earth, I have no further interest.”
To hardcore believers, however, the TTSA Nimitz story is
the proof they have been waiting for. The government knows aliens are here, and
they’ve been keeping the truth from us. But now, mainstream media have taken an
interest, and so we finally have Disclosure!
Although… we don’t, really. Because of the strong
marketing by DeLonge and his TTSA staff, media did remain interested for a
while, but the alien story has now been trumped by other news. We didn’t really
get much in the way of revelations. The Nimitz video had been leaked publicly
on YouTube years ago through a
German special effects company, raising some warranted suspicion. The
videos don’t match what the pilot saw. The pilot’s testimony itself is
interesting, but we’ve had many pilots come forward with stories of UFO
encounters over the past several years. A popular book by Leslie Kean details
many of these. The stories show that UFOs are still being seen and reported by
qualified observers.
In Canada, we’ve been more fortunate than the Americans,
as UFO reports have been continuously part of the official record through the
decades. As readers of this blog know, I regularly include UFO sightings
reported to Transport Canada and other official agencies in the annual Canadian
UFO Surveys. And 2017 was no exception. In fact, because UFOs were being
reported and recorded while the American UFO project had been closed, it was
obvious that another American project must have been doing the UFO work in
parallel to the Canadian records. AATIP is at least a partial answer, and it
only officially ran between 2007 and 2012.
And what do the 2017 Canadian UFO reports tell us about
the nature of the UFO phenomenon? Do they support the excitement of Disclosure?
In a word, no.
In fact, out of roughly 1,000 UFO reports every year in
Canada, none are proof of alien intervention or visitation. Yes, there’s a
small percentage of unknowns or unexplained UFO reports every year, but even
they just mean that we’re not sure exactly what they were. And in many cases,
further investigation and details that come to light later can help explain
even those as terrestrial and human phenomena.
It’s also useful to consider the numbers involved.
Typically, there are about ten percent fewer UFO reports in Canada than the
USA, in any given year. This is because there’s a direct population effect. More
people around as potential UFO witnesses means more UFO reports. So that means
there are, roughly, about 10,000 UFO reports in the USA every year. And these
are only the ones reported to civilian agencies like NUFORC and MUFON. Where do
the sightings made by military personnel on routine or clandestine missions get
reported?
A partial answer might be the AATIP group as noted in the
TTSA release. It makes perfect sense that UFOs seen by military pilots and
other official observers would be going to an official agency, just in case the
UFOs seen were “enemy” aircraft or other phenomena posing potential threats to
personnel. Aliens need not be involved. Furthermore, because such sightings
would be regular occurrences during the course of normal operations in many
theatres, a program keeping track of such observations would not just operate
for seven years. It would be an ongoing thing.
AATIP, therefore, was likely only an arm of another
project, bleeding into the civilian world through technology companies like
that run by billionaire Robert Bigelow, who has a profound interest in the UFO
phenomenon and who believes
we are being visited by extraterrestrials.
It
was also claimed that Bigelow had to “modify” special buildings within his
purview in Las Vegas “for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that…
had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” This was perhaps the
most remarkable claim within this broader story. Pilot testimonies of UFO
encounters are nothing new. Government UFO programs have been noted before. But
actual physical evidence from a UFO? That’s in a different category of
ufological discourse.
We don’t know what these might be, however, and there’s
no hint that anything about this is forthcoming. But over the course of UFO
history, many claimed alien artefacts have been presented and examined by
ufology researchers and independent laboratories. None have been deemed truly
alien.
But which ones might be in such a collection? I developed
a list some time ago and posted it publicly. They might include:
1. Ubatuba magnesium.
2. The Bob White "bullet"
3. Falcon Lake radioactive silver bars
4. Ottawa slag
5. Crashed-saucer material (?) from El-Taire, Bolivia?
6. Crashed-saucer material (?) from Plains of San
Augustin
7. Roswell fragment found by Ben Mezrich?
8. Implant(s) from Derrell Sims' collection
9. Valensole plant material?
10. Pretoria (1965) asphalt
11. Desvergers' cap
12. Maury Island slag
13. Angel hair?
14. "Space grass"
15. Spitzbergen rocket hardware
16. Chunk of UFO shot off UFO by Navy fighter in 1952?
17. Others?
One can imagine that if money was no object, you could
get your hands on this kind of material. It’s been known that pre-eminent
ufologist Jacques Vallee visited Argentina as recently as 2016 and may have
been given access to some of the original Ubatuba metal at one point in the
past. He noted in one
interview that the Ubatuba metal, if really from the 1930s as claimed,
would be quite interesting. (He also described a metallic fragment from a 1970s
UFO case that turned out to be aluminum.)
What this shows is that pieces allegedly from alien
spacecraft have been found and examined for a long time, and that this “hard
evidence” could be what scientists contracted by UFO-focused billionaires would
be examining for evidence of alien visitation. And such scientists could be
part of an actual “Invisible College” like what Vallee described in
one of his books, willingly studying UFO evidence out of personal interest
and collaborating with like minds at post-secondary institutions around the
world.
This was, in effect, what I have been doing in the
background for many years, seeking out academics willing to entertain the
subject of UFOs without dismissing it out of hand and engaging in useful
discussions. For example, it’s how I got a small group of scientists,
ufologists and a UFO witness together in the early 1980s for the Manitoba
Conference on Ufology to talk openly about the nature of the UFO phenomenon. It’s
partially why I continue to work with Geoff Dittman and others on the annual
Canadian UFO Survey: to gather UFO data through collaboration with UFO
organizations sincerely seeking to help understand the phenomenon, and make the
data available for others to use in studies. (It’s already being used in some
statistical courses as an example for data mining.)
Which brings me back to UFO report data.
We began the annual Canadian UFO Survey in 1989.
Originally, it was simply an exercise to see what the overall national picture
looked like in terms of UFO sightings reported in Canada. What area of the
country had the most UFO sightings? Were there any patterns to the
distribution? Were saucers more common than cigars? What could UFO reports tell
us about UFO witnesses themselves? And so forth.
The hardest part was getting cooperation from other ufologists
and group across the country, who tended to be rather territorial and
ensurient. Through the enlightened teamwork with those that worked with me,
however, we gained some insight into the nature of UFO reports and their
characteristics. What’s more, we had some data on the distribution of UFO
reports across classifications. Most were simply lights in the sky. Close
encounters were few and far between. Most UFO sightings had more than one
witness. And so on.
But above all, the analyses showed that few UFO reports
were left unexplained after investigation. In fact, after a few years, it
became obvious that data on things such as the duration of a sighting, the
colour, and the time of day, often provided enough information to explain many
UFO cases. The ratios of unknowns to explained cases or to those with possible
or probable explanations remained fairly constant from year to year. Only a
small fraction of UFO cases each year were left as unexplained, and even in
those cases, none were convincing proof that aliens were visiting Earth. After something close to 30 years of studying
actual UFO reports (as in the case of the annual Canadian UFO Survey), we have
looked at about 18,000 UFO reports in only one country. And this can be
extrapolated to something like 150,000 to 200,000 UFO reports from the USA
during that same time period.
(This of course is immaterial to the caution that not all
ufologists believe UFOs are alien spaceships. Many note that UFO simply means
unidentified flying object, and that perhaps other explanations such as an
atmospheric phenomenon might be responsible. The reality is that media
campaigns such as that launched by DeLonge and TTSA trumpet the contention that
UFOs are indicative of alien intervention.)
But based on analyses of tens of thousands of UFO
reports, if there is no real evidence that UFO sightings are caused by alien
spacecraft, what is the whole Nimitz/Pentagon/TTSA announcement and effort all
about?
It’s also interesting that in 2004, Bigelow announced the closing of the
National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) which he founded and funded
in 1995 to study Fortean phenomena, but especially UFOs. But by 2004, he noted
NIDS had no cases to study for years and therefore was rendered “inactive.” Yet
only three years later, AATIP was created and later allocated $22 million to
Bigelow for studying reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, and had been
encouraged enough to create a building to house alien artefacts.
As noted elsewhere, I had met Robert Bigelow in 2009 at a
MUFON conference. We talked a bit about my work and he expressed interest in an
arrangement to receive information about “good” Canadian UFO cases. This meant
cases for which he could send his team of investigators out to interview
witnesses and acquire physical evidence, if any, ahead of media and other
civilian investigations. But since no such Canadian cases became evident, it
was a moot point.
To me, all of this is pointing to what I would call a
disconnection from disclosure. The revelations so far presented don’t seem to
be the (capital D) Disclosure that UFO zealots have been waiting for. There was
initially a bit of a media flurry, but mainstream media are back to focusing on
other issues. It’s possible that with so much attention to and claims of “fake
news” today, stories about possible alien visitation just don’t seem that
remarkable. Especially when the hard evidence isn’t made available.
There are stories floating around the Internet about
mogul-financed investigations of UFO crash sites, an invisible college of
academics in conferences on ufology, and back-engineered projects and products
(such as smart phones, quantum computing, and Velcro) that were inspired or
produced from bits of alien tech.
And yet, there are thousands of real, verified UFO
reports from sincere witnesses who believe they have seen alien spacecraft, but
upon even cursory investigation (let alone intensive research) turn out to have
simple explanations. This is a paradox of significant proportions, and flies in
the face of any imminent disclosure or even “soft” disclosure, however you may
wish to define it.
On the one hand, we have thousands of UFO reports from individuals
across many demographics. The overwhelming majority are innocent
misidentifications, but many are easily explained IFOs whose witnesses are
firmly convinced aliens have contacted them. A tiny fraction is unexplained,
but these don’t necessarily mean aliens are visiting.
On the other hand, there are people in positions of power
and/or influence who are convinced that aliens have made themselves known to a
select group. We also know that various world governments and military
institutions have had (and likely continue to have) an interest in UFO reports.
This interest is largely because intrusions on a country’s airspace is of great
concern, but when individuals in power involve themselves in such programs, the
delineation between objectivity and religious belief in alien influence blurs.
Disclosure is assumed by some; rejected out of hand by others.
And hence, we have a disconnection from disclosure. We
need facts and data that would allow reasonable conclusions to be drawn, but we
still have mostly conjecture and interpretation. Proponents of the recent
revelations scoff at “debunkers” who refuse to see this Disclosure that is as
plain as the noses on their faces. Adamant skeptics demand more tangible
evidence that can be presented in a public court for open examination.
I suspect that with some government officials rattling
some cages, we might see the initiation of some low-level congressional inquiries
into the truth behind the recent furore. We might be treated with the release
of additional footage from the Nimitz video.
But will any of that be enough to state there is true
Disclosure of alien intervention?
# posted by rutkows @ 12:32 PM 
