If you think we’ll eventually learn the truth about UFOs, think again. Late last year, a US government bill mandating the controlled release of all classified documents and artifacts related to UFOs was significantly watered down at the last minute to get it through Congress.
Interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), a new term for UFOs, began in June 2023 when former US intelligence agency whistleblower David Grusch wrote on the Debrief website that during his official missions he discovered that the US had indeed received spacecraft that were not spacecraft. It flared up again when he said that. It has been of human origin for decades. The allegations led to a congressional hearing in which Grusch and others described what they learned from the supersecret project or saw with their own eyes during military service. Their testimony resulted in the new Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Disclosure Act, written by a bipartisan group of five elected representatives led by Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer and Republican senator Mike Rounds.
While it is easy to focus on the extraordinary nature of the subject or the reliability of witnesses to UAPs, the possibility of alien spacecraft raises serious issues that go beyond whether we are alone in the universe. There have been many people lately not only to look for signs of extraterrestrial life, but also to ask what it would mean for us psychologically if aliens really existed, and – potentially worse – what it would mean psychologically if the authorities lied to us about what happened. Scientific study is being done. they know.
When it comes to governments, the primary issue is trust. As Wisconsin Republican congressman Glenn Grothman explained in his inaugural address on July 26: [government] “Transparency regarding UAPs has fueled wild speculation and debate for decades, eroding the public’s trust in the institutions that are supposed to serve and protect them.”
The Disclosure Act was intended to restore public confidence and reassure Congress that secret projects were not occurring outside its oversight.
The legislation was modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. He is frustrated by the growing public perception that agents of the U.S. government are conspiring with the military to assassinate the president; A belief that entered the mainstream through Oliver. Stone’s 1991 film JFK -The law created a national archive of all records related to the assassination and declassified the vast majority of them. The process was audited by an independent institution.
Declassifying UAP records will depend largely on the same organizations that have blocked their disclosure for decades.
Chuck Schumer
The original text of the UAP Disclosure Act was similar in that it proposed the creation of a national archive that would be overseen by an independent panel of nine U.S. citizens. Their job was to decide when and how to disclose information in the archive, independently of military, political or institutional influence. The law would give the panel the power to hold more hearings and provide witnesses with immunity from prosecution. He also proposed: “The federal government will exercise ‘supreme authority’ over all recovered technologies of unknown origin that can be controlled by private individuals or entities in the public interest and that are biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”
In other words, the U.S. government could seize any artwork deemed to be held by private citizens or corporations and was under a duty to make it public. In parallel, the law also called for the secretary of state to “contact any foreign government in possession of material relating to unidentified anomalous events, technologies of unknown origin, or non-human intelligence and request the disclosure of such material.”
In short, the truth about UAPs would finally come out. However, most of these provisions have now been repealed. All that remains is the archive, but it will not be managed by an independent institution. After the vote, Schumer called the archive a “huge, major win for government transparency” but later said it was “a disgrace” that the proposed review board was not adopted. “This now means that the declassification of UAP records will largely depend on the same organizations that have blocked and concealed their disclosure for decades,” he said.
talk with News Country On December 12, Grusch unequivocally called the amendments “the greatest legislative error in American history.”
Not only did this law do little to increase transparency, it also increased suspicion that the U.S. government actually had something to hide.
“If the UFO/UAP issue has no substance other than misperceptions, paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, naivety and disinformation, then government, military and academic bodies need to openly and transparently look under every alleged rock on this subject. From Cardiff Metropolitan University says clinical psychologist Daniel Stubbings. “But they chose to do the opposite, which increased the suspicion that there was something to hide.”
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People have been seeing unexplained things in the sky for thousands of years. While it’s easy to dismiss these as hallucinations or delusions, it’s much harder to ignore photos and videos from reputable sources. This is exactly what the office of the director of national intelligence in the United States published in 2021. The Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena report details that the U.S. Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena task force investigated 144 UAP reports made between 2004 and 2021. mostly by military personnel. He also released three declassified videos of some of these UAPs in action.
These were the materials that helped persuade Stubbings to take the matter seriously. He interviewed people who believed they were seeing something they couldn’t explain, who were interested in identifying underlying mental health needs or common personality types between them. He found that all types of personality profiles have UAPs, and many are left with unmet psychological needs.
“I was initially confident that the UAP problem could be explained by ordinary psychological and/or situational factors, but the more I studied actual cases, the less certain I became,” says Stubbings.
“I started to realize that this was a very safe topic. “If it’s true, it’s a game changer,” he says. “If it’s not true, that’s extremely worrying. How did we get to this point in society where we think all these things are true and spend all this money to research them?”
Traditionally, it is astronomers who look for evidence of other life in the universe. For example, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Seti uses telescopes to look for signals from alien civilizations. While Seti was once on the fringes of astronomy, it is now increasingly seen as mainstream.
Breakthrough Listen is the largest scientific research program ever seeking evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. It aims to investigate the 1 million stars closest to Earth and the 100 galaxies closest to ours. The project, which has been carried out at the University of California at Berkeley since January 2016, announced a new headquarters in Oxford last October.
“This is a huge vote of confidence for the project from one of the world’s leading universities, astrophysics groups, and physics departments,” says Steve Croft, an astronomer at UC Berkeley and the Seti Institute who is also a senior researcher at the new Headquarters. .
In early December, Croft and colleagues published results from the project from more than 140 terabytes of data (equivalent to more than five years of continuous high-definition video monitoring) from 97 nearby galaxies. Although they didn’t find anything that looked artificial in this particular study, Croft says: “It’s a start.”
Other astronomers using different techniques have seen things that warrant further investigation. Beatriz Villarroel, professor of physics at Stockholm University, leads a team of astronomers studying photographic plates of the night sky before the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957.
As satellites orbit the Earth, they can reflect sunlight, causing bright flashes in the night sky. These leave spots or lines of light that appear and disappear randomly on astronomical images. Villarroel mysteriously found nine light sources in a plate from April 1950 that appeared and then disappeared over a half-hour period. Observations using the Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma in the Canary Islands did not reveal anything that might have caught fire at the locations of the light sources.
“There is no astronomical explanation for such events,” says Villarroel.
Recently, his team found three bright “stars” on a plate dated July 19, 1952, that had since disappeared. Provocatively, this is a date etched in the diaries of UFO enthusiasts around the world because it coincides with a famous incident in which pilots and radar operators saw lights in the skies over Washington DC that they could not explain.
It only takes one account to become true, and it changes humanity’s narrative forever
Daniel Stubbings
“I think it is very important to do something like this. [nearby] Because we are looking for extraterrestrial objects [astronomical] The community often searches for things far, far away. I think it’s time to do something new,” says Villarroel, who is trying to set up the ExoProbe project to search for anomalous objects among the many human satellites currently in orbit.
But what if he, or anyone else, uncovers irrefutable evidence that nonhuman intelligences have visited or are visiting Earth?
A few years ago, physicist John Priestland, who runs an engineering consultancy, found himself wondering what this meant for us as individuals. “If there is something to be explained here, then I am aware that there are a lot of people who will be affected and, as far as I can see, there is no entity that puts people first.” says.
That’s why he founded Unhidden, a charity dedicated to reducing the stigma associated with discussing UAPs, non-human intelligence and the possibility of evidence being suppressed by governments.
It’s a mission Stubbings accepts. “There is still a stigma around this issue; “People are too afraid to discuss it,” he says. “But it only takes one explanation to be true, and it changes the narrative of humanity forever.”
Priestland says that’s why the Disclosure Act is seen as important and that its amended version is a huge disappointment, even potentially dangerous.
“It’s all about ‘my truth’ these days, except for people seeing strange things in the sky. “We do not legitimize their truth.” He says they need help and support. “And we have to do this in the context of possible exposure, because suddenly 8 billion people may have to get used to the fact that they are being told that the organizations they are now aware of have a very different view of the world.” “I’ve lied to them for the last 80 years.”