Are We Really in a True Disclosure Moment? THE ROADS TO DISCLOSURES, THE BARRIERS TO TRUTH

There’s been a great deal of excitement flushing through the Twitter trenches and across UFO websites and blogs about how we’re on the precipice of a true Disclosure moment – or is it a cliff where many things like UFO tuthieness fall off into the pit as they have for the past 70 years? Statements by high profile figures keep dinging the Disclosure bell for yet another round in the sweaty, bloodied ring. And that includes Big Lue Elizondo, the current Disclosure Poster Boy who led the government’s secret UFO studies platform --The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- before leaving to join rock star Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, before leaving that now-dubious organization to become the Go-To guy for media, a sure-bet Truthsayer to illuminate the darkness that is us. Well, most of us.

Big Lue Elizondo at You Know Where: The Poster Boy for Disclosure and The Best Hope for it?

It should be noted that Elizondo’s former colleague at DeLonge’s rodeo show, Chris Mellon (a former deep Defense Intel Department wrangler serving both Clinton and W before also “coming out” like Lue), is also singing like a caged bird set free from the Beltway to soar on the UFO/UAP flyway. And dropping his formidable opinions about “the phenomenon”  to A-listers like The Hill’s "The Rising" webcast as recently as Friday, Feb 4. There, Mellon says what many government and military officials are conceivably thinking but will never say, “Government's inability to explain flying objects strengthens 'alien hypothesis.’" Arguable, but Mellon scores points in this latest round.

Chris Mellon with the You Know What’s: Strengthening the “alien hypothesis?”

So, are we in a true Disclosure moment? Or are we again experiencing the “Where’s There’s Smoke, There’s Mirrors” Syndrome (apologies to Gary Trudeau)?

Some facts.

1)      The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) including the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Amendment, is now signed into law, establishing a formal office to conduct collection and analysis related to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). However, the public may never be privy to the details of either collection or analysis.

 2)      While this is well and good and makes for great mainstream news headlines and web watercooler talk among Disclosure devotees (myself among this long-suffering horde), the government’s new UFO/UAP office may be designed to fail right out of the shoot, given the longstanding protections of the National Security State that are firmly in place to guard state secrets that even presidents and congressional lawmakers can never penetrate: the Special Access Programs (SAP’s) and the Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAP’s -- in which one must be read into the program by those already in it.)

Some explanation – from 1996:

During that year, I wrote a short piece for the Utne Reader’s special issue about Space. It was titled, “Life in the Stars: Whether the existence of extraterrestrials is an irrefutable fact or just a compelling theory, the media would do well to start telling the story.”  In it, I briefly explored these security mechanisms that safeguard all sorts of military (mis)adventures (and probable crimes?), plus a range of exotica like the UFO thing:

“Richard M. Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: An Unclassified History, Volume One 1941– 1973 (Keyhole Publishing, 2000), says it’s difficult to follow up on claims such as Corso’s [in Colonel Corso’s book, The Day after Roswell] because, while classified documents created by government agencies can occasionally be ferreted out, proprietary information held by businesses and global corporations is hard to come by. Since the military and the federal government rely on subcontractors to do some of their most sensitive work, using special-access projects (SAPs) and unacknowledged special-access projects (USAPs), secrets are easier to keep…”

“Writing on his website (www.ufoskeptic.org), author and astrophysicist Bernard Haisch points out that a SAP ‘is for programs considered to be too sensitive for nor[1]mal classification measures. . .. They are protected by a security system of great complexity. Many of the SAPs are located within industry funded through special contracts.’ Much of his analysis is based on “In Search of the Pentagon’s Billion-Dollar Hidden Budgets,” an article by Bill Sweetman in the highly regarded British publication Jane’s International Defence Review. “Even members of Congress on appropriations committees (the Senate and House committees that allocate budgets) and intelligence committees are not allowed to know anything about these programs,’ Haisch writes. ‘Moreover, Freedom of Information Act requests cannot penetrate unacknowledged special access programs.”

“In Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (HarperCollins, 2004), New Yorker contributor Seymour Hersh reports that one SAP, used to recruit operatives, has been linked to military torture in Iraq. The desired effect is the same: to avoid scrutiny and sidestep opposing elements that exist in the CIA and Pentagon.”

 “’The granddaddy of all USAPs is the UFO/ET matter,’” writes Steven Greer in his book Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and Implications (Crossing Point, 1999). Greer— who says USAPs are a top-secret, compartmentalized project that not even the commander in chief has the power to access—founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Since the early ’90s, working under the assumption that the USAP model exists, Greer and CSETI associates have met often with high-level officials of the U.S. and other governments, including former CIA director James Woolsey” (in full personal disclosure, I served as CSETI’s communications guy in the ‘90s, and some of The Space Pen Club is set during that period).

Will this new office have the authority to override these SAP and USAP systems?

3) An LA friend whose father used to work at the Skunk Works sent me this link last summer from the National Archives -- https://www.youtube.com/c/USNationalArchives/search

 It features an array of videos about our favorite topic here in the Chronicles. Is “the government” – scattered across umpteen departments and agencies, inscrutable subdivisions and multiple fractured communications channels – really doing a Disclosure in slow motion?!

 4)  In my book, Chapter 9 is titled, “The Road to Discloser, The Barriers to Truth,” and I tackle this issue more in-depth. But I’ve titled this blog using road and barrier in the plural – since there are likely other considerations we haven’t discovered yet, other barriers, including the reality of unintended consequences having to do with what newspaper writer and independent UFO/UAP blogger, Billy Cox, loves to call The Big Enigma.

 We’re certainly on a new road, as Elizondo, Mellon and others like to remind us for the past year or so. Let’s hope, and pray, and act like, it’s not David Byrne’s/Talking Heads’ “"Road to Nowhere".

 Credits: Chris Mellon photo (To The Stars Academy); Lue Elizondo (Roswell Daily Record, submitted by LE)