Could we soon find out the truth behind the UFO/UAP mystery?
So believes the hype-wave swarming over the UFO community online, as numerous events have coalesced into a broad sensation that long-awaited “disclosure” may finally happen.
We’re not so sure ourselves. Disclosure is the magic word that, for UFO believers, means an unveiling of humanity’s greatest discovery: that we are not alone. It would involve the U.S. Government and institutions coming clean on their involvement in a decades-long misinformation campaign that sought to discredit and delegitimize research into the topic, and which arguably began in July 1947, after the controversial Roswell crash.
In other words, disclosure means glasnost for aliens.
But disclosure is always a breath away, according to UFO believers, and has been so for decades. But this time may actually be different. Because Trump’s quasi-revolutionary agenda does mean a form of disclosure may further his administration’s immediate interests of re-centralizing power in the executive, and away from the shadowy security state.
But let’s study how we got here in the first place.
Much of this hype stemmed from quotes by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who claimed the phenomenon “keeps me up at night” in a recently released UFO documentary titled Age of Disclosure. The now-Secretary of State further claimed that “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities — and it’s not ours.”
This sensation was propelled by Harvard Professor Avi Loeb’s preoccupations that Earth may be defenseless should objects like the now-departed 3/I Atlas turn out to be alien probes, and Swedish astronomer Beatriz Villarroel’s groundbreaking study on mysterious ‘transients’ in orbit prior to the launch of human satellites.
Dan Farah, the producer behind Age of Disclosure, claimed to have been informed that Donald Trump “had become aware of the basic facts” behind the phenomenon, and that his team “is trying to learn everything they need to know”. Farah went further, explicitly suggesting his belief that Trump may be the disclosure President.
This was coupled with the viral release of an ominous image from Steven Spielberg’s new movie, which rented out a billboard with the text “ALL WILL BE DISCLOSED.”
UFO believers have long argued for the urgency of disclosure, arguing the United States should come clean on their decades of misdirection on the topic, and gift humanity their claimed truth; that we are not alone. Such a revelation would strengthen trust in governmental institutions and prepare humanity ahead of its drastic consequences, they claim.
But if any form of disclosure happens soon, such political goodwill won’t be the cause. Neither will it be a desire for greater transparency or trust in government.
Instead, it is the United States’ ongoing transition from Republic to Empire that promises to overturn the primary reason for UFO secrecy; unaccountable security structures designed to protect the West from foreign infiltration.
The democratic infiltration risk
Democracy has one major flaw: its mechanisms can be penetrated by foreign powers through lobbying. This means democracies cannot adequately handle sensitive secrets, as was required when the West was gearing up for the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
When faced with powerful adversaries, democracies only have one recourse: to create lobby-proof security structures.
In other words, to create an extra-democratic state that sits above democracy. This is Carl Schmitt’s typical “state of exception” theory: that the true sovereign in democracies is that institution which can exist above the conventional rule of law.
Democracy didn’t directly give birth to UFO secrecy. But the requirements of secrecy being incompatible with democratic rule led to the creation of unaccountable and obscure institutions that could keep secrets. It was called the dual state by Hans Morgenthau when, in 1955, he described the creation of this prerogative-driven security apparatus that covertly sat atop a normative democratic state.
And UFOs, along with nuclear secrets and a plethora of black-budget programs to fight communism, got swept up into it.
Thus, the only institutional power with a real incentive to break apart UFO secrecy is one willing to dismantle this extra-democratic structure to achieve its own ends.
In other words, disclosure would need a Julius Caesar-type who, sat atop an atrophied normative state, would be willing to rip up decades of Republican tradition to fulfill his power-maximizing ends. For a Caesar, UFO transparency wouldn’t be an end in itself. It would be a mechanism to strip the secret state of another locus of its power, returning it to his executive control.
And while Donald Trump isn’t literally Caesar, his governance style is Caesarian: under a radical interpretation of unitary executive authority, which considers the White House the undisputed fount of legal validity, the traditional separation of powers has crumbled.
And key to his extension of executive power over the entire apparatus of state bureaucracy is the demolition of competing transnational and extra-democratic power structures whose power relied on keeping America’s democratic government constantly checked by Congress, the Senate, the states, and the judiciary.
The Cold War’s birthing of UFO secrecy
This analysis goes against the grain of conventional UFO thinking.
There are many reported reasons for UFO secrecy in Western governmental institutions, and very few of them blame inherent pressures in democratic governance amidst geopolitical tensions.
As a result, most miss the mark.
At the SOL Foundation’s conference this October, the preeminent gathering of serious UAP researchers, conventional speculation as to what kept these potential secrets under wraps abounded among the audience.
The most sensible position I heard was to speculate a mundane answer; maybe governments are just too embarrassed to admit that humanity may be powerless before an external, non-human threat. Or, as the famous 1960 Brookings Report commissioned by NASA noted, the secret may be too destructive to human society, threatening to dismantle our civilization-building incentive structures as the arrival of the Spanish did to the Mesoamericans.
The next series of positions argued from a position of warranted cynicism of established power by speculating even further; that the discoveries which emerged from a series of crash retrievals unlocked technological breakthroughs that threatened to upend our reliance on traditional sources of energy. According to this conspiratorial perspective, the same financial forces that supposedly torpedoed Nikola Tesla’s vision of a future with almost free electricity, fearing damage to the nascent, oil-powered industrial revolution, suppressed these findings, also suppressed the truth about the “phenomenon”.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If non-human intelligences abound, and if their technology has been retrieved, the above explanations do not exactly miss the mark.
Government requires an illusion of power and security to exert its legitimacy — admitting to powerlessness is tantamount to withdrawing its raison d’etre. Antiquated civilizations are destroyed by the arrival of technological rivals. And alternative methods of growth that threaten monopolistic, incumbent powers are typically suppressed.
What these perspectives miss is an understanding of the context within which the UFO term and its associated secrecy arose: the early Cold War. The context of a historical figure, process or idea is just as central to understanding its contents as the ideas themselves. And it was the Cold War, not the pressures of governmental authority, civilizational trajectories, or economic considerations, which defined our society’s current relationship to the phenomenon.
One speaker at the conference nailed it. This was Dr Karl Svozli, a former Professor of physics at T.U. Vienna. Svozli argued in his presentation that the UFO topic was defined by the West’s permanent state of exception since the Cold War.
In other words, that UFO secrecy was defined by the war’s necessity to house this problem, or to exploit it for covert war-fighting aims, within unaccountable structures.
Disclosure is no MAGA Affair
Disclosure has been around the corner for decades. No high-signal intelligence has reached us that would suggest the Trump administration plans to disclose some reality behind the UFO phenomenon immediately.
What is interesting for disclosure is understanding that Trump’s incentives for re-centralising power, both toward the White House and the Americas, are not MAGA-specific.
Instead, the sense of political crisis gripping Western societies will increasingly favor a powerful executive out of necessity, just as the late Roman Republic increasingly relied on strongmen consuls and dictators like Sulla or Caesar.
This means American governance may increasingly favor policies that weaken the Western transnational security state, while these extra-legal powers are increasingly transferred to the executive branch, whether Republican or Democrat.
Consider this: the recent push to officialize and normalize the UFO phenomenon (as we recently argued) serves as a club to weaken the security state. And the whole idea was first pushed during the late Obama administration and Clinton’s Presidential campaign by John Podesta, and not by Trump.
In other words, if the UFO phenomenon’s normalization benefits an American executive who, regardless of party affiliation, is forced to strip authority from competitive power nodes, we may already be on the inexorable road towards disclosure.
If so, the only question would be: how quickly will the desperation set in?
