An updated tweak for 'Disclosure Day'

Things appear to be happening suspiciously fast now

The most salient questions raised by Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” aren’t about ESP, screen memories or the nature of nonhuman intelligence. They’re about logistics.

What does it take to steal classified material from a legally suspect black program? Where is Daniel Ellsberg? Where are the Pentagon Papers, the pilfered thumb drives, the Rosetta Stone? Who has the chutzpah to ghost the reservation and risk a martyr’s stand against the immorality of privatizing the biggest headline in human history? Would today’s politicized and brand-flogging media platforms – bracing against Nixon-like blowback for telling the truth about Vietnam – band together the way newspapers did 55 years ago in order to guarantee the public’s right to know and understand government policy?

Recent glimmers of optimism notwithstanding, it’s looking like the most efficient way to pry the UFO “core secrets” from their minders – or for getting anything else you want out of government these days – is to break the law. After 250 years of stretching the envelope of executive power, we’ve finally come to a place where top-down corruption can accommodate appropriate “fee schedules” in broad daylight, where criminal penalties are negotiable if not downright arbitrary.

Last week’s Disclosure Forum at the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington offered a welcome glimpse into higher aspirations for this administration. The sobriety of the venue connected history with living memory. This is where the Teapot Dome bribery scandal was dragged by its heels into the sunlight and Sen. Howard Baker demanded from John Dean, straight up, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” The vibe was on loan from a bygone era when political parties took turns holding their noses to call out their own crooked benefactors.

The long-distance runners

The Kennedy Caucus Room was packed with a bipartisan Who’s Who of lawmakers, witnesses, researchers, journalists and other advocates for government-authorized revelations. After years or even decades of thankless slogging for honest answers, this crowd had been energized by online microbursts of hope – UFO photos, documents, videos, current and archival – that the worm might be turning at last. On this day, there were standing ovations for whistleblowers and pols supporting a notion that would’ve gotten them laughed out of the joint 10 years ago. On this day, the stigma appeared to disintegrate in real time; even Whitley “Communion” Strieber, the grand old man of the once-radioactive alien abduction lore, rated a round of applause for hanging in there.

Keynote speaker Christopher Mellon laid the groundwork for the occasion in 2017 by helping to finesse Navy UFO footage out of the Pentagon. The New York Times’ subsequent investigation of the DoD’s secret research program went on to alter the course of history. Mellon used the Senate platform to make an optimistic pitch for truth as a great global unifier.

“If it turns out, as I believe the evidence suggests it will, that some of these craft are of nonhuman origin, the implications are not merely scientific,” stated the Disclosure Foundation’s board chair. “They ripple outward from national security into economics, into religion and philosophy, into the deepest questions of human identity.”

That prepped the stage for Sen. Mike Rounds, chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, to announce yet another bid to open the drapes. Once again, he’s spending political capital to support the UAP Disclosure Act, which he vowed to work into next year’s National Defense Authorization Act. Because without a) enhanced whistleblower protections, and b) a dedicated independent review board to evaluate the Pentagon’s classified UFO data for public release, there is no coherent path forward. Which means science will continue to contemplate piecemeal scraps of heavily edited military releases until the hidden hands decide to quit playing altogether.

Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Burlison, arguably the point of the congressional spear on the evidence-acquisition front, sounded exasperated. Without even making it to the floor for a vote, all prior attempts to open The Great Taboo to legislative interrogation have died behind closed doors. No one is taking credit for sabotaging accountability, but Burlison said he knows who they are. He just didn’t name names.

Never mind the middle finger

“It’s staff,” charged the Missouri Republican. His words had trouble catching up to the emotions of the moment. “And it’s like, who elected you? You were not elected! I mean, for you to be able to deny an elected official whose – my job is to answer to the people, and you’re going to deny me the ability to get this amendment, if at least even offered, is unacceptable!”

Of course it’s unacceptable. But who’s gonna stop it?

According to a loose consensus in the Kennedy Caucus Room, the money’s on Donald Trump now.

Trump’s February 9 directive to “identify and release” federal UAP/UFO material was a defensive rejoinder to Barack Obama’s casual remarks about the possibility of such evidence being hidden from the presidency. In a calculated editorial move that triggered a firestorm of intrigue weeks later, the White House registered the domain names alien.gov and aliens.gov. When the contents spilled on May 28, they went over like a big middle finger. The interchangeable sites posted an immigration arrest map, complete with a portal for reporting “suspicious aliens” to ICE. The White House website then promoted the gag with a tone-deaf video showing a UFO beaming up a border crosser and teleporting him to the other side of a wall.

This juvenile stunt mitigated the expressed intentions of the abruptly assembled Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), under whose auspices the so-called Department of War has been releasing scores of documents and videos since May 8. Undoubtedly, some of the downloads raise interesting questions. Why, for instance, is a mysterious white orb – tracked by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in 2024 – slaloming around a network of offshore wind turbines? Last year, Trump tried to kill America’s windmills because “they’re ugly.” Wonder what he made of that wind turbine UFO video. Wish I cared enough about his opinion to ask.

Hail to the chief

Nevertheless, Forum participants were obliged to signal their appreciation of the man whose capricious and perhaps fleeting interest in the last great secret of the Cold War offers maybe the only hope for a breakthrough.

Framing the UFO coverup as another “deep state” conundrum rooted in Trump’s “deep distrust of government,” Burlison set some lofty expectations: “Now we’re seeing an administration that is absolutely hellbent on getting the information out.” Hellbent. Absolutely. Even retired admiral Tim Gallaudet ran with the emphatic language. “When (Trump) came into office, I met with some of his appointees in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering,” Gallaudet told the Forum, “and they were committed to look under the hood and gain control with political appointees of the whole UAP issue. And they were very hellbent on . . . wresting the topic from them.”

Significantly, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, singled out White House adviser Stephen Miller for his “absolutely incredible” work on exploring amnesty options for anxious insiders hoping to go public. Miller’s legendary hard-on for dismantling the Deep State rated scrutiny in Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, the bestseller from reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Keeping it all off the books

Described as a “master of concealment” who avoids putting requests in writing, Trump’s volatile deputy chief of staff attends all intelligence briefings and has “built his own systems of secrecy.” Those tunnels, write the authors, “allowed him to make plans away from the prying eyes of much of the rest of the administration, including, in some cases, out of sight of the White House office that tracked the flow of paper to the President.”

Exactly how this dead-eyed Gollum’s machinations factor into Trump’s UFO initiative is a bit muddy, but they lead us into a forest of possibilities. We are nearly nine years downriver from the NYT scoop that riveted Steven Spielberg’s attention, but it’s helpful to remember the mountains of foundational material that woke us up in the 20th century.

From Project Blue Book to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena to the Center for UFO Studies and beyond, researchers have compiled detailed and largely forgotten or overlooked UAP reports for 80 years. The numbers are so overwhelming, in fact, that some historians argue that new cases are superfluous.

The largest collection in the U.S. is the National UFO Historical Records Center in Rio Rancho, N.M. Curated by veteran investigator David Marler, the NUHRC now houses the full inventories from APRO, CUFOS and myriad other independent research groups, from Australia to Chile to the U.K., going back to the ‘40s. NUHRC’s shelves and cabinets span more than 100,000 documented files, videos, images and audio recordings. Expending time and resources on ridiculously censored contemporary reports without a quantifiable historical context makes little sense, Marler says. He calls what’s happening now “UFO porn.”

The PURSUE drops are “there to elicit an emotional response,” Marler says. “But cognitively, what does it prove? We need to look beyond that. We need to take a serious look at what we’ve already got.”

Past as prelude?

Small wonder that the author of Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation was paid a visit by DoD officials in 2023. Marler doesn’t name them, but he was approached after Mellon gave some of his contacts a heads-up on untapped resources. Marler describes their conversations as largely a “one-way street,” but “collegial.” Last year he was also visited by phenomena-curious Justice Department officials. Orb- and triangular-shaped UFOs were high on the agenda.

“My takeaway,” he says, “is that they were looking for sources of as much information as they could get. Maybe they were getting stonewalled by the private sector, I don’t know. What I can tell you is, we had a professional military-scientific audience taking an active interest in this.”

With the arrival of code-cracking AI, Marler has high hopes for identifying past patterns of UFO behaviors and rolling them into predictive models. In conjunction with the Rio Rancho public school system – which hopes to incorporate the archived data into STEM studies – more than a dozen volunteers are prepping the files for consolidation, standardization and, ultimately, digitized scanning.

“Do you know what we could do with large language models and machine learning here?” he says. “Maybe all this historical preservation has just been waiting for the technology to catch up with the case files we’ve been sitting on. I drool at the prospect of what we can learn.”

So who knows — given the fluid state of digital reality these days, circling back to analogue data might someday be the most foolproof path forward on the UFO front. Because after decades of flatlining, things seem to be happening suspiciously fast now.

She ‘falls’ out a window!

In addition to the advent of PURSUE, just last month the ODNI confirmed the establishment and convening of a UAP Governance Board also overseen by the FBI and the Pentagon. The board will consult with a new panel of experts called the UAP Science Advisory Council, led by Harvard astronomer and Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth author Avi Loeb. The enthusiastic Loeb raised a few eyebrows in June when he told a podcaster, “If I have to sign a nondisclosure agreement, you know, I would do so just because I think it’s a very important type of evidence for the future of humanity. And I don’t need to broadcast it to the public at large if there are reasons not to do it immediately.”

Sounds patriotic.

Anyhow, whatever minor tweaks I might bring to “Disclosure Day” would have to include a more timely update on the version playing at the multiplex. For instance, this time around, a leggy and ambitious blonde White House staffer named Thelma discovers a plot to destroy capitalism.

When the chief executive makes a perfunctory concession to Capitol Hill disclosure pests by ordering the release of censored low-value UFO products, Thelma learns that a defense contractor really is operating a reverse engineering program. She also learns of a dangerously misguided movement hellbent on pushing the fiction that “free” energy tech belongs to the world. She reports to her boss at the Resolute Desk.

At the president’s request, Thelma races the clock against these America Last whackos by securing the holy UFO grail from the legacy-program contractor with a payoff the size of the Pentagon’s budget. The supreme commander then orders Thelma to bootleg the package to a consortium of billionaire tech bros and Big Oil for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION dollars.

The tension rachets up when the do-gooders reveal their true fake-Marxist colors by announcing they have hard-drive copies of the UFO data and plan to release it all if they don’t get a 50 percent cut. POTUS retaliates by bombing Cuba. ICE agents looking for “aliens” crash through the wrong doors. Thelma “falls” from a tenth-floor balcony. Madcap hijinks ensue.

Dunno how this one ends yet, but I’m open to suggestions.