Curse of the reptile eggs

Taking AARO seriously at this point requires the suspension of disbelief

When it comes to predicting how Uncle Sam will deal with the UFO dilemma going forward, all we have to go on are patterns of past behavior.

In 1992, hoping to restore faith in transparency over one of the most heinous flashpoints in American history, Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The law ordered all federal agencies to empty their closets of any and all related information into the public domain within 25 years. Naturally, there were numerous exceptions that gave discretionary power to the POTUS to withhold evidence. Such as:

Records that could pose a “threat to the military defense, intelligence operations, or conduct of U.S. foreign relations” might “outweigh the public interest.” So would an “unwarranted and substantial invasion of personal privacy.” So would records pertaining to “a security or protective procedure” in “current use.” Etc., etc., etc.

Trump exercised that option against full compliance when the deadline rolled around in 2017, and President Biden did it again two weeks ago. Although 70 percent of the 16,000 documents previously released with redactions are now completely unedited, the National Archives and Records Administration says 515 docs remain fully exempt based on potential “identifiable harm.” And 2,545 are still partially censored – more than 59 years now after that bloody weekend in Dallas.

The NARA announcement came just one day before the Pentagon staged a “media roundtable” to ignore its history of dereliction on the UFO issue. And the proximity of these two headlines evoked a passage from Libra, novelist Don DeLillo’s haunting 1988 meditation on the Kennedy murder and intelligence operations gone wrong.

“Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset,” DeLillo wrote. “In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled. They counted on it.

“The Attorney General wasn’t to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored. It had to be this way … The men at (this) level were spawning secrets that quivered like reptile eggs.”

Transmedium activity? Whaaa—?

Unfortunately, what keeps this piece of fiction from being dismissed as overly cynical and paranoid, at least in the context of the Pentagon’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, are admissions from the key players themselves. Rather than placating taxpayers, official statements on December 16 raise questions about AARO’s credibility.

“We have not, to the best of my knowledge, had any credible reporting, that we’ve been able to analyze of trans-medium activity, or trans-medium objects,” said Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. “We are still going through the data. And so, I would say it’s still early in the process.”

Moultrie is being either dishonest or, as DeLillo once suggested, laboring under the cherished asset of ignorance. His gaffe stands athwart the famous footage of a UFO that sliced with minimal resistance/splash into Puerto Rico’s coastal waters in 2013. Clocked at airborne at speeds of up to 120 mph, the thing was tracked by thermal imaging doing 90 underwater before taking flight once more, when it split into two separate objects.

Subjected to a frame-by-frame, 1,000 man-hours of scrutiny by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in its 162-page report in 2015, the Aguadilla sequence was captured by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection DHC-8, operating under the Department of Homeland Security umbrella. It was leaked to researchers shortly after senior interagency officials expressed zero curiosity about the incident, which unfolded near a local airport and forced a Fed Ex flight to delay its scheduled departure by 16 minutes. However, CBP has refused to formally release an uncensored version of the video, which includes audio chatter from the crew as it followed the object.

Let’s put Barnes on it

What Moultrie and AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick did succeed in doing, however, was score a few cheap yuks with an assist from Julian Barnes of the NY Times. Barnes loves declaring that UFOs aren’t piloted by space aliens, which of course can’t be proven without a “Made in Venus” logo etched into the hull or whatever. In 2021 and again in October, Barnes trumpeted the party line that, whatever UFOs are all about, it damn sure ain’t “alien technology.” One wonders if Barnes’ predictability was the reason the Pentagon invited him to join the press conference in the first place.

“Is there any evidence,” he asked, knowing full well how they’d answer, “that you have affirmative evidence that you have collected that shows any one of those anomalies is a space alien?”

Moultrie dug it. “So can we say it in unison,” he retorted, “and can we do it separately?” One presumes the audio included a smattering of smug chuckles. The transcripts tell us that Kirkpatrick answered “No.”

Hey good one hee-haw yawn zzzz.

Reuters headline: “No evidence of space aliens so far in the Pentagon’s deep-dive.”

The only thing mildly interesting in 13 pages of transcripts is that AARO is working with “hundreds” of new or additional reports dating back to 1996, and that it has produced two Congressionally mandated quarterly reports in August and November. And that “most” of those reports are in fact going to AARO. But not all. Hm.

Otherwise, we got a lot of words about AARO’s commitment “to the Congress, the American people, to you in the press corps,” to “openness and transparency and objectivity,” and that the “highest scientific and analytic standards” are being brought to bear on phenomena that “require our urgent attention.”

Note to AARO: Since your highest scientific and analytic standards can’t find any evidence of transmedium UFO activity and you haven’t read SCU’s Aguadilla report, here’s the link to Rich Hoffman, on video, setting the scene. It’s less than 40 minutes long. Maybe you can even convince DHS to give you the unedited version. Then, in the interest of openness and transparency and objectivity, you can put it all out there and explain how SCU got duped.