Hearts & minds, cont'd.

“With the recent (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) report, even our government has now publicly acknowledged its reality. The question is, can we get the court of public opinion to consider and accept it? Can we all give it the attention it deserves?” — retired USAF Capt. Robert Salas, National Press Club 10/19/21

Don’t be lulled into thinking the UFO disclosure-movement momentum is self-sustaining and irrevocable. The forces arrayed against transparency, argues attorney Danny Sheehan, are as structural as DNA. And without the guarantee of a viable damage-containment policy designed to keep the current architecture of power afloat as UFO leakage spews through the seams, the guardians of state secrets will have little if any incentive to bow to the public interest.

“It’s pretty simple,” says the constitutional law scholar, now defending Luis Elizondo against an alleged Pentagon smear campaign ignited after Elizondo in 2017 publicized the details of its secret UFO research program. “If the media backs off, Congress will back off.

“What executive department officials think about congressional representatives is true, that they’re media hounds who respond in this kind of Pavlovian way to what’s going on in the news, that they’re afraid of getting caught looking like they don’t know what’s going on. (Executive department lifers) refer to themselves as the government. And they view people in Congress as interlopers, temporary people who come and go, you know, they used to be president of their student council in high school, or they were the head of their fraternities in college. And so the ones behind these public faces – they’re the ones who really make the decisions.”

Sheehan was at the National Press Club last week in Washington to support the elderly Air Force veterans attempting to share, perhaps for the last time, personal insights into UFO/UAP interference with America’s nuclear arsenal dating back nearly 60 years. Although all four had spoken on the record before, the reunion was an emotional imperative for these erstwhile comrades in arms, who had been ordered to squelch the greatest mystery of their professional lives.

Former USAF captain Robert Jamison’s story about being onsite at Malmstrom AFB in 1967 when 10 nuclear ICBMs were powered down by UAP activity was old hat to the UFO crowd. But his comments were aimed at an uninitiated generation of Americans; wheelchair bound, he traveled all the way from California to speak his truth.

Former lieutenant Bob Jacobs couldn’t make the trip to D.C., but he wanted audiences to know about the price he’d paid for following his conscience, decades before America was willing to listen. Speaking remotely from his home in the Missouri Ozarks, Jacobs recalled how, in 1982, he broke his imposed silence 18 years after filming the UFO shootdown of a speeding dummy warhead off California. In 1989, he was fired from the University of Maine after obsessive-compulsive debunker Phil Klass wrote to UM’s administration, accusing Jacobs of lying and “conduct unbecoming.” Charged Jacobs: “We’ve been silenced, we’ve been ridiculed, we’ve had our lives disrupted. This is more than just being ignored – we’ve been treated like imbeciles.”

Event organizers Bob Salas, a retired USAF captain/launch control officer, and longtime disclosure activist Stephen Bassett had hoped for a large turnout by the Fourth Estate; instead, influential legacy media institutions took a pass, and there were plenty of empty seats. (CNN managed to show up and gather witness interviews for later airings.) A British tabloid ran with the testimony. And a reporter from Military.com applied the lazy “true believers” cliché to describe the speakers. Ultimately, some 700 viewers tuned in for the YouTube livestream – including, according to Salas, at least one Air Force PIO. At last glance, the archived two-hour press conference had rated nearly 30,000 viewings.

Just days after Jacobs urged the nation to learn its own hidden history, NASA director Bill Nelson (high school 4-H Club president, former Key Club International president) surprised everybody by volunteering his astonishment over the recently celebrated UFO encounters by U.S. Navy pilots. Nelson’s spontaneous and unsolicited remarks to political scientist Larry Sabato then elevated into near rhapsody over the prospects for producing the missing pages of human identity: “… This is a mission, that we’re constantly looking – what, who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize?”

But it’ll take more than open minds from the “temporary” help of political appointees to retrieve our redacted past, cautions Sheehan. The shadow system responsible for maintaining the UFO coverup for more than half a century is facing unprecedented scrutiny. And if its stewards are smart as they appear to be, they’re gaming out the risks on all fronts, including their own. What happens when growing majorities of taxpayers wake up to the stone-cold fact that trillions of dollars blown on national defense since the dawn of the Cold War have done nothing to obstruct or even mitigate UFO behavior? What happens to confidence in government, already dangerously fragile? What happens to the markets? Foreign policy? Energy?

Sheehan has made a career of clashing with stone walls, government and corporate alike. But he suspects the campaign for accountability on black UFO projects could prove the longest slog of all.

“They’re fighting back against having the present system destabilized without having an alternative stable system in place. They want their authority intact,” says the chief counsel to the Romero Institute, an interfaith human rights nonprofit in Santa Cruz, California. “And it’s extraordinarily interesting because we’re talking about something that threatens the entire world view of a power structure.”

And if these unelected gatekeepers find themselves in crisis over the sustainability of the status quo, Sheehan says they’ll need to take a number and wait in line.

“Half of California’s on fire all the time, people on the Gulf Coast keep getting flooded out of their homes by massive storms, rains, tornadoes. This is the downside of the present stable system. And when you have 10 million people a year starving to death on this planet, when you’ve had millions more people dying of diseases we’ve known the cure for, for over a hundred years, and everybody says that’s OK, it ain’t happening to us – well, a stable system for some people is a terribly unstable system for others.”

Sheehan says the disclosure conversation won’t get real until discussions engage policy wonks at Foreign Affairs magazine or in Sunday morning network roundtables. That seems a ways off — although it’s actually not all that hard to imagine the next Bill Barr subpoenaing Bill & Hillary for records of their unsuccessful pursuit of the Great Mystery a quarter century ago in the White House.

A more likely scenario, says Sheehan: “I think what they’ll be doing is using the discovery of exoplanets to slowly feather in information. They’ll be saying, oh look, we’re not alone, we’ve discovered a single-celled life form beneath the ocean of a distant moon in another star system somewhere. Then another. And over the course of a generation or so, they’ll go, OK, we’ve now found really sophisticated life forms, but they’re so far away and they really can’t communicate …”

If the drama plays out that way, it’ll be because the media failed. Again.