'Knowledge is curative'

UFO survey explores public reactions to disclosure scenarios

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." — John F. Kennedy, 1962

As psychologist Linda White watched former intelligence officer David Grusch testify about UFO/UAP Special Access Programs before a House Oversight subcommittee last summer, she was flushed with an unexpected surge of empathy. And it wasn’t over the UFO topic per se – it had more to do with the stifling secrecy, the harassment, the intimidation Grusch claimed to have endured from the bureaucracy for pushing transparency.

White knew a few things about military discipline. For three years, her father was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, renowned for reports of nuke-missile shutdowns during UFO flyovers. In fact, Maj. George Thomas White, Sr., was a launch control officer at the Montana SAC base before being redeployed in December 1965. Fifteen months later, the incursion that took 10 Minuteman missile warheads offline at MAFB made a lifelong impression on airman Robert Salas, whose account of the 1967 incident at Oscar Flight Launch Control Center has been scrutinized in books, documentaries, and press conferences.

“The man who Captain Salas woke up and said hey, there are UFOs up there? That would’ve been my dad a year or so before,” Linda White recalls. “And we know now that wasn’t the only encounter.”

If anything weird ever happened on dad’s watch, he never let on. Secrecy was the coin of the realm; yet, The Great Taboo was “common knowledge around nuclear silos,” Linda recalls. She grew up never doubting its existence. Maybe the bigger mystery was Dad’s hidden life.

Her family was told he’d been assigned to Vietnam/Thailand as a B-52 navigator, but Linda White wonders if that really happened. Records indicated he also worked with the National Security Agency. Evidence suggests he’d been involved with a defense contractor eventually acquired by Northrup Grumman. But dad never explained; on April 14, 1969, he opted out and took his life. And his abrupt absence has haunted her ever since.

Guns ‘n toilet paper

“I just shut down and I didn’t talk about it,” says White from Camden, Maine, where she’s an LCPC. “That’s a lot of what led me to become a psychologist, people needing to be able to talk about their reality and how much of what we consider crazy is really just people not knowing any different.”

Was it mere coincidence, then, that she tuned into Grusch’s congressional testimony just as she had joined a mission to quantify Earthlings’ attitudes in case everything he said turned out to be true?

Context: Uncle Sam, or one of his red-headed stepchildren, is sitting on so much classified UFO material, there’s a real possibility the repercussions of a key leak would make Edward Snowden or Julian Assange look like Dollar General shoplifters. Rumors of frustrated insiders getting increasingly restive over Congress’ failure to force transparency with aggressive legislation persist.

Should a whistleblower go rogue, pull a Daniel Ellsberg, and produce the smoking gun, there’s talk of “catastrophic disclosure,” portending unpredictable but destabilizing consequences. Extreme forecasts include cratering world markets, energy turmoil, and weaponized paranoia among international rivals.

An alternative, “controlled” disclosure, presumes that UFO data could be rationed out in small, organized and easily processed increments, and in a manner that might mitigate another increasingly popular buzzphrase – “ontological shock.” But the plan would require a coordinated effort between the black world and those who think democracy works best in sunlight. And even that long-shot prospect might not be enough to stop COVID-sized runs on guns and toilet paper.

Either way, goes the scenario, the longer the truth embargo endures, the worse the results when the beast slips the cage. However, after decades of movies, sci-fi epics and other modes of cultural acclimatization to the likelihood of an ET presence, one might also argue that extreme narratives are selling us a little short. And this is where some new data, with commonsense logic, comes in.

. . . and hybrid witch hunts, too

In 2023, a small group of researchers from eclectic professional disciplines – Linda White was one of them – began assessing the impact from an imagined announcement that not only is the phenomenon real, but it embodies nonhuman intelligence commanding wildly superior technology. Calling themselves the Cosmic Connectors, and after much debate, the participants settled on 44 potential outcomes to put in the questionnaire. The possibilities were all over the board, including but not limited to:

“Increased investment in STEM education,” “treaties reduce nuclear weapons,” “acceptance of abductions,” “backlash against deep state,” “emergence of mystical religions,” “rogue military colludes with NHI,” “the rich get richer,” “reverse engineering fails,” “hybrid witch hunts,” “people tune out,” and “interdependence of technology and consciousness.”

Last month, the group released a 71-page UAP Disclosure Implications Report, and there’s detailed exposition on its methodologies, and how it whittled its sample size to 434 respondents. Using forced-choice questions designed to ascertain individual world views, the results placed participants into one of two categories – Scientific Materialism and Expanded Consciousness. With an asterisk.

“Seventy-five percent of the sample size skewed toward expanded consciousness, which is probably the inverse of where the population is in general, but probably more indicative of the type of people interested in taking a survey like this,” concedes Tom Curren, a Navy veteran whose resume falls squarely inside the left-brain box.

The more you know

Self-described former “Mad Men” account executive for marketing Proctor & Gamble products, former senior VP for corporate planning and business development with the Marriott Corporation, now working with a diverse range of clients at his Hawthorne Consultants practice, Curren began warming up to unconventional fare in 2010 after reading Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. Eventually, he teamed up with entrepreneur Sean Esbjorn Hargens to create a website offering what they considered the best evidence for UFO/UAP reality.

January’s Implications Report indicated roughly half the respondents were Baby Boomers, and the rest distributed among Gen-Xers, Millennials, and the iGens. There were no significant statistical differences in generational or gender responses. Using a 5-point rating scale, the survey assessed the UFO knowledge base among respondents, and their answers divided the Scientific Materialists and the Expanded Consciousness groups into two subcategories: Know-More and Know-Less.

“The most significant finding that we highlighted was the role of knowledge – that was the most significant and unexpected finding,” says Curren, “that the more you know, you see it as a transformational opportunity, with less fear.” And even though the Expanded Consciousness crowd doesn’t reflect the population at large, he adds, “If you look at the hundred or so in the Scientific Materialism group, you find the same trend curve. So that overrides the bias in the sample.”

Words like “uncertainty,” “fear,” “chaos” and “scary” stalked the Know-Less crowd. Furthermore, states the Report, the Know-Lessers “did not have confidence in assessing a single implication as ‘Positive’ arising from UAP disclosure. It considered 95 percent of the implications as too ‘Uncertain’ to rate.”

But who’s paying attention?

Conversely, “the Know-More group believed the disclosure implications presented a transformational opportunity, mixed with a bit of shock and chaos . . . They sense overall ‘opportunity’ after assessing 18 implications as ‘Positive’ and four implications as ‘Negative’ risks.”

So the knowledge-is-power cliché rings true, again. Which means ignorance is — submission? To what?

Linda White says “we’re not married to the data,” as the proportions could shift with more representative surveys. “We just want to get the conversation going. Given all the attention brought to this issue since 2017, we’re still in awe over how many people aren’t paying attention or giving it much thought.”

Obviously, the way to reduce disclosure-related uncertainties is public empowerment. But watching David Grusch tell lawmakers about the blowback he’d received for trying to access information triggered a bundle of unanswered questions about the flexibility of a top-secret culture that may have contributed to her father’s death.

“How do we normalize, how do we de-pathologize this for people, how do we integrate this into a new cosmology? How do we navigate the need for openness and transparency and at the same time hold people accountable?” White wonders.

“I understand and honor the need for national security, the need for discernment and discretion. But the U.S. does not have a good track record for making amends when harm is caused. And lying to the American public for 80 years may be the biggest harm that’s ever been caused.”

Only direct action will reveal whether or not it’s too late to restore trust in government. For Tom Curren, only one path is sustainable.

“The pitch we’re making here,” he says, “is that knowledge is curative – and here’s a place to start.”