More fissures in the quarantine

But will UFO whistleblowers trust Congress?

Let’s say helicopter pilot Jake Barber’s making it all up. Let’s say everything the former Air Force Special Operations veteran revealed in a groundbreaking interview last week with NewsNation reporter Ross Coulthart was utter bunk. Let’s say:

Barber never went on any UFO retrieval missions. The video of the egg-shaped anomaly in the desert was really just an aerostat balloon. He was never contracted by an aerospace company to work as an off-the-books USG intelligence asset. He and his crewmates were never hospitalized on account of radiation leakage from a mysterious sealed cargo. There was never an armed clash at an alpine lake between his retrieval team and a rival unit, ostensibly from same company, dispatched to recover hidden top-secret and likely UFO-related sensor data. Nor, during his recon of that now-former employer at its Washington, D.C., offices, did Barber confirm his suspicions about who was responsible for this botched operation. Let’s say that’s all B.S.

There’s still a problem. At least if you’re one of those so-called “deep state” entrepreneurs invested in the UFO/UAP coverup. Here’s why:

Last fall, Barber marched this story into the office of then-Senator and just-confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, long a skeptic of Uncle Sam’s performative ignorance of UFOs. So that’s on record somewhere. Barber’s discharge papers confirm an eclectic and honorable military career. Three former brothers-in-arms – special ops veterans Don Paul Vales, Fred Baker, and John Blitch – are vouching for his character. Vales confirmed for Coulthart he was with Barber during that “engagement” with the other company goon squad. And Fred Baker told this to NewsNation: he, Baker, belonged to a small band of USG “psionics” who’ve been able to channel their telekinetic abilities into lines of communication with UFOs. These folks could and can “summon” objects to materialize and, in some instances, shape their behaviors. Baker provided videos of a contact operation.

And the horse he rode in on

Question: Will the new White House allow the Government Accountability Office or whatever’s left of independent oversight to do its job? Just once? Just for UAP records? Last week, in separate appearances on Don Trump Junior’s podcast Triggered, both Coulthart and Pentagon UFO whistleblower Lue Elizondo knew exactly which buttons to push. Both predicted, perhaps accurately, with enthusiasm, that Don Junior’s dad would go down as one of history’s great men if he demolished the Berlin Wall around The Great Taboo. The receptive First Son sounded all in, and downright jazzed.

What neither said was this: The UFO gorilla is so inherently disruptive, the Defense Department’s infrastructure so financially mismanaged (seven years without passing an audit, $2.5 trillion in assets at stake), and their combination so ripe and swollen and moist for catastrophic exploitation, Trump 2.0 will look like just another limp has-been if he takes a pass. It’ll mean the Deep State was smarter and richer than he is. It’ll mean they own him and the horse he rode in on, like they’ve owned all the others.

But – if Trump 2.0 lets UFO hearings proceed, if he gets out of the way and allows the legislative branch to strain its leash for the thinnest feather of relevance, then the second worst option is in play, along with the loaded question: Can this Congress be trusted? Can anyone?

But somebody’s gotta do it

Well taa-daaah! Just in time for that debate comes a three-part TMZ series called “UFO Revolution Season 2.” It stars filmmaker/podcaster/influencer Jeremy Corbell, who commands this TMZ Headline: “Jeremy Corbell: Pushing for UFO Transparency . . . With A Target on His Back!!” Yes. And its full-length trailer is pure crack. Corbell storms out of November’s UFO hearing by the House Oversight Committee with a jarring accusation — “Congress just lied to the American public!” The camera follows him through the dizzy aftermath, where he fumes, “I’m not gonna be quiet. I’m fuckin’ going to look everybody in the fucking eye – whoever fucking lied? I’m gonna say it in front of everybody.”

Dope! Produced by Jesse Michels, founder of YouTube channel American Alchemy, “UFO Revolution S2” takes an overlong and hyperkinetic look at Corbell’s attempts to get the controversial Immaculate Constellation documents into the public square. Immaculate Constellation is the alleged name of an illegal unacknowledged special access program, and Corbell has acquired an 11-page synopsis of its scope from an unnamed DoD source who participated in it. The program actively gathers UFO data, is sitting on hundreds if not thousands of videos, and conducts crash-retrieval/reverse-engineering operations. Corbell’s quest: deliver the goods to lawmakers.

Employing jittery quick cuts, pushing the story forward with heroic slo-mo man-of-destiny segues, and soundtracking it with the sort of ambience that foreshadows a bare-knuckles showdown with hellspawn lurking somewhere offscreen, Michels’ cameras are there to record every steely-eyed twist and turn of Corbell’s lone-wolf crusade. As the “Weaponized” co-host alongside veteran Las Vegas newsman George Knapp, Corbell has been under critical scrutiny for more than a decade. His most notable splashes involve showcasing Navy-generated video of triangular-shaped “drones” buzzing naval maneuvers off California in 2019, and the “jellyfish UFO” cruising over a military base in Iraq. And now this – evidence of a thriving coverup that could blow the lid off it, from here to the moon.

The burden is heavy. You can see it in his downcast eyes, hear it in his voice, probably the way Lincoln looked right after signing the Emancipation Proclamation. And in fact, there’s a scene in S2E2 where Elizondo flat-out tells Corbell you’re under surveillance by people who can fix your mouth.

An October surprise

But it's a worthy drama that also includes perspectives from equally serious journos and pols who’ve been stonewalled at every turn by USG obstructionists. All too often, however, the series gets diluted by repetition and stylistic grandiosity. Corbell spends a lot of time looking over his shoulder and eluding spooks by tooling around town in his Cybertruck; fortunately, draft beer numbs the pain, and we get frequent visual reminders of what it takes to persevere. Not until the third and final 52-minute episode do we get to the meat in the bun – what happened backstage at the House hearing on November 13.

That gathering – anchored by sworn testimony from Elizondo, retired Admiral Tim Gallaudet, NASA’s Mike Gold, and journalist Michael Shellenberger – is chaired by Rep. Nancy Mace, whom Corbell interviews on camera prior to the hearing. He tells viewers he introduced unnamed whistleblowers-in-waiting to three representatives. A month or so before the event, however, Shellenberger launches an October surprise by revealing the existence of the Immaculate Constellation project on his Substack blog. He goes on a media blitz telling the likes of Joe Rogan that he had interviewed the author – Corbell’s source – on several occasions and has established the guy’s bona fides.

But Corbell alone possesses the actual Immaculate Constellation summary. “UFO Revolution” shows him dropping off copies to a few selected House committee members the day before the testimony. Moments before the session is called to order the next afternoon, Mace and Shellenberger are shown entering the hearing room together. And just prior to opening statements, Mace openly thanks Shellenberger for giving the 12-page report to Congress. Shellenberger makes no effort to correct the record. That duty falls to Rep. Tim Burchett who, an hour into the testimony, makes a point of crediting Corbell, sitting in the gallery, for actually producing the documents.

But the 12 pages entered into the Congressional Record aren’t the original 12 pages as submitted. The cover letter – or page 1, written by Corbell as an introduction to Immaculate Constellation – is excluded. A new blank page, attached at the very end, becomes page 12.

Jeremy Corbell and comic actor Dave Foley speak at Nevada’s remote Alien Research Center during “Storm Area 51” weekend in 2019.

When the two-hour hearing wraps, Corbell is apoplectic. He accuses Mace of deliberately lying. And it’s “not an ego thing,” he insists. It has to do with accuracy over the documents’ official chain of custody, and whether or not his confidential sources can trust a process that gets it wrong. He phones Shellenberger immediately afterwards and demands an explanation. Shellenberger refuses to call Mace a liar but has no explanation for the way it went down. “So I don’t know, you know, I mean yeah,” he replies on Corbell’s recorded call, “I don’t know what to say, I don’t know why she said that . . .”

After agreeing to meet Corbell later that day to hash it out, Shellenberger fails to show. Mace doesn’t respond at all to Corbell’s request for clarification. Corbell charges the hearing was “a counterintelligence operation,” a “fucking setup” initiated by “the executive branch and intelligence agencies” and designed to flush out the names of his sources. He says he provided the House committee with “a dozen chances to have first-hand whistleblowers to testify,” but it was a no-go because an unspecified “they” only wanted the names.

What would Mace gain by knowingly redirecting credit from Corbell to Shellenberger? Shellenberger frequently praises Elon Musk for saving free speech from “totalitarianism” by refusing to screen content. Might Shellenberger now be the House’s unofficial media point man for handling breaking news on whistleblowers?

Someone who attended the hearing but declined to be identified said they were in the back room when Shellenberger offered the documents to a congressional staffer for copying. “I’m certain he got it from Jeremy,” they said. The decision to remove Corbell’s cover letter was probably made in haste by a staffer who, with time running out, didn’t want to risk burning him just in case Corbell’s name happened to be privileged information.

Either way, a tone has been set for whatever UFO/UAP developments may occur on Capitol Hill this year. “Any whistleblower should be terrified right now,” Corbell tells his audience.

Burchett, whose knowledge base on UFOs appears to exceed that of Mace, told a podcaster after the hearing, “I will never be allowed to be chairman of one of these committees . . . I don’t raise enough money. I don’t have a lot of billionaires that I represent that allow me to raise money, and that’s the crooked game of Congress. Both parties are in on it.”

Begging the question: Where’s the popcorn?