OK, fine, what's for supper?

Going forward, whenever I see government activity that looks counterproductive, I need to learn to back off, to not intervene, and let nature take its course.

One of the things that sucks about no longer being affiliated with the corporate media is getting zero response from government agencies. I never got a whole lot of smooch before – after all, secondary market, Sarasota – but this time, I thought I was doing them a favor.

But I could be wrong.

What’s up: The federal agencies/bureaus/spooks/mindset that’s had a blank check to monopolize UFO secrets since Truman beat Dewey got backed into a serious corner last month, thanks to a Senate bill that could spell the beginning of the end of this monstrously long con game. Introduced by a Democratic senator from New York, the proposed investigative effort, tentatively named ASTRO, is gaining bipartisan muscle and is now called the Gillibrand-Rubio amendment.

Three weeks later, the Pentagon tried counterpunching with a clownish acronym called AOIMSG. AOIMSG tried to make a big deal out of announcing how military/intelligence assets are henceforth being instructed to start comparing notes on UFOs. Unlike Gillibrand-Rubio, AOIMSG doesn’t say squat about sharing those notes with the suckers who’ve been footing the bill for 14 presidential administrations now. In fact, AOIMSG is so pointless, even Republicans are calling it out. As Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) put it last week on the floor of the House: “It stunk of a coverup.”

Welp, on Thanksgiving Day, just two days after the Defense Department tried boosting its immune system with AOIMSG, a familiar and exhausted diatribe popped up on Twitter. Titled “The UFO Information Operation,” an anonymous writer accused two key whistleblowers, without whom our revitalized UFO conversation would still be stuck in 1969, of being disinformation agents. He/she/they charged former Pentagon officials Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon with conducting “a DoD sponsored operation against American civilians,” and implied the game-changing Navy F-18 videos – two published by the New York Times in 2017, one by the Washington Post in 2018 – were illegally released.

The post also took aim at To The Stars Academy, the private investment-soliciting thingamajig that introduced the Elizondo-Mellon initiative to the world in 2017. The blogger suggested TTSA “is a commercial cover organization for an agency of the US government … formed to carry out an unlawful influence operation against US audiences related to UFOs.”

There’s more to the rant, but if you’ve followed this stuff, you know the alleged illegality of the videotape release is a red herring. In fact, this entire 11/23/21 narrative is so sloppy, the initial impulse is to dismiss it altogether. I mean, at least I know Elizondo’s first name isn’t spelled L-o-u-i-s. And where the blog claims TTSA had been in the licensing business since 2011 – and that it had been issuing financial statements since 2016? Why not also mention that TTSA wasn’t formed until 2017?

For the targets of this polemic, the broadside was intensely derivative. “Pure drivel,” replied Elizondo. “All the allegations are not only false, but a regurgitation of the ‘haters’ manufactured issues of our progress.”

Furthermore, the idea that an American military unit charged with facilitating “Land Information Warfare Activity” would go anywhere near such clumsy messaging seems absolutely ludicrous. “Nobody at DoD,” responded Mellon, “is that stupid.”

One hopes. And yet, this unsigned pushback – posted on Medium by something called INFO_OPS – appears to have more official stature than your average embittered anonymous hack. Visually speaking, anyway. The post features a military logo, a sword crossed with a lightning bolt. That image is emblazoned above the Latin words “Indicium Dominatus,” or “information domination.” The crest and the motto belong to the 2nd Information Operations Battalion, which serves the U.S. Army’s 1st Information Operations Command in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

All I know about the 1st IOC is what I read on its website. The content is pretty sparse. The unit was created in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and is now a “major subordinate” to the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command. There aren’t many details here about its duties in “planning, analysis and reachback support.” But there’s a little more specificity about what “Information Operations” really means, in the eponymously titled Army-Navy Joint Manual 3-13, published in 2014. Broadly speaking, it’s fairly simple:

The IO mission is “to gain advantages in the information environment” against “state and non-state adversaries,” an intriguing policy in a world drowning in lies and propaganda. By using “psychological operations” and “military deception,” the Manual states that one of IO’s jobs is to “influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of TAs [target audiences] to create a desired effect to support achievement of an objective.” The Manual also found room to include this observation from Cosmo, Ben Kingsley’s character in the 1992 dramedy “Sneakers”:

“There is a war out there, old friend – a world war. And it’s not about whose [sic] got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information.”

No shit. What we know for sure is, this post couldn’t be an official IO blow against the UFO disclosure movement because it’s so inept. I mean, if this was a sanctioned trial balloon, the thing popped on liftoff. At last glance, the INFO_OPS author had collected a pitiful 24 followers. Not exactly a robust TA.

Anyhow, last week, I tried to warn the 1st IOC that some yo-yo was trying to make ‘em look bad, or that maybe an overzealous staffer having a panic attack over the potential compromise of classified hardware had gone rogue. I sent an unacknowledged email query to the PIO in Fort Belvoir. Then I tried the phone numbers listed for 2nd IO Battalion personnel, but I couldn’t leave any messages because their voicemail boxes were clogged.

So my conscience is clear.