Time for the 'weapon of protest'?

Congressional impotence on UFOs renews talk of direct action

Thirty years after the last coordinated demonstrations over the UFO coverup at the Pentagon fizzled out, a digital insurgency hopes to revive the campaign by engaging a new generation. [Ed Komarek/Operation Right To Know]

Ages before Ed Komarek was able to smell a rat, an entire demographic of Americans learned that the democracy they aspired to was so broken, it didn’t matter which way they tried to work the system. Within or without, same results. And waiting around for some innate or magical course correction was obviously a fool’s errand. Final option: the streets.

“The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated on the front end of his long crusade to tear down the race wall. “. . . Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we all must protest.”

Decades afterwards, as he became aware of containment walls of an entirely different nature, Ed Komarek understood that the passivity enabling their perpetuation was far more complex than what King was trying to demolish. The barriers posed no obvious mortal danger or physical peril to any class or group. There were no water cannons, police dogs, skull-splintering batons or other visuals to stoke mass discontent. If anything, what made the cages so effective was their ostensible non-existence. You needed shovels and picks to dig for this stuff.

As the 50^th anniversary of the alleged Roswell UFO crash approached, everything Komarek had seen and read led him to believe the U.S. government had confiscated humanity’s greatest secret. Uncle Sam had been hoarding it from day one, then quarantined truth like a contagion behind layers of silence, obfuscation and propaganda. Furthermore, socially conditioned taxpayers were letting them get away with it. Komarek was among the guilty. Having been hooked on the mystery since 1967, he had to ask: Was reading books or newsletters the best he could do?

“It began to occur to me that we were in the early stages of, like, a civil rights movement, where everybody was fearful and nobody wanted to stick their neck out and attract attention,” recalls the Georgia native. “Then the NAACP got involved, and next thing you know, there were mass demonstrations, and everybody started talking.”

Short-lived momentum

In 1992, along with Mike Jamieson, Elaine Douglass, Larry Bryant and a handful of others calling themselves Operation Right To Know, Komarek decided to stick his neck out. They did a little thing on the Ellipse, across from the White House Rose Garden fence. They set up a couple of tables, broke out a few signs calling for UFO transparency, drew Secret Service scrutiny, maybe a curious look or two amid light public turnout. It was a beginning, and it lasted maybe 15 minutes. But their motive was clear.

“What we all realized was, you can’t have good science if you’ve got a political problem that’s interfering with it,” he says. “If the data’s being manipulated, how can you do good science? So now you’ve got a political problem and it deserves a political solution.

“We knew what we were up against, and we knew we needed to make a statement and get the political community involved as best we could.”

So ORTK did it again, bigger and smarter. They reconvened on Independence Day weekend in 1993 at Lafayette Square in Washington. They invited public participation well in advance and issued a heads-up to the press. They booked live music and speakers urging a simple but unprecedented request for the new president: “End UFO Secrecy Now.” Scores of strangers joined the picket line. The likes of CNN and the Associated Press showed up and expanded the audience.

The prospects were promising, at least culturally. The last surviving veterans of the alleged crash-retrieval operation in 1947 were confessing in books like 1991’s UFO Crash at Roswell. Art Bell’s wee-hours “Coast to Coast AM” amplified the revelations for its 10 million-plus listeners amid a blur of other neglected headlines from the paranormal and conspiracy fringes. Chris Carter’s “X-Files” drama pitting two FBI agents against a sprawling UFO coverup jumped the rails and went from cult niche to mainstream staple.

Authority always wins

And ORTK was on a roll. It sponsored small but showy protests outside the Pentagon, the offices of senators Sam Nunn (D-GA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bob Graham (D-FL). Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) began fielding so many constituent queries about what happened in 1947, he requested from the GAO (nee General Accounting Office) a full inventory of Air Force records surrounding the Roswell controversy. ORTK followed suit and staged a demonstration outside GAO headquarters in Washington in 1994.

But all that momentum got blown to smithereens when the Air Force pushed back with The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert in 1995, and again in 1997 with its more emphatic The Roswell Report: Case Closed. The USAF told the GAO it couldn’t find anything, and put it all on the clueless witnesses. Those poor bastards had mistaken the recovery of a military fallout-sniffing balloon for UFO debris; furthermore, they mistook alleged alien corpses in 1947 for military drop-test dummies in 1953. Shit happens, man. Suck it up.

Komarek didn’t buy it, but the press scattered and that’s all that mattered. ORTK had been a long shot, anyway. In the lull before the digital-media storm, getting volunteers to show up for demonstrations had been “like pulling hen’s teeth.” Komarek gave up on trying to wring anything useful from official sources anymore; hoping to retain a semblance of “situational awareness,” he went back to studying contact cases.

Thirty years later, public, congressional and media interest in The Great Taboo have turned a 180, but the Pentagon’s game plan – deny, denounce, stall, hedge, misdirect, classify, avoid, shuck, jive, etc. – remains stuck in the Vietnam era. Because why change what works? In fact, Defense Department behavior around the UFO issue has become so bereft of meaningful consequences, and so (perhaps rightfully) contemptuous of the public attention span, the shot-callers are wagering they could get Manpower coolies to handle FOIA requests and no one would be the wiser.

Scratch that — no, wait . . .

Two weeks ago, in reply to Black Vault researcher John Greenewald’s FOIA for interoffice email correspondences involving counterintelligence officer/whistleblower Lue Elizondo, the Pentagon pulled such an amazing stunt, it could’ve inspired the anthemic love ballad by that famous girl band whose name I forget. In an effort to sabotage Elizondo’s credibility, the censors redacted information from a 2017 exchange between him and his successor to the DoD’s secret UFO program. They blacked out the name of the program – AATIP – as well as the name of the guy who was inheriting those duties. Never mind that the exact same email had been released, completely intact, names and everything, to the New York Post, which had published the document in 2022.

:-/

Say — maybe a transparency advocate hacked the FOIA desk to make the Pentagon look really stupid. Anyway, back to Ed Komarek and a jarring analogy:

“I think the message now should be about the Pentagon and the broken (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), which is using public money to run an active disinformation campaign against Americans. That’s why I joined the New Paradigm Institute – maybe they’ll be the NAACP of the ‘cosmic rights’ movement.”

Cosmic rights. Hm.

Co-founded last year by Danny Sheehan, the controversial Constutional attorney who has represented Elizondo in litigation against the Pentagon for professional retaliation, NPI has lofty goals. The startup nonprofit sounds a lot like ORTK 2.0, but unencumbered by snail mail, fax machines, landlines and pamphlets. Its website offers a portal that generates zip code-specific “Call to Action” emails allowing visitors to pressure their Senate and House representatives into sponsoring stronger UAP legislation and hearings. Since its launch last October, some 24,990 emails have reached lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to PIO Kevin Wright. In February, NPI produced half a dozen social-media ads targeting diverse special interests, from national security to climate change to flight safety.  

But the ultimate goal is to drive policy change by organizing the kind of numbers that only public turnout can achieve. The stakes, argues a disclosure movement leader, are greater than idle curiosity over what’s happening in the skies.

A question of timing

“I think the lack of disclosure has created a cancer that is corroding our democracy from the inside out,” says NPI Director Jim Garrison. “And I think our system, which Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, has taken over the U.S. government and extended itself internationally.”

A lifetime veteran of anti-nuke/peace/anti-apartheid marches, Garrison is pressing for a methodical and strategic approach to mass mobilization.

“To date, I haven’t seen anything out there that would draw more than, maybe, 10, 15, maybe 30 people. And what is needed,” Garrison says, “is thousands.

“You’ve got to be really careful about the relationship between the issues and timing. If your timing is off, nobody shows up. If you get it right and you hit a chord, then the media shows up and the effort is worth the accomplishment that comes out the other end. But it’s a very subtle dynamic that is not so easy to discern.”

Setting the table, he says, means employing tactics that enabled the success of the Vietnam antiwar movement – teach-ins on college campuses.

“Back then, professors and even students would rent a hall on campus or gather in a park and invite a series of speakers to generate student and university awareness around an issue,” Garrison says. “Now that the U.S. government has passed legislation, in black and white, that government agencies engaging with technologies of unknown or nonhuman origin are required to turn documents over to the national archives, it’s time for UFO disclosure to begin. Teach-ins are a small step in the process but they have a rich tradition of bringing truth to power, and knowledge into the public domain.”

Garrison and NPI are networking with amenable professors at home and abroad about holding teach-ins at maybe half a dozen college campuses as early as fall semester, with followups envisioned for next spring. Maybe, he says, the disclosure movement is just one summer away from filling the streets with numbers too big to ignore.

Last year, the Senate proposed a bill to let a review board independent of the Pentagon evaluate UFO documents for declassification. It was defeated by Mike Turner, chair of the powerful House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The snub provoked at least a few constituents in Ohio to vent at his office. [Facebook]

ORTK veteran Ed Komarek isn’t getting his hopes up. Convincing folks to rally around an issue that remains by and large an abstraction is a trick he never figured out. In fact, he wonders if the classified UFO research programs will collapse from their own weight well before respectable public picket lines materialize.

“From what I can tell, there’s a fight going on inside the intelligence community because a lot of insiders are totally fed up, too,” he says. “They can’t get their reverse engineering stuff done very well because so much of the money and resources to sustain it are all involved in security. That’s gotta be crazy.”