A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (13 page)

Disclosure is impossible
. Secrecy is the immovable object. The powers-that-be have no incentive for revealing the truth about UFOs, so dramatic its transformative power would be, so threatening to established interests. Surely, too, the years of official silence and cover-up might make people powerless to effect change.

Disclosure is inevitable
. Truth is the irresistible force. Something this large cannot be held back forever. It is easier to stop a tsunami from reaching the shore.

Let us imagine a situation that sparks a crisis, a “trigger” to action. It could be an event in which many credible witnesses record what appears to be a genuine UFO. It might be the unauthorized leak of sensitive data. It might be a surprise detailed statement by a prominent figure about the UFO cover-up—something that allows for fact-checking and verification. The event that triggers Disclosure will probably involve multiple factors that will turn into an avalanche of truth, rushing over everything in its path.

As we have said, the decision to disclose the UFO reality will probably not be made on Capitol Hill or even in the West Wing. The power center of this secret—the Breakaway Group—will meet, maybe virtually, but probably in person. Although it may not be called Majestic-12, this UFO “Control Group” or “Silence Group” will come together and hash it out.

The first thing on the agenda will be a review of the event itself—the event that is pushing Disclosure beyond its normal habitat of radio shows like
Coast-to-Coast AM
and Discovery Channel specials. In this future turn of events, the growing momentum toward Disclosure will be discussed on the front pages and covers of newspapers and magazines, and become the lead story on network newscasts.

The discussion begins. One of the Majestic members will argue that, as bleak as it looks, the group has weathered previous storms like this one. The Phoenix lights in 1997 came close. Someone else will mention the sighting over Stephenville, Texas, in 2008, and the near-panic they felt as a result. Another member will note ruefully that, ever since Roswell, they have skated near the edge.

They take an informal, anonymous straw poll, just to gain a sense of where they are. Imagine their surprise when, after counting the votes, they find they are deadlocked, six votes to disclose and six votes to stonewall. Every time Disclosure came up in the past, the idea had been defeated soundly.

Wishful Thinking?

Since the beginning of the UFO cover-up, interested observers have expected an imminent disclosure. In some of the earliest flying saucer books, U.S. Marine Corps Major (ret.) Donald Keyhoe predicted that the “Silence Group” could not keep the lid on much longer. As far back as 1950, in his book
The Flying Saucers Are Real
, he wrote “the official explanation may be imminent.”

Opening the floodgates. Six decades of secret contact means a massive amount of suppressed evidence
. Image by Mastersfx.

The feeling that Disclosure is imminent surfaces every few years, like Ahab’s White Whale. It appeared again during the mid-1960s, when there were so many American UFO reports that even Congress wondered what was going on. Then again, during the late 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act provided a new weapon against secrecy, some activists thought it just might be possible to pry the lid open. Even after the weakening of FOIA in the 1980s, researchers periodically believed that leaks from sympathetic insiders would turn the tables.

Some believe that Disclosure has been happening slowly over the years, via a policy of public acclimation to the UFO reality. To some, it is an article of faith. Indeed, Keyhoe himself believed this. “If we were fully prepared, educated to this tremendous adventure,” he wrote, “it might come off without trouble.”
¹

But if there is a public acclimation program in place, how would it be undertaken, and how would the public be prepared without causing panic?

Lights, Camera…Disclosure!

Some UFO researchers believe that the entertainment industry is part of the effort to acclimate the public to accept the concept of alien life. Hollywood, it has been argued, has collaborated with the intelligence community to release disinformation, and at other times leak a few details to prepare people for eventual contact with non-human life.

Certainly several 1950s movies look like CIA-sponsored attempts to deal with Roswell. Researcher Bruce Rux cited 1951’s
The Thing from Another World
, considered to be the first realistic flying saucer movie, which reflected certain elements of the crash and recovery at Roswell four years earlier. The film’s maker, RKO, was up to its eyeballs in intelligence assets. It was owned by billionaire defense contractor and test pilot Howard Hughes, plus it was a subsidiary of Time-Life, which was owned by CIA-connected Henry Luce. The movie also captured the essence of the Top Secret government study, Project Twinkle, which was then classified.
²

Some of the other movies of the era look suggestive, also. Several key industry players had connections to military intelligence and later the CIA.
Edmund H. North, the screenwriter of the 1951 UFO film,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, had worked in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War. It would seem that the secret-keepers wanted to float some trial balloons before the public, and that Hollywood producers were happy to oblige.

If so, their message seems unclear. Although
The Day the Earth Stood Still
demonstrated alien tough-love, many other movies from this period were invasion-oriented. They included
Earth Versus the Flying Saucers
,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and
The War of the Worlds
. Were these also examples of CIA influence? And were they the result of official policy, or some unauthorized leak?

If there is continued intelligence community influence amid the out-pouring of ET-related movies today, it is even harder to know what the message is.

Consider the career of Steven Spielberg. When he developed
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
in 1977, some wondered if he was part of a government acclimation program. Spielberg has always denied this, saying that he simply believes in extraterrestrial life and knows a good story when he sees one. Although such a denial is to be expected, Spielberg’s choices in this genre support his position. His films have hardly been limited to a monochromatic meme about contact, something one might expect if he were receiving inside information. His early films, such as
Close Encounters
and
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
, both portrayed the Others as benevolent scientists. His later treatments, however, showed no such optimism.
Taken
, his epic television series, depicted abductions as the core UFO secret,
The War of the Worlds
presented Martian predators wiping out humanity, and his television series
Falling Skies
features the resistance against an alien invasion of Earth. Spielberg has also been behind such diverse projects as
Men in Black
, portraying Earth as a cosmic way-station, the historical fantasy
Cowboys and Aliens
, and
Transformers
, with its robotic threat. The easiest explanation for this extraordinary diversity of treatment is that Steven Spielberg, like other people, reads the literature.

The same can be said for the rest of Hollywood. During the 1990s, TV series such as
The X-Files
(“The Truth Is Out There”) and the historical
conspiracy
Dark Skies
(“History Is a Lie”) portrayed the government as involved in a UFO cover-up and willing to go to almost any lengths, often extra-legal, to maintain the secret. Both were subject to much speculation, usually either as a means to prepare the population, or else to provide disinformation.

Yet, why would the covert elite authorize dramatic content highlighting their own lies and deceit? If anything, Hollywood’s natural method of operation may work in opposition to Disclosure. Its product is of such uneven quality, its messages so diverse, that any citizen hungering for its truth will receive only confusion.

If the Breakaway Group indeed had been using Hollywood as a means either to prepare the public for the eventual truth, or else to obfuscate and bury the truth still deeper, the moment of Disclosure will have caught them off guard, as it will have caught everyone else.

Points and Counter-Points

Let us imagine that the Breakaway Group has decided to break its deadlock by allowing one member from each side argue their respective positions.

First up is the member who supports the
status quo
. His argument will boil down to three fundamental points.

First, the public’s right-to-know is not an absolute, especially during wartime. Moreover, he adds, there is evidence that at least some of the Others are hostile, given the abduction and mutilation phenomena. National security concerns dictate that they maintain control as long as possible in order to reverse engineer hardware and develop defensive capabilities.

Second, Disclosure will not stop with a simple acknowledgment of the presence of the Others. The world will be unable to grasp the complexity of this collection of disparate intelligent life-forms. And the Others themselves (or some of them) may have a negative reaction that we will have brought on ourselves. Because they have not made their presence clear, why should we go first?

Third, the results of telling the truth are unpredictable. The economy of the world is based on the
status quo
. Disclosure will cause it to falter and may create another Great Depression. With national unity weakened and governments undermined by years of lies, they will not be able to mount an effective response.

Public panic, he adds, is a real danger. It’s not impossible that 1938 can happen all over again, he says gravely, only worse this time.

This refers, of course, to that iconic moment in American history when, on Halloween night, radio listeners who changed stations during the popular
Chase and Sanborn Hour
to avoid the singing of Nelson Eddy got the surprise of their lives. They heard a frightened eyewitness in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, stating that large tube-like spacecraft were on the ground. People were riveted, they called their friends, and the audience grew. As it did, listeners were informed that the human race was under attack by Martians. The aliens were massacring American troops and marching in New York City, as other spacecraft were landing across the United States.

These terrified listeners had tuned in to Orson Welles’s
Mercury Theatre of the Air
. They were listening not to a news broadcast, but a radio play—an adaptation of
The War of the Worlds
, the book authored by H.G. Wells four decades earlier.

Orson Welles told the drama as a news story based on breaking events because he wanted it to be realistic. It certainly was. But many people never heard the disclaimer that the broadcast was a play. People heard the names of real places and government officials and assumed the broadcast was “real.” In the streets, people were seen packing their prized possessions into their cars and speeding out to the countryside. Some became hysterical and others simply prayed and waited to die.
³

The speaker might well add that panic was repeated several times. When
The War of the Worlds
was rebroadcast in Chile in 1944, it caused riots. Five years later, it happened in Ecuador. As late as 1988, citizens of Portugal panicked.

It is also possible he will add the comments of Winston Churchill, if a declassified report from the British Ministry of Defence files can be
believed. The story came from a scientist who said his grandfather was one of Churchill’s bodyguards during the Second World War. It had been passed down to his mother and then to him.

According to the scientist, his grandfather was present during a meeting between Churchill and General Dwight Eisenhower when they discussed an intriguing UFO incident. This involved a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane returning from a mission that was approaching the eastern English coastline when it was intercepted by a strange metallic object that matched the aircraft’s course and speed for some time. Then it accelerated away and disappeared. Churchill appears to have been more concerned about the social repercussions than the military implications of such a device. He said the report should be immediately classified because it would “create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one’s belief in the Church.”
⁴

No doubt some of the secrecy insiders know whether this story is true or not. If it is, it may be invoked to bolster their position.