IF UFO DISCLOSURE IS COMING, IS THE WORLD PREPARED? DOES IT EVEN CARE?
RED PILL JUNKIESATURDAY, JUNE 1ST
“When I was with the army in New Jersey in the 50s, we had an incident on the base where many people saw a UFO. The next day we were ALL told “Many of you went home last night and told your loved ones that you saw a ufo.” They then gave the order: “You will go home tonight and tell them that you were mistaken and that what you saw was not a UFO.” I have always thought that we are not alone in this universe. I remain agnostic. But I always wondered why they made such a point to tells us what was not seen.”
The above quote was tweeted by beloved TV and Hollywood actor
Ed Asner, as a comment on the much
MUCH discussed
New York Times article that caught everybody by surprise during Memorial weekend. When even Mr. Fredricksen is freaking talking about UFOs, even critics of Tom DeLonge and TTSA have to concede things are getting interesting!
Unless you were hiding under a rock, you were also probably caught by the avalanche of mainstream media articles unleashed by the NYT piece: The Washington Post, The Hill, The New York Post, National Post, Washington Examiner, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and a long etcetera. At last! This is what UFO buffs always wanted, right? Right??
Well, Yes and No…
For starters, what would superficially seem like a deluge of UFO-related news is just the same story repeated and commented upon over and over again; namely the testimony of NAVY aviators who were part of the “Red Rippers” Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11) of F-18s Super Hornets, who had a series of bizarre encounters with unidentified objects while they were on training maneuvers on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt at the United States’ East coast in 2014-2015, prior to their deployment to the Persian gulf. One of those encounters would account for the famous ‘Gimbal’ video released by To the Stars in 2017.
Secondly, the drip-dripping of small tidbits of information pertaining to these encounters across
UFO online circles, coupled with the timing of the first articles that hit the news early this week, seems to suggest they were all part of a heavy-handed PR campaign aiming to promote History’s TV series Unidentified, which premieres tonight at 10pm Eastern – and no, I’m not the only one saying that:
De Void’s Billy Cox and
The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway also share that opinion, albeit they may not express it as bluntly as I am. Some of those articles were op-eds written by people directly involved with To The Stars (Tom DeLonge and Chris Mellon) while the rest are natural reactions of modern mainstream media of seeing a hot topic and joining the trend –most media nowadays consist of 90% punditry and 10% actual investigation, after all.
We’ve also learned that some of the journalists who have been recently writing about these stories encounters also make an appearance as talking heads on Unidentified — like
Politico‘s Bryan Bender, who failed to mention his involvement with the TV series when he wrote about the Navy’s new guidelines for reporting UAPs. In the service of transparency these journalists should have made a ‘full disclosure’ (pun
totally intended) of their level of involvement with TTSA and the series’ producers.
So, if the current ‘UFO hype’ was orchestrated at some level, has it at least attained the desired effect? As an outsider observer of American society –and UFO Disclosure seems to be mostly centered in the United States at the moment– I can only comment on what I can assess from online interactions. Over the week popular influencers like
Xeni Jardin and
Chris Hayes expressed varying levels of interest on the New York Times article on social media, despite not being particularly interested in the UFO phenomenon per se, and remaining agnostic about its possible otherworldly implications. A cursory review on the comments found in Hayes’ thread ranged from the LOLzy (“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos”), to the Meh-sy (“This is a two-year old news”) to the witty-yet-poignant (“Until they are talking about it in a Midwest diner it doesn’t matter”).
The “two-year old” remark is worth pointing out, because it shows confusion mixed with apathy. The uninterested reader skims through the content and sees the same TTSA-watermarked screen grab of the Gimbal video that was first published by the NYT in 2017, and concludes this is yesterday’s news –after all, we’re all still here which means the aliens haven’t vaporized us (we’ll get back to that).
What can be the source of that apathy, aside from the decades-old cultural disregard for the UFO subject? Part of it might be the fact that we live in an age of sensory overload: We wake up at the sound of our cell phone’s alarm, and the first thing we do is open Twitter or Facebook, to check out what our social circles are ranting or raving about. This week we burned our thumbs giving our opinion about Mueller’s statement, Trump’s bullying moves against China and Mexico, and the unresolved issue of Brexit. Meanwhile we remember there are bills to pay, our monthly mortgage/student debt monthly payment is due, and on top of it all there’s the Damocles sword on top of everyone’s head called Climate Change.
It’s hard to pay attention to the lights in the sky, when the ground itself is on fire.
But then again, that might have been part of the plan all along: Dimming the brunt of the impact of UFO reality by releasing key information when people are too busy navigating life in the 21st century, in order to prevent everything to screech and collapse awaiting further revelations. Such have been possible scenarios for a “lower-case disclosure” explored by theorists in the field like Richard Dolan and Bryce Zavel.
And there’s also no denying that, despite the fact we’re still going about our business as best we can, people ARE talking about UFOs. Asner’s introductory tweet is one example, and so is
John Podesta’s. As cynical and skeptical of TTSA’s ultimate intentions or modus operandi you could be, one cannot deny a certain amount of the old stigma is being lifted. If the trend lasts is anyone guess, especially since the engineered hype is not being currently backed by the one thing that REALLY riles up the masses and motivates them to demand answers from their appointed leaders: A good old UFO flap over populated areas –the fact that TTSA relies on events that happened 4-5 years ago will be a hard sell in the age of the instant news feedback.
One thing is for sure, and that is even though we may not be witnessing the dawn of Disclosure, we ARE witnessing the end of UFOlogy as we have currently known it for the last 30 years. TTSA is where it’s at and MUFON is nothing but a bloated whale carcass rotting on the beach of public opinion, and if people are still renewing their memberships it’s probably more out of a sentiment of old camaraderie rather than a real pursuit for investigating UFOs. The need for belonging is deep, but not perennial.
It would seem TTSA achieved what NICAP and APRO only dreamed of, even though
Chris Mellon’s op-ed on The Hill explicitly states TTSA is not interested in following the route of previous UFO groups, and doesn’t perceive any value in ‘Congress hearings’ in order to increase public awareness on the subject. It seems TTSA’s message to the government is clear: “We want to work with you, not against you.” Perhaps that approach will pay short-term dividends, hinted at by the recent (unofficial) news
Lockheed Martin is partnering with TTSA – a move that should surprise no one, since the former head of Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, Steve Justice, is a board member of TTSA.
