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defense & war government transparency

The UFOs Are Here

Now that UFO sightings are ubiquitous, is it at all amusing that ufologists generally scoff at them, dismissing them as “drones”?

Out-​of-​place lights dot the skies of New Jersey and other east-​coast states, and have for several weeks. Yet there is no panic that The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming!

Speculation as to what they actually are — and whose — is rampant.

And the government hasn’t helped.

The first congressperson I heard on the subject said there had been no briefing on the subject from the Pentagon. The second claimed to have confidential information that these were Chinese-​made drones deployed by Iran. The Pentagon has denied this.

Governor Philip Dunton Murphy of New Jersey says there’s “no threat,” but how on earth would he know, since he seems to know nothing of consequence?

Dozens of drones have been reported hovering over the state since before Thanksgiving mostly in northern areas about Route 78. The Democrat said he held a briefing Wednesday with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, senior officials from federal and state homeland security and State Police,” reports New Jersey 101.5. “‘We are actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners on this matter,’ Murphy said Thursday in a statement on his X account.”

So we are in the dark. 

Or, very spotty light.

We don’t even know they are drones — as in the recent hovering/​flying technology allowed by improved battery and computing technology, but relying on propellers, not anything as outré as Zero Point energy.

Considering that the rise of drone tech was something we could all see coming, however, why is government so incoherent on the subject?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Transient Stars

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.

The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-​up.”

This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.

What do we really know?

Not much.

Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence … from an unexpected quarter.

A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events. 

But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-​like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”

They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS‑I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure.… The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”

These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.

As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”

One wonders whether later mass-​sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989 – April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study. 

Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Two Roadblocks, and Their Names

Meandering through social media, a popular meme with several variants runs something like this:

“Hey, this guy says the government believes in UFOs!

“See, nobody cares. Now show us the Epstein client list.”

The gist: the Jeffrey Epstein story is a bigger, more important story than the on 70-​plus years of government control of the UFO story.

Well, we now know precisely why we cannot have either: a few specific politicians are blocking disclosure, one Democrat on the Epstein story and a handful of Republicans on the UFO story.

Hillary Vaughn of Fox News asked Senator Dick Durbin (D‑Ill.) why he — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — won’t subpoena Epstein’s flight logs to and from his private Caribbean island wherein sex trafficking with under-​age females and males went on. His response? “I don’t know anything about his flight logs” and “This has never been raised by anyone.”

This is untrue. 

UFO/​UAP transparency, on the other hand, has gone much further than the Epstein — probably because there are fewer politicians implicated in crimes. Yet two major disclosure elements in a recent defense bill have been nixed by Mike Turner (R‑Oh.) and Mike Rogers (R‑Ala.). Journalist Ross Coulthart, who has covered this story best, ascribes this pair’s opposition to disclosure to their respective military-​industrial complex constituencies. And Coulthart adds that Senator Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.) also had a hand in disclosure suppression.

Both the Epstein and the UFO story reveal a lot about our government, which wants us to know the truth about neither.

And as for the notion that these issues must be played off each other, the proper memed response would be “Why can’t we have both?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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If/​Why

“This is about accountability, and about transparency,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R‑Tenn.), at yesterday’s House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan press conference on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP’s) — “about holding the Deep State to task for their refusal to declassify information that the American people need to know, that Congress needs to know.”

He paints the same picture of the UAP/​UFO issue that has been rumored about for nearly 80 years: “Foreign objects are buzzing around in our airspace, and Joe Biden’s over 30 generals have not only been silent on the issue, but have yet to play ball with Congress.”

The tenor of the presser was summarized early by host Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.): “It is unacceptable that any mid-​level, unelected bureaucrat staffers can tell members of Congress that we are not allowed to access information about UAP’s.” 

Senator Chuck Schumer (D‑N.Y.) has pushed a disclosure procedure on the order of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, but these representatives scorned that notion, arguing there remains too much secrecy surrounding the 1963 event in Dallas. 

“So, whether it’s little green men, American technology, or worse — technology from the CCP — we need to know,” insists Rep. Ogles.

“I think the American people have a simple question,” Jared Moskowitz (D‑Fla.) hazarded, “which is ‘if none of this exists, if this is all false, why, at every turn, are there people trying to stop the transparency and the disclosure? Why are folks who are in charge of committees, whether they are in the House or in the Senate, opposed to this disclosure?’ And it’s that point alone that piques the interest.”

Indeed it does. 

It’s time for the people to find out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Identified?

The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.

Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.

“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-​human-​made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-​worldly remains in order to build more technologically-​advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”

Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”

He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s  June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.

What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.

Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.

While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-​downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”

You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-​wetting prostitutes.

While General VanHerck simultaneously up-​played and down-​played extra-​terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-​foot-​tall balloon episode.

“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”

I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?

Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.

VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-​like and rocket-​like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-​fighter-​like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.

This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/​floating/​darting-​about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.

Especially in time of war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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