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government transparency

Do Not Discuss This!

Some stories linger in the background, under-​acknowledged, never really addressed, driving us a bit crazy.

Example? Deficit spending and debt accumulation.

The problems that deficit financing inflicts upon us are many and devastating. We would be a lot wealthier, healthier, and wiser were the federal government not so madly out-​of-​control. We could invest in all sorts of great things, and prices would be more stable, and … and … and …

But what can we do about it?

It’s not obvious. So we don’t talk about it much. 

And the debt only grows, with destructive hyperinflation looming as an ever-​increasing danger.

The other under-​discussed story is even more disturbing — so we ignore it even more studiously.

Within the last several years headlines in The New York Times and on TV have covered it, yet … very few people talk about it, despite the startling revelations.

The issue? UFOs — a strange subject at face value, which, once you poke into it, gets even weirder.

We level-​headed yokels used to deny the existence of UFOs, but now the Pentagon has confirmed their persistent plaguing of Navy jets and seacraft, and the Army has acknowledged its ongoing study of UFO-​derived “meta-​materials.”*

In June, the Senate will be briefed on the subject, per instructions in a recent stimulus bill. (Which brings us back to our first blank-​out issue.) Meanwhile, as we wait for what could be big news, new revelations of repeated incursions by UFOs against a Navy fleet 100 miles off the California coast back in 2019 appear in specialty media** but barely make a ripple in major media.

Wait — Fox just featured a segment on a Pentagon confirmation of flying pyramids!

Will we make headway on UFOs before the debt?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


 * French scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee is also engaged in research on UFO-​site-​retrieved mystery alloys.

** See Richard Dolan discuss these recent Channel Island incursions, based chiefly on the report in The Warzone.

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previously on Common Sense with Paul Jacob:

It’s Aliens (May 30, 2019

The Whys Behind the Whats (June 25, 2019)

Stranger Things 2019 (January 2, 2020

Two Conspiracies Unearthed (December 10, 2020

Why We Still Live (December 18, 2020

Categories
government transparency

Why We Still Live

The year was 1983. One man, trusting his instincts and his knowledge of how technology can fail, averted catastrophe by not “pushing the button” to launch Soviet missiles at the United States.

It was September 26, and we celebrate it here, at Common Sense with Paul Jacob, as Petrov Day, after the day’s hero — indeed, the world’s hero — Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. Though tensions were running high in the early Eighties, Petrov suspected a false alarm. Events proved him right.

Petrov is not alone on this specific heroes’ list. There’s also Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who averted disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

But the oddest list candidates might not be human.

A week ago or so, when I reported that a former head of the Israel space programs, Professor Haim Eshed, had talked, in an interview, about Israeli and American diplomatic relations with a “Galactic Federation” — yes, of extra-​terrestrial aliens — I failed to mention that he had also claimed aliens had averted nuclear war.

Is he crazy? Lying?

Well, ufology lore and de-​classifed military documents tell of repeated — and unnerving — UFO incursions into the operations of both Russian and American military nuclear missile installations. We could easily dismiss these claims when the U.S. military was denying any mysterious UFO reality out there — after all, people like to tell tall tales — but that’s not the case now, when the Pentagon has confessed that something very real and really weird is indeed going on in our oceans and atmosphere.* 

But the Pentagon is not admitting to treaties with alien civilizations. The “official position” of the U.S. military, despite increasing numbers of disclosures, is that the UFO phenomenon “appears to remain a mystery,” as Tim McMillan concludes his recent extensive survey of official congressional briefings for The Debrief

Still, the official, accepted reason we have not experienced massive thermonuclear war is merely game-​theoretic: no winners being possible, as we learned in a popular movie a few months before Stanislav Petrov had to make his big decision, rational players wouldn’t start one.

Yet, Mutually Assured Destruction is initialized MAD, and those with limited faith in human reasonableness not unreasonably consider, at least, other explanations for our continued survival. 

So, hail Petrov; honor Arkihipov; and … consider … aliens?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


 * As we have learned in the reporting, “Flying Saucers” aren’t the only form seemingly inexplicable UFOs take. The latest is “triangle.”

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international affairs scandal

Two Conspiracies Unearthed

Two huge stories broke this week.

The first is that the “People’s Republic” of China guided American policy for decades using “old friends” who had “penetrated the highest levels of the U.S. government and financial institutions before the Trump administration.” 

Bill Gerz, writing in The Washington Times, reported that “Di Dongsheng, a professor and associate dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, also suggested in a Nov. 28 speech that China’s Communist Party helped Hunter Biden, a son of presumptive President-​elect Joseph R. Biden, obtain Chinese business deals.” 

These remarks were posted as a video on the professor’s Weibo account (think “Chinese Facebook”). Though quickly removed, copies went viral.

The second story? “Did Donald Trump Nearly Confirm Existence of Aliens? Israeli Ex-​Space Chief Makes Bizarre Claim,” by Jeffrey Martin, writing at Newsweek. “Professor Haim Eshed, who served as the head of Israel’s space program from 1981 to 2010 spoke to the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Sunday. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post published some of Eshed’s quotes in English and they contained the most incredible claims made about Trump, who has long [been] the center of conspiracy theories — some of which he has actively encouraged.”

Eshed claims that both the U.S. and Israel have had contact with extraterrestrial civilizations (a “Galactic Federation,” no less) and that President Trump was about to go full-​on Full Disclosure but — somehow — the aliens stopped him.

Quite a yarn, not unfamiliar to science fiction readers and moviegoers. But note: quite a few de-​classified Pentagon, FBI and CIA documents suggest something very much like this. And in the last few years we’ve covered the U.S. Government’s trickling admissions that the UFO phenomenon is not all fakery, but real and odd.

Both stories hail from professors with close ties to foreign governments. Both point to actual conspiracies. Both present “epistemic” problems for us: they are neither easily proved or disproved.

Both, also, are too eerily plausible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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media and media people national politics & policies

Stranger Things 2019

On Tuesday, I seconded George F. Will’s judgment that the biggest story of 2019 was the Hong Kong protest movement.

In America, though, 2019’s top news story must be how the anti-​Trump movement morphed from Russiagate, which fizzled upon release of the Mueller Report, to the quasi-​impeachment bit over the most yawn-​inducing scandal of all time, Trump’s Ukraine Phone Call.

It is certainly a strange story, but there are stranger big stories from last year. I am tempted to assert that the year’s biggest news is actually the Biggest Non-Story: trillion-​dollar deficits and ever-​increasing debt.

No protest over that enormity. Getting anyone to talk about it is like getting the government to come clean on … UFOs.

Which brings us to the absolutely weirdest story of 2019. During this last swing ‘round the sun, multiple sources associated with (and inside) the federal government, admitted that, within the corridors of our un-​beloved Deep State, artifacts from crashed ‘and landed’ UFOs were being studied.

After decades and decades of ridicule, eye-​rolls, stonewalling, lying, and disinformation about ‘flying saucers,’ several important government bodies — including the Army and Navy — now admit that they almost regularly encounter astounding … crafts … that are not part of our nation’s official sea and air technology inventory. 

These admissions amount to ‘disclosure.’ But it is not an information dump — disclosure is just a trickle, so far.*

Why? Perhaps the idea is that we cannot handle the truth.

Or perhaps they can’t.

Which isn’t really unlike ever-​increasing deficits and debt, now that I think about it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Still, even with a mere handful of official and near-​official admissions of retrieved UFO tech, the story looms large indeed.

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Strange Days

We live in a strange time when a possible official UFO disclosure by the government doesn’t seem strange at all.

What’s odd is one of the two major American political parties proudly talking up socialism.

What’s weird is the increasing financial instability of the country’s top two social programs, Medicare and Social Security, while Americans seem unworried and politicians push not to shore the programs up, but expand them.

What’s bizarre is over $22 trillion in federal debt, and the current president and Congress piling on ever more with new trillion-​dollar deficits.

What’s strange is … well, OK: UFO disclosure is a bit strange.

It is worth noting that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have unearthed quite a lot of information on UFOs already. When FOIA mechanisms were first set up, no one expected the avalanche of requests that would be related to UFOs. But that is what happened — and they haven’t dredged up nothing.

When President Trump was asked about the issue by George Stephanopoulos, his response was dismissive, however. “People are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”

Like me, he probably has seen nothing first-​hand, experienced nothing. But by now he has surely been briefed.

Or has the de facto Deep State coup attempt against his presidency entailed keeping him in the dark?

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, running for Trump’s job, told YouTuber Joe Rogan that he would pass on whatever he might learn about UFOs if president. “Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?”

Yet even that is not the strangest thing Sanders has said.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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government transparency Popular

The Whys Behind the Whats

“[H]ow quickly our differences worldwide would vanish,” said Ronald Reagan in 1987, “if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” 

Does that Reaganite talking point give us any hints about the current series of disclosures about Unidentified Flying Objects? 

I noted the most recent story to hit mainstream news on Sunday, about members of the U.S. Senate being briefed on the many repeated Navy encounters around the world with Unexplained Aerial Phenomena — “UAP” being the current euphemism for “UFO.” 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the bulk of these news stories have been driven by a cadre of former government officials and contractors who have investigated UAP as part of a Pentagon research program. Now members of a non-​profit educational corporation, they are on a mission to break the government-​imposed silence and compartmentalized lock-​up of knowledge about the phenomena. 

This being America, the effort also has a History Channel tie-​in.

But much of the buzz appears to be coming from outside that core group, some of it focusing on leaked documents relating to a 2002 meeting between a scientist and a Navy admiral. The subject matter includes a secret program studying actual, hangered examples of ultra-​strange flying craft* kept deeply secret — even from current military command — in the corporate wing of the military-​industrial complex.

A new threat to unite us all? Or just another excuse to throw taxpayer funds down the Pentagon/​military-​industrial complex rathole?

The ongoing UFO disclosure might be neither of these yet still not what it seems.

We should keep our minds open, but our suspicions set on high alert.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* The technology in question, in this document as well as in the footage disclosed in 2017, purportedly does not use propellers, jets, or rockets to move extremely rapidly, change course immediately, and hover.

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