UFOs - Leslie Kean [127]
The second half of this sentence begins with “it is possible”—unlike “I am aware,” this phrase is not stating a fact, but only a possibility. This too is actually quite revealing. One must question why this intelligence officer could not get more information about the nature of this group from his closest ally. He has not been told much at all about the nature of the “informal group” and was not able to determine whether this reflected any more of a “formal” structure, something properly constituted. This attests to the highly secret, deeply buried nature of the informal group.
If indeed this interpretation is correct, and I have every reason to believe that it is, this document references a secret group within the U.S. intelligence world actively studying UFOs. It is a much more important piece of paper than any new case reports released recently by the MoD, which have received all the attention. The public position of the U.S. government is that they haven’t investigated UFOs since 1970, when Project Blue Book was closed down. But this British document—the provenance of which is beyond dispute—potentially blows this claim out of the water. According to this analysis, the United States is studying UFOs. But by doing so in the way revealed by the UK, the program is operating behind the backs not only of the public and the media, but also of Congress, the Senate, and the president. However, this is in no way “proof” or definitive since we’ll never receive proper confirmation as to the missing words, which remain classified.
I approached Nick Pope hoping to receive some clues, some hidden message. But he is too much of a pro ever to be caught off guard. He acknowledges that he helped his DIS colleague with the drafting of the proposal for the UFO study, and can recall which two countries were redacted from the document. I asked him about my assessment of the two missing words, and whether he could respond in any way to it. “No comment” was his reply.
This material, though intriguingly suggestive, is in no way definitive. Taking a step back, we must reflect once again on what we actually know, in order to move forward. Caution, or even understatement, must be the name of the game when dealing with the unaccepted subject of UFOs. The reality of what we do know is extraordinary enough.
For many, the process of discernment is not easy. Conspiracy theorists and the television media have fueled an intricate, rumor-based mythology around the idea of a cover-up, leading some to write off the whole subject of UFOs as inane science fiction, and others to swallow every morsel offered. Those in the middle have no way of sorting out the valid information from the fanciful, which get all mixed into one big pot of unhealthy soup. (This is essentially self-made disinformation, and no secret agents are needed to disseminate it since the media and large swaths of the so-called UFO community take care of that themselves.) But behind all the extreme reactions is the actual fact that the state doesn’t seem to want us to know UFOs exist. Since we know they do exist, we have to assume that the government knows that, too. If so, why is it hiding this, and what is it hiding? People are desperate for answers, and very frustrated, and they have understandably come to deeply mistrust our government on this issue.
Some take advantage of this situation. So-called whistleblowers at varying levels of psychological health and mental clarity regularly jump into the pot—people who have no relationship to the credible sources I referred to earlier—claiming direct knowledge of some aspect of a sinister government cover-up. Undiscriminating UFO groups have made them or their spokespeople into heroes and trotted them out at press conferences, offering them up like sacrificial lambs to be promptly ridiculed by the few media that bother to take note. And in many of these clearly unfounded cases, the