What about Disclosure?

Recently, the disclosure community, such as it is, has been beating the drums about official announcements of a UFO presence on this or that imminent date. November 14, November 27, December 10–all were claimed as the big date when the President of the United States would go before the world and announce that aliens are indeed among us and the U.S. has extensive relations with them and has had for years.

Now, I have to be honest with you. I was not on tenterhooks about any of these dates. Maybe there will be some sort of official U.S. announcement concerning this matter one of these days, but I doubt that it will take anything like the dramatic form imagined by the disclosure believers.

It is conceivable that NASA might quietly accept that some objects tracked in and near our planet are unknowns. The next step would be for the National Science Foundation to agree that research into the origin and nature of such objects was an appropriate and grantable scientific pursuit.

If those two things happened, a few scientists here and there would probably propose various research programs, and seek funding for them from places like the Ford Foundation. (Granting for UFO research is not possible now due to the NSF’s current stance on it.)

There are three primary areas of research that would potentially provide a useful data harvest.

First, a wide angle sky search using automatic cameras and possibly other forms of detection, that would build maps of the movement of unknown objects, seeking consistencies of any kind.

Second, the physical and mental study of people claiming close encounter, both those whose bodies reveal the presence of unknown objects, and those who do not appear to bear them.

Third, once all possible in situ exploration of such objects is exhausted, their removal and analysis.

The combination of these three types of study would provide a harvest of data that offer a reasonable prospect of developing a realistic hypothesis about what is happening.

To do this, though, science has to put certain preconceptions behind it, the first of which is that we have even the slightest idea of what is actually happening. We do not know if we are being visited from other planets. In fact, unless we start from the basis that we know essentially nothing except that the whole phenomenon is unexplained, we will be facing a high probability of intellectual failure, even if we do acquire good data.

Of course, there is a large community who would say that the government and parts of the defense industry already know these things, and that may be true. However, classified scientific work is notoriously unreliable because it is done by so few people, and generally not by those at the pinnacles of their fields. In addition, in this case, because of the need to operate in secret, there is probably a serious lack of methodically collected data.

How are you going to do what is needed, which is to collect samples and information from hundreds of thousands of affected individuals, in secret?

The answer is that you are not. Instead, you’re going to sample just a few people and extrapolate from those findings.

Thus, you are going to open yourself to what has probably actually happened behind the scenes: your data acquisition is going to be controlled by whomever or whatever is generating this mystery in the first place.

By working in secret, in other words, the various scientific groups who have made methodical attempts to understand, have only acquired what data our visitors–whoever they are–wanted them to obtain.

We cannot expect that conclusions drawn from a managed sample like this will have any value beyond affording us an understanding of what it is wanted that we should believe.

Therefore, information coming from those legendary secret groups that allegedly exist deep within the bowels of the defense department and its satellite industries may or may not be correct, and therefore cannot be trusted at all.

Open research, broad-based data acquisition and the use of existing institutional structures such as the peer-reviewed scientific press are essential to drawing trustworthy conclusions about what is happening, and even then it is going to be the single greatest social, cultural and intellectual challenge in the history of the human species.

This is especially true because the original source of the data we need is not passive. On the contrary, our visitors appear to possess vast and extraordinary knowledge, and even brains that may offer them superior command of reality.

Nevertheless, if we are sufficiently rigorous in our approach, there is little question in my mind but that we can come to an understanding that advances human knowledge, and probably in ways that are more significant than anything else we have ever done.

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