Rambling Lemurian

Here’s the thing I don’t get about the UAP Disclosure movement, at least in the United States. How do you know when it’s done?

I’ve always been into UFO stuff. I grew up on the UFO Hunters and UFO Files shows on the History Channel, and whatever other show or documentary about the subject was on TV. I know all about Shag Harbor, Rendlesham Forest, Varginha, Gulf Breeze, the Phoenix Lights, Travis Walton, Kecksburg, Lonnie Zamora, Betty and Barney Hill, Project Blue Book, the Battle of Los Angeles, Ariel School, Paul Bennewitz, Cash-Landrum, the Nuremburg aerial battle in the 1560s, the 1976 Tehran Incident, and Tinley Park and O’Hare in the early 2000s. And obviously Roswell. I think I saw a small UFO briefly near O’Hare right around the same time as the famous 2006 sighting. And one time while watching one of these creepy “aliens are here” shows, I freaked out when I thought I saw an alien outside our front window. Turned out it was just a shadow from the neighbor’s driveway light pole projecting onto our house. I was all-in on the idea that the US Government (or maybe even the Deep State) was covering up knowledge about extraterrestrial visitation. While I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist and can view most of these cases with a skeptical eye, I’m not entirely sure which tense to use in that previous sentence.

I grew out of my UFO interest for a while. It was still there, to be sure. I’d occasionally watch some Ancient Aliens while trying to quiet the logical part of my brain saying “this is clearly racist bullshit”. But it wasn’t until 2017 when the NYT broke the story about the Nimitz encounter and AATIP and the secret UFO/UAP investigations going on at the Pentagon that my interest was recharged. I was back, baby! I started following a bunch of “Disclosure” people on twitter, reading whatever articles I could find on the subject, watching the 60 Minutes interviews with Fravor and whoever the other Navy pilots and witnesses were. I think the fact that Donald Trump was somehow the President of my country made the resurgence of UFOs especially appealing to me. It was a great way to distract me from that whole circus.

But I quickly tired of all the Disclosure discourse. It was too many people claiming to know exactly what’s going on. It didn’t really make any sense because some were sure so-and-so was a charlatan but still hung on to their every word as long as it fit their own narrative. Certain new players in the field like Lue Elizondo were treated as if they were prophets despite still not offering anything concrete. Every promise of proof ended up delayed or classified or “in progress”. Each “mind-blowing” video was ambiguous at best and easily explained away at worst. The same Disclosure people who claimed to be reasonable and skeptical and unbiased in their analysis of grainy videos and pictures and verbal testimony would immediately attack any well-meaning skeptical and scientific analysis that didn’t jive with their pre-formed conclusions.

While wading through the Disclosure swamp, I rekindled my interest in other paranormal subjects. I dove into a couple fun podcasts focused on High Strangeness. “The Quite Unusual Podcast“, “Haunted Objects“, and “Hi, Strangeness with Steve Berg” being 3 of my favorites. It was a new term to me that’s essentially synonymous with Paranormal. But it’s a little more all-encompassing than paranormal. Now I’m no expert on the subject by any means, but my interpretation of High Strangeness is that it’s basically anything that’s “Weird”. And then connects all these phenomena, whether it be Sasquatch, Aliens, Ghosts, Ultraterrestrials, the Fae, etc, into basically the same bucket. Which then presents the idea that maybe all this Stuff is interconnected or even all different manifestations of the same thing.

Do I believe in this stuff? If I had to give a binary, one-word answer, then no. Too much can be explained by hallucinations, psychosis, hoaxes, or plain old bullshit. But if you give me the free of a free-form answer, then…. kind of? I’d like to believe it. I want to believe. I think there is some legitimacy to a lot of these reported encounters which seem so consistent with each other across cultures and centuries that maybe, just maybe, there’s something to it. And honestly I’d rather believe in something like Bigfoot being a form of fae folk that can cross into our realm occasionally for whatever reason, than in an all-powerful and all-knowing God that sends people to Hell for eternity for breaking arbitrary rules written in code 5000 years ago. But the thing that really appealed to me is that the general consensus when taking this approach is that we don’t really know what this all is. And maybe we’re not really meant to understand it or answer all the questions surrounding it. It’s basically an unknowable mystery which can maybe be revealed to those lucky or unlucky enough to experience something and it’s up to them to interpret it however makes the most sense to them.

And that takes me back to “Disclosure”. There’s always been this desire for there to be a neat answer for the question about UFO, or UAP as they tend to be known now. There’s a desire for us to know that not only does the government and world leaders know about these UFOs, but that they know exactly what their agenda is. So many members of the UFO community claim to take a rational, scientific approach to this while pushing the idea that there’s a massive cover-up going on. The US government has been hiding alien bodies, and possibly currently live aliens at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and at Area 51. And there’s a massive underground alien base under the Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico. And/or there’s one off the coast of Catalina Island. But there’s never any proof other than “one guy told this guy, and this guy told that guy, and that guy told this dude, who wrote a book. And isn’t it strange that this dude is saying the exact same things that the one guy originally said?? Wow, conspiracy confirmed!” We just have this same cycle going over and over again, we had Paul Bennewitz, Bob Lazar, Jesse Marcel, Rick Doty, and now Lue Elizondo and David Grusch. Maybe some of these guys are somewhat legit, but the common thread is none of them have produced anything tangible yet. Yet the Disclosure movement revolves around them to varying degrees hoping that one day they will crack open the Pentagon’s vault and force the government to unveil the truth.

But what happens then? Let’s say tomorrow Joe Biden and top Pentagon officials say “ok folks, no more secrets. Here’s everything we’ve ever known about UFOs”. Suppose this disclosure says Roswell was real, we recovered a craft and bodies and covered it up because we didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to freak out the American people and make them think the Soviets had insanely advanced technology. And basically where it stands now is that the American government knows about UFOs, and there are UFOs constantly coming to Earth, but we don’t know what they are other than that they are extraterrestrial in origin. We don’t have any line of communication with these beings. Would you, the Disclosure Activist, believe this? I doubt it. It’s coming straight from the government and you, the Disclosure Activist and UFO investigator, have been distrusting the government since Day One. Why would you believe them now?

OK, maybe the government admits that they can communicate with these aliens, but only very rarely, on the aliens’ terms. But they seem friendly, or at least not hostile. Do you believe that? Probably not, you think there’s more to the story. OK fine, there’s a secret alien base on Earth, but it’s not where you think. Area 51 and Dulce were decoys. It’s actually off the coast of Western Australia. It’s been there longer than anyone knows, we don’t know what they’re doing there. Is that enough for you? No? OK fine, we have sent CIA reps there to meet with the aliens and we do get some tech from them. But there’s nothing sinister going on, trust us. They’re just observing us. There, that’s everything. Ugh, still don’t think that’s it. OK, OK, you win. Here’s the whole story. There’s an alien base in the Indian Ocean. They’re here monitoring our nuclear capabilities and trying to guide us into not destroying ourselves and the fabric of space-time. The alien race down there are Nordics and are the ancestors of human beings. Their nemesis are the Greys which also study humanity but just abduct us for science experiments. They want to create an alien-human-hybrid slave race, but the Nordics are blocking it with the power of the Galactic Federation. There’s fear that war between the races might break out at any moment. As world leaders, we are trying to slowly break the news to humanity and get them mentally and militarily prepared for a potential invasion. There, that’s everything. Here’s all the proof.

And I bet the common response to that level of disclosure would not be “oh wow, thank you for telling us”. It would be… “hmm, that’s bullshit. you’re just trying to scare us so that you can create a New World Order controlled by our ultraterrestrial overlords. David Icke was right!”

So is there an endgame for Disclosure? Will there ever be a point where the UFO Conspiracy Community accepts what the government says about the issue of UFOs? We know that “there are no aliens, here’s an explanation for literally every sighting” won’t fly with them. But even a positive Disclosure and acknowledgement of whatever UAP is will just be met with unhealthy skepticism and an escalated conspiracy theory. So are the UFO Disclosure activists actually in it for real disclosure? Or are they like me and the High Strangeness folks, and really just in it for the chase?