Curveballs: Dr. Jerkpatrick & the Valid Suspicions of Greenstreet.

“Narcissists will never tell you the truth. They live with the fear of abandonment and can’t deal with facing their own shame. Therefore, they will twist the truth, downplay their behavior, blame others and say whatever it takes to remain the victim. They are master manipulators and con artists that don’t believe you are smart enough to figure out the depth of their disloyalty. Their needs will always be more important than telling you any truth that isn’t in their favor…”
― attributed to Shannon L. Alder.

On May 8, 2024, the New York Post YouTube channel posted a video providing Steven Greenstreet’s edited interview with Jerkpatrick – oh shit, I’m sorry, Dr. Sean Kirkparick – regarding his time as director of AARO and the aftermath. At roughly 17 minutes into the interview, after a little under twenty minutes of passionately sucking ARRO’s bulging, throbbing arrowhead, Greenstreet suddenly confesses, in voiceover, “Okay, now for two curveballs. There were two moments during the interview that didn’t sit right with me.”

The first such curveball he mentioned was when he asked Kirkpatrick about the UAP Task Force.

He explains how, given the “viral news stories” by the UFO Activists, there was a surge in public interest in UFOs. As a consequence, the Pentagon created The UAP Task Force (UAPTF), which ran from August of 2020 to November of 2021. Greenstreet notes that in the ARRO Report, they dedicated a full 6 pages to AWWSAP and how the UFO Activists therein were “wasting taxpayer money chasing paranormal things”, and finds it suspicious, or at the very least confusing, however, that only two paragraphs were dedicated to the UAPTF – particularly given that it was headed by Jay Stratton, identified by Greenstreet as one of those who had formerly been part of AWWSAP, and one of those he had christened “The UFO Activists.” Furthermore, the report failed to mention how Stratton recruited “various paranormal enthusiasts” and how the task force “missed multiple incursions of Chinese spycraft over America for years” due to “chasing spooky UFOs”.

To summarize and clarify, Greenstreet’s issue was this: when the UFO Activists were in AWWSAP, the paranormal aspects of the investigation were highlighted, “but when members of the same group get put in charge of yet another program,” namely the UAPTF, “there are zero mentions of it. This report was supposed to reveal all those details, but here it doesn’t.”

This last line, I must confess, I find very curious. Most surprising is that he seems surprised. I mean, it’s almost as if he doesn’t suspect in the least that, given the ARRO Report was a Congressionally-mandated historical report and that ARRO is a wing of the DOD, that they wouldn’t try to rewrite history through the medium of select omissions and deceptive spins.

So Greenstreet asks Kirkpatrick if some of those involved in AWWSAP went on to work for the UAPTF, and Kirkpatrick answered that to his knowledge the UAPTF had only three full-time and unnamed members that “lived in the Pentagon” and that “everybody else that was tapped across the community – the IC or the DOD – weren’t full-time members of the task force.”

In other words, he evaded the question.

Greenstreet noted this, and politely persisted, this time softening the question, asking if AWWSAP members were “initially” involved in the UAPTF, to which Kirkpatrick finally answered a semi-definitive, “I believe so,” but denied knowing who placed them in those positions or why they would do so given their apparently damning history in AWWSAP or the discrediting comments Kirkptrick has conveyed regarding them.

“Are you aware that some of those third parties that the UAPTF brought in were a number of people with fringe beliefs,” Greenstreet asked, “like Ghost Hunters and psychics, and they were brought in to be analysts?”

“I was not part of and don’t know anything about how they ran the task force,” Kirkpatrick claimed. “I was actually out in Colorado during all that.”

“Okay, but during your AARO historical report you didn’t see any of that information?”

“I think the rest of that part of the review will come in volume two,” he clearly deflects.

“Oh, really?” Greenstreet says, admirably not giving the guy a pass. “So there’s more on the task force coming in volume two?”

“I don’t know for certain,” Kirkpatrick says, visibly backpedaling and taking refuge in deflection yet again. “I have to direct you back to ARRO.”

Greenstreet openly confessed that while he wanted to press him more in this area, the clock was ticking on the interview, and he had other questions he wanted to ask, so he felt compelled to move on. I simply don’t have it in me to criticize the guy for that, as given the 30-minute time constraints, there would be more questions I’d want to ask if I were in his position. Even so, I must say, it’s good for us that he moved on, too, for this brings us to the second curveball he referenced, which, as Greenstreet put it, came when he asked if Kirkpatrick had any “previous history working with UFOs or if he had any previous associations with members” of the UFO Activists.

In case you’re wondering: this is when it gets so, so, so fucking good.

First some context is required, however. In one of Greenstreet’s previous reports, this one apparently on May 2 – almost a week before this interview with Kirkpatrick – he published an interview he had with Brandon Fugal, the current owner of Skinwalker Ranch.

In that interview, Fugal alleged that in 2018, Thomas Kirk McConnell, a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), called Fugal on behalf of Senator McCain, who was chairman of the committee until his death in August of that year. The call was to request he brief the committee in DC regarding the strange activity occurring on Skinwalker Ranch. Fugal accepted, of course, and reported that after preparing his powerpoint presentation, he flew to DC and entered a large briefing room. Hal Puthoff and Brennan McKernan (who later became the sole director of the UAPTF, from 2020 to 2022) were allegedly present, and Fugal ultimately gave his briefing to multiple Pentagon officials. Most interesting, however, was something else Fugal said regarding the briefing, a confession that led to a lovely, public chain reaction.

“As we [commenced] the presentation,” he said, “I was interrupted by a gentleman at the head of the table, and he said, ‘Wait. Before we proceed any further, I wanna establish an understanding: all the gentlemen here, Mr. Fugal, that you’re presenting to are all very well aware of the reality of [the] UFO phenomenon. So please dispense with any part of your presentation that would seek to convince us of the reality, because we already know.’”

In the interview, when pressed, Fugal failed to identify the individual, identifying this person only as “one of the individuals leading the discussion.” In a voiceover, Greenstreet revealed that one of his sources, “familiar with this briefing, told me this was Sean Kirkpatrick.” Naturally, this in turn inspired a series of questions in Greenstreet’s subsequent interview with Kirkpatrick.

AARO, mind you, was created in July, 2022.

This is where we come to Greenstreet’s second “curveball” in his interview with Kirpatrick, which came after establishing, through a series of questions, Kirkpatrick’s assertions that, prior to AARO, he had no previous history or even interest in the UFO subject (aside from “the occasional movie,” he says), and performed no duties associated with either the paranormal or UFOs. Then Greenstreet dropped the bombshell question:

G: “Did you attend a 2018 [SASC] briefing on Skinwalker Ranch?”

K: “No. I attended a briefing at the request of [SASC] on what was, at that time, associated with the AATIP/AWWSAP research that was going on, as an independent outside reviewer, and I gave them my opinions at that time.”

G: “Who invited you to that briefing?”

K: “It was one one of the staffers.”

G: “Okay, one of the staffers on SASC. Got it. And you’re saying that this was an offset of AWWSAP/ATTIP?”

K: “That’s my understanding at the time – that it was a spin out of those programs.”

G: “In 2018? Wow. Okay.”

K: “Though those programs were ended, the research by these independent people – because this was not an official government briefing, this was a briefing by people that were not associated with the government, so…

G: “Okay, so this briefing was not an official DOD/Pentagon briefing…”

K: “Oh, absolutely not.”

Throughout this series of questions I can’t shake the sense that Kirkpatrick is freaking out inside, verbally striving to cover various sectors of his increasingly exposed and bloated ass on the fly, all the while at least vaguely aware that in the process he was simultaneously digging his own grave, emitting the increasingly distinctive odor of potent fishiness and utter, vomit-inducing bullshit.

When Greenstreet then confronted Kirkpatrick with what Fugle claimed – namely that he had led the briefing and had proclaimed that was already fully aware of the “reality” of UFOs – he, of course, denied it all.

“I wasn’t leading anything,” he insisted. “I had another job at the time and I was brought in as an independent, objective reviewer of what… that SASC was being told.” In addition, he denied having had any association with any of the UFO Activists before becoming director of ARRO in July of 2022, and denied having ever met any of them prior to this briefing in 2018.

Even Greenstreet, to his credit, smells the distinct scent of bullshit here.

“Okay, but seriously, what was he even doing there?” Greenstreet asks in voiceover of Kirkpatrick’s presence at the briefing, regardless of his capacity or what he might have said there. “How can he say that he had no interest or duties regarding UFOs before 2022 if he’s attending briefings in 2018 about one of the most famous UFO spots on planet Earth?”

While Greenstreet didn’t push him on it during the interview, he emailed follow up questions to Kirkpatrick, and the doctor responded that he had “ended up at that briefing because a congressional staffer asked me to attend as an objective third party scientist to listen to the presentation. I did not know it was about Skinwalker Ranch until later. I don’t recall it being referenced by that name during the briefing.”

Where Kirkpatrick had previously been digging his grave with a large spoon in a frantic, amphetamine-fueled kind of way, his energy now seemed to increase, and he exchanged his spoon for a shovel.

Greetstreet then emailed him the Powerpoint presentation with slides inundated with the words “Skinwalker Ranch” that Fugal claims he presented at the briefing, which Kirkpatrick then claimed was unfamiliar to him.

“That’s not the briefing I recall seeing, The briefing I saw was less polished,” is what he specifically said. Then, apparently oblivious to how pathetic of a con man he is, he went a step further in his pathetic effort to increasingly distance himself from the circumstance. “Come to think about it, I don’t believe it was 2018 that I attended a briefing on The Hill. I believe it would have been 2017. In 2018 I was stationed in Colorado. I don’t recall ever meeting Fugal. Maybe he’s confusing the two meetings.”

And so it came to pass that Kirkpatrick exchanged his shovel for a goddamn excavator.

When Greenstreet subsequently emailed Fugal via email, he responded: “Are you trying to get Kirkpatrick in trouble and destroy his credibility? You better be careful with what you report.” Greenstreet replied that this was not his intention and explained how he’d had an interview with him and provided what he’d asserted regarding the matter. Fugal responded that indeed, despite what he might say, Kirkpatrick “was at that meeting on April 19th, 2018. I gave you an accurate account of the meeting and have video, photos and witnesses.” At the time Greenstreet published his video, Fugal did not respond.

But he did. Fugal did indeed respond.

Not to Greenstreet, however, but to the public. On May 9, 2024, on X, Fugal posted: “I am telling the truth. On April 19, 2018, my team from Skinwalker Ranch was asked to provide a confidential briefing in Washington D.C. to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence & United States Armed Services Committee. Sean Kirkpatrick was at the head of the table.”

Fugal’s word against Kirkpatrick’s ever-morphing ones, right? Not so. Fugal also provided three photos, which he later confessed that he wasn’t supposed to take, but decided to take anyway, just in the event that he might later require proof that it happened. Good for him, too, for the first of these photos is truly epic.

This photo was taken during the presentation, and depicts ten people. Near the head of the table, there is one person seemingly looking towards the camera with a displeased look on his face.

That individual? It is undoubtedly Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick.

Jerkpatrick: a fucking liar.

On Dr. Jerkpatrick’s UFO Conspiracy Theory.

In 2019, I began watching a New York Post YouTube series called “The Basement Office,” which was hosted by Steven Greenstreet, a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist. In the series, he was nearly always accompanied by Nick Pope, and together they would explore the UFO phenomenon. To my utter surprise, Greenstreet not only seemed to take the subject seriously, but came across as a guy absolutely mind-blown by revelations that there was something to all of this after all; a guy who was busy struggling to integrate these new revelations into his former perspectives. In short, I found that I really enjoyed the show.

Then it seemed to stop. Rather abruptly, too, I might add, and this I found rather disconcerting. Certainly disappointing.

Ultimately, my pessimistic suspicions proved to be correct, for when Greenstreet reappeared on the scene, or at least came to my attention once again, his attitude towards the phenomenon had shifted to the extreme other end of the spectrum. Now he only seemed interested in discrediting the subject at all costs. Then he abruptly fell off my radar once again.

Then, on May 8, 2024, on the New York Post YouTube channel, Greenstreet provides an interview he had with none other than Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. While it didn’t come to me directly given the YouTube algorithm echochamber, channels that I’d subscribed to highlighted the interview, provided summaries, included their own angles on the subject, and provided links to his original interview. As much as I valued their insights – more or less – it became obvious that I needed to listen to the entire interview, so that’s precisely what my embarrassingly obsessive ass did.

In this interview, the conspiracy theory Kirkpatrick was weaving gained clarity.

You see, “UFO Activists” have successfully infected particular members of Congress with their UFO religion, subsequently leading these Congressional members to form the UAP Caucus. While Kirpatrick couldn’t identify the particular “UFO Activists” in the interview, apparently for legal reasons, Greenstreet proudly proclaims that he had previously identified fifteen of them himself, as he detailed in former videos of his. According to him, these individuals include Kit Green, Hal Putoff, Chris Mellon, George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, Robert Bigelow, Eric Davis, Lue Elizondo, Jay Stratton, Travis Taylor, Colm Kelleher, James Lacatski, Leslie Kean, Garry Nolan, and David Grusch. He asserts that a number of them have worked together over the decades and the stories of a UFO conspiracy by certain unelected officials against the public all seem to derive from them. These perceptions are echoed in the ARRO Report, which Greenstreet interprets as his vindication.

As for the UAP Caucus, it presently has six official members, according to their website, including Representatives Tim Burchett, Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, Nancy Mace, Eric Burlison, and Andy Ogles. They also list seventeen other members of Congress who have expressed support for their mission.

As Kirkpatrick said in an interview with the National Security Space Association, as supplied by Greestreet’s video, and which apparently occurred March 14, 2024: “I think that is disturbing and should be a flag for the National Security Community, because how can you then trust those people if they are not objective enough to understand evidentiary-based assertions like that? How can you trust them with our national secrets?”

In essence, Kirkpatrick’s conspiracy narrative is this: UFO Activists infected Congress with their UFO religion through the media, which consequently resulted in a threat to national security.

According to Kirkpatrick, at least publicly, it all began on December 16, 2017, when the New York Times published an article, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” which according to Greenstreet contained deliberate falsehoods and deceptions. It was co-written by Leslie Kean, one of those aforementioned activists, and her “sources for the article [were] other activists in the same group,” many of whom the ARRO report notes “were a part of AAWSAP [Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program], a 2008 Pentagon Aerospace technology program that went off the rails when program contractors misappropriated taxpayer funds to hunt UFOs, ghosts, and monsters at Skinwalker Ranch, a supposed paranormal hotspot in Utah. Kirkpatrick says the Pentagon had no idea they were doing this.”

Greenstreet and Kirkpatrick both allege that AATIP, which the aforementioned article brought to light, was never an official Pentagon program and that it was not headed by Lou Elizondo.

Remember this point. It will be referenced in a later post.

Despite this, Greenstreet says, this article spawned widespread interest by the media and Congress. Gasoline was subsequently thrown on the fire when, in early June of 2023, another one of the “UFO Activists,” David Grusch, came on the scene, initially through an article in The Debrief and an edited interview on NewsNation, alleging an ongoing, decades-old secret government program that recovered UFOs and the bodies non-human pilots and was engaging in a cover-up. The following month, on July 26th, there came the historic Congressional hearings, where Ryan Graves, David Fravor, and David Grusch testified. AARO, however, was not invited, as bitterly expressed in Kirpatrick’s LinkedIn post, submitted to the site the day after the hearing, where he writes that “AARO was established, by law, to investigate the allegations and assertions presented in yesterday’s hearing. […] some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to AARO, raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”

The disinterest of the Caucus in ARRO was further confirmed when Greenstreet asked Kirkpatrick whether any member of the Caucus asked to be briefed by him. Kirkpatrick said no, with his vibe – at least to me – strongly suggesting that he’s still just as butt-hurt that Congress trusted the whistleblowers over ARRO as he was when he wrote that weird LinkedIn post. While Greenstreet viewed it through his own lens, his follow-up question strongly suggested that he got that general impression, too.

“You come off, in general, as perturbed about a lot of this, if not mildly frustrated,” he said. “Why is that?”

Kirkpatrick responded:

“One of the most frustrating and concerning things that I discovered in this assignment – and I’ve had assignments all over this world, doing a lot of really cool stuff – none of it has given me this level of frustration. Because the thing that we uncovered was that the number of, for the lack of have a better description, ‘true believers,’ that have the faith of conviction that the government is covering this up and hiding it – the number of those people that actually exist within the government, within the National Security space – people that I’ve known for decades and worked with on some very sensitive things – to have them sit in my office and tell me face to face, ‘I’m not going to help you and support you ‘cause I know you’re part of the cover-up,’ even though I’m looking at them, going, ‘I only had this job for like the last week. I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about,’ and then lay out evidence to the contrary for them… for them to ignore all of that and continue to press forward with the allegations is not just frustrating. Because some of them are in positions of authority that then make it difficult to get a job done…”

Greenstreet then provided a clip from a January 23, 2024 interview with Peter Bergen, “In the Room”, in which Kirkpatrick conveyed a similar sentiment. “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary,” he said, “that is going to make the true believers ‘convert’, if you will. It’s almost like a religion. It is basically religion.”

This butt-hurtness manifested again in the interview, too. In March of 2024, after ARRO released its “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I,” this apparently didn’t impress the Caucus, as within the same month they signed a letter supporting Grusch’s claims. Greenstreet referenced this.

“Even after the ARRO report was released,” Greenstreet began, “some Congressional leaders announced that they will still continue to pursue many of the UFO and alien claims that were dismissed in your report as unfounded. What are your thoughts on that?”

“I think, as I’ve mentioned before, that there are folks that are going to believe what they want to believe,” Kirkpatrick said, “and when they have that level of belief there is no amount of rational thought that you’re going to put in front of them that’s going to change their mind. I think it is a waste of time for them to continue to pursue that. Congress stood up ARRO with all of the authorities and resources necessary to go investigate this on behalf of both Congress and the executive branch, and they have done that job. And for them to continue to pursue that and call them liars is actually telling the men and women of ARRO that have been working on this diligently that they are less credible than anybody else that walks in the door and that they are dismissing their commitment to the Constitution and their duty, and I find that beyond reprehensible.”

Contrary to his assertions that he represents the rational and empirical side of the psychological binary with respect to the UFO issue, here he tries to trigger emotional reactions in Greenstreet and his listeners, a tactic unerringly aimed at inspiring empathy with not only himself, but the ARRO efforts he purports to represent, and by extension seeks to inspire faith in ARRO’s official conclusions. Cherry on top, he’s also calling into question the patriotism of those who question his motives and conclusions.

In essence, Kirkpatrick is trying oh-so-fucking desperately to polarize the issue. He’s not framing the polarization using the currently popular political avenue of Team Red versus Team Blue, either (and if nothing else, I can give him credit for not reaching out for that low-hanging fruit), but something deeper: this, he seems to indicate, is about reason and empiricism versus belief and faith. In other words, it concerns science versus religion.

On one side – the side of which he’s a representative, of course – are the rational, empirical individuals who embrace open-mindedness coupled with healthy skepticism in their approach to the UFO/UAP subject and the associated allegations. They are dedicated to simply collecting the data and following where it leads through a process of investigation and analysis, after which they present it all to the public, entirely devoid of prejudice or ulterior motives.

On the other side, however, reside those naive individuals, many within powerful positions within the US government, who bear passionate convictions, who are possessed by a religious faith that drives them to believe not only that UFOs are alien spacecraft but that elements within our government know this, have recovered such spacecraft, and are lying to the American people about it.

And when he or ARRO provides “evidence” to the contrary, he says, the resulting backlash from the other side, from those that stand with the aforementioned “UFO Activists,” provides evidence of the nature of their emotionally-based position as a whole. He, on the other hand, is not like that, so he maintains. Remember: he’s rational, empirical, simply going where the evidence takes him.

Interestingly, he tries to hammer in this point by citing the hate-mail he has allegedly received as well as those who have threatened him and his family, even one incident where the FBI had to arrest someone on his property – none of which I doubt, and all of which I personally find reprehensible. Even so, bringing this up in this context is clearly done in an effort to elicit sympathy, and to suggest that such an individual accurately represents the “other side” is to paint the other side as irrational and violent, and ultimately reinforces his conspiracy theory.

Consequently, it turns out he is playing on the very same emotional reactions he’s condemning the other side as exhibiting in order to prop up his conspiratorial narrative.

In the end, him trying to brand the position of the so-called “UFO Activists” and UFO/UAP Caucus as being equivalent to Faith and Religion and based only in emotion and brand himself and those he wishes to associate himself with as standing for Reason and Science and all that is rational is utter hogwash.

Many of those Greenstreet refers to as activists were in high positions in our government — positions in which it would make sense that they would know what they claim to know. Assuming they’re truthful, and I assume that those such as Elizondo and Grusch most certainly are, their efforts to push to get the truth out to the public have obviously cost them dearly.

Both Grusch and Elizondo, for instance, torpedoed their careers to try and push for UFO disclosure from outside their former insider positions, and in a legal manner – getting lawyers, going through DOPSR – and it seems abundantly clear that their personal and professional lives have not only taken massive hits as a consequence, but they were intelligent enough to anticipate this. Both have been smeared and lied about multiple times, and in recent days there are even suggestions that the lives of such UFO whistleblowers may be in danger. It’s absurd to interpret their actions as being on behalf of some “UFO religion.”

As for Kirkpatrick himself, as I’ve written previously, there are strong suggestions that he is not being honest with either the public or our elected representatives, constantly straddling the line between being misleading and blatantly lying. Early on, I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and considered me might just be a naive tool, a “useful idiot,” for the Powers That Be, but since the Greenwald revelations, which I’ve covered elsewhere, and in the context of everything I’d previously researched, that naive perception of my own has passed. My working hypothesis is that it’s all deliberate obfuscation and deception.

In addition, while his credentials suggest he’s clearly an intelligent, rational, and empirical individual, he’s also clearly a very emotional one, and often tries to elicit emotions in others to manipulate them into siding with his own stated “empirical” position and “rational” perceptions. His voiced conclusions regarding the UFO phenomenon, the allegations regarding it and those associated with it, and the perhaps not coincidentally similar official conclusions of ARRO, are clearly not rational.

Kirkpatrick’s conspiracy theory is bunk. The guy is a liar and an asshole, and as someone on Reddit who I wish I could credit ingeniously suggested some time ago, one might more accurately refer to him as Jerkpatrick.

The Greenwald Revelations: Drama, Distraction, & UFO Conspiracy.

“When will this be over,
this cold and bitter season?
The government is lying.
The truth is found with reason.”
– Box Car Racer, “All Systems Go.”

“The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.”
― attributed to Noam Chomsky.

Despite my resistance, into this insipid drama I descend, if only in an effort to sort it out. As I do so, however, please tread forward pained with the knowledge that I absolutely fucking hate myself.

In my September 14, 2023 post with an admittedly convoluted title, “UFOs, Congress, and the Pentagon (Kirkpatrick VS Grusch, Enter: Hicks)”, I detailed to the best of my knowledge and ability the drama that had unfolded between UFO whistleblower David Grusch and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who was at the time the Director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). However much I would like to be allergic to such drama, I am human, after all, and in addition, I shamelessly confess that I feel particularly drawn to such drama when it’s inextricably associated with an alleged century-long global conspiracy that, if ultimately disclosed, could entirely upend what our civilization regards as conventional reality. So please excuse that over-half-a-year-old post as well as this one, which serves as a follow-up, for recently more has come to light regarding this drama. As before, I intend to sort through it the best I can.

Before doing so, however, I must introduce another character: Mr. John Greenwald, Jr.

I. John Greenwald, Ken Klippenstein, FOIA, & Signal.

In 1996, when he was fifteen, John Greenwald began submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents relating to UFOs and other interesting subjects. Believing that there should be an online repository for such received government documents, he gave birth to his website, The Black Vault, containing over millions pages of FOIA material. Later, he began a podcast, started writing articles and books, started appearing on television and selling T-shirts, and became a producer and writer for television series regarding UFOs. He has also engaged in non-related pursuits, and still considers The Black Vault a hobby.

Since Grusch came on the scene in early June 2023, Greenwald has made abundantly clear his suspicions regarding him. At least from what I’ve gathered until recently, this primarily stemmed from his interpretation of DOPSR, though it may go beyond that, as I do not frequently view his YouTube channel. On April 18, 2024, it became clear that his distrust of Grusch extended beyond that, however, as that was when Greenewald published an article entitled, “FOIA Documents Reveal AARO’s Authorized and Repeated Attempts to Engage with David Grusch.” As implied by the title, according to Greenewald, this article documents the fact that ARRO, while headed by Kirkpatrick, “made numerous attempts to interview UFO whistleblower David Grusch regarding his claims of U.S. Government engagement with extraterrestrial materials and technologies.”

The documents released to The Black Vault and included in Greenwald’s article included not only a January 8, 2024, Memorandum – that, yes, some suspect was written by Kirkpatrick, though there is no conclusive evidence of this – but also screenshots of relevant Signal text messages and emails. Greenwald also includes his summary of the documented events along with his article.

There is some suspicion with respect to how quickly his FOIA request was responded to, however, as well as what he specifically received.

In Shaun Raviv’s May 6, 2020 article on John Greenwald, “Inside the Black Vault: A FOIA obsessive’s UFO-filled empire,” he probed an interesting question: how long did it typically take a FOIA request to bear fruit? Back in the 90s, Greenwald said, it really wasn’t all that bad:

“Back then, the turnaround time for a request was far quicker than it is now. ‘It’s really night and day,’ he told me recently. It averaged, by Greenewald’s estimate, a couple of months before he heard an answer; today the wait is often measured in years. […] In one case, documents he requested took thirteen years to arrive. That was fine. His patience, he believes, is a large part of what makes the Black Vault valuable.”

This is admirable, broadly-speaking.

In this particular case, however, I find it incredibly interesting, as Greenwald filed this FOIA case (24-F-0266) on November 2, 2023, as previously mentioned, and received it recently, he said in his article, which would be April 2024. In other words, it took roughly half a year. From what can be gathered from the above quote and in many other FOIA cases filed by others, this seems to be a rather prompt response, relatively-speaking. As a matter of fact, it’s suspiciously akin to the unnaturally swift response journalist Ken Klippenstein received with respect to his FOIA request involving Grusch.

According to Klippenstein, in response to Grusch’s Congressional testimony four days previously, he allegedly spoke with his contacts in the DOD and IC. As I wrote in my August 20, 2023 post, “On the Smear Campaign Against David Grusch,” he then apparently “spread a net to receive tips outside his comfort zone, and ultimately received a ‘mosaic’ of general suggestions as to where he should look to substantiate their claims.” At the direction of the suggestions received, he made his FOIA request on July 30, 2023, which was received and responded to by August 1, at which point he was told “it was being forwarded to the Leesburg Police Department in Virginia.” Klippenstein’s article in The Intercept was published nine days later, on August 10.

Given that Klippenstein’s father works for the DOD, I naturally find it relatively easy to believe that he might have been smearing Grusch on behalf of his contacts in the DOD and IC. Greenwald? I’m far less inclined to take that bold and entirely unjustified leap. I think Greenwald provides an invaluable service to not only the UFO community, but towards the efforts of government transparency in general. Particularly in an era in which the mainstream media is failing as what I once felt was its role, which was to serve as the unofficial fourth branch of government composed of watchdogs for the citizenry with respect to the Powers That Be, we desperately need guys like him.

In light of his previous suspicions regarding Grusch, which he was not shy about, and his subsequent FOIA request, however, I think he may have been perceived and subsequently used by The Powers That Be in this particular instance as convenient conduit for data and could be reasonably confident how it would be slanted by him. Given his previous public perceptions, they knew how he would interpret this data and they knew it would serve their agenda, which is to throw shade on Grusch – much like Klippenstein’s article in The Intercept. They assumed the public would focus on Greenwald’s summary, which was hardly an elaboration on the Memorandum, which was a misleading summary of the provided text messages and emails, in my opinion. That said, I’m sure I have my biases as well.

It wasn’t just how relatively swift his FOIA request received a response, either, as I formerly suggested, but how much he received as a result of his request. Even Greenwald said – in his own YouTube breakdown and during his discussion about it with Patrick on the Vetted podcast on April 19 – that he was surprised at the material he got.

Specifically, the aforementioned documents in question provided five screenshots of Signal text messages between Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of ARRO at the time, and Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and current UFO disclosure advocate. The provided text exchange occurs for the most part through June 12-13, followed by a brief text exchange that took place at some undetermined date after the original texts. In his later YouTube breakdown, Greenwald said he has issued FOIA requests for the earlier texts (suggested by a “Thank you” from Mellon at the top of the first screenshot, dated June 11) as well as one rather large text by Mellon which was cut off due to length.

He wasn’t the only one surprised by the Signal text exchange being provided. So was Mellon. My impression of him, which I will get to shortly, was only reinforced when I later learned of his tweet on X, which he posted on April 18, the same day Greenwald published his article:

“To my surprise, parts of a conversation I had with Dr. Kirkpatrick on Signal were recently made public via a FOIA request. These messages simply relate to my effort to facilitate a meeting between AARO and Dave Grusch at Dr. Kirkpatrick’s request. I don’t give out people’s contact info without their consent, but I told Sean I would be happy to convey his request to Dave. My recollection is that Dave was going to consult his attorney and proceed from there. Dave has an excellent attorney, so if he was advised by counsel not to meet with AARO or others I certainly don’t blame him. I was not in a position to judge the legal arguments and issues involving conflicting IC IG, DOJ, and AARO jurisdiction and claims, I was simply trying to facilitate communications in the hope of helping the Congressionally mandated investigation.”

We can also add Lou Elizondo to the community of the wide-eyed, as his response to Mellon’s tweet the same day conveys:

“Chris, I wonder when did DoD authorize Kirkpatrick to use the Signal app for official U.S. business and correspondence? You and I would have been crucified for doing that while we were in the Government. And when did they allow personal identifiable info of U.S. citizens to be released contrary to [the] Privacy Act of 1974? I guess [it’s] more of the same regarding rules that apply ‘to thee, but not to me.’”

According to what Greenwald said in his interview on the Vetted podcast, hosted by Patrick Scott Armstrong, any emails or text messages with a government official are potentially accessible through FOIA. Even so, he reiterated that he “was surprised to see that method of communication” and was uncertain as to whether it was the preference of Kirpatrick or Mellon. He obviously wasn’t aware of the tweets of Mellon or Elizondo at the time. If it was due to anyone’s preference, Kirkpatrick must be the one.

Now, if you’re as ignorant as I was, you might be wondering just what the hell “Signal” is. As I’ve learned, it’s an app that allows end-to-end encrypted communications, which means that only the intended target can receive them. The Signal app apparently also has a feature where you can set it to entirely wipe out (for instance) your text messages after one week. As the final screenshot of text messages reveals, the user had this setting, as between the 12-13 communications and the subsequent brief exchange formerly mentioned the app reminded the user: “You set disappearing message time to 1 week.” The user, as we’ve discerned, was evidently Kirkpatrick. So far as I’m aware, this only implies that it was at that point in his conversation with Mellon that Kirkpatrick implemented that setting, from which we can infer that he felt he had no reason to do so beforehand.

In any case, why would he take screenshots of this conversation at any point? After all, it seems to contradict the very point of the Signal App. Does he perhaps possess some degree of precognitive ability, and this is what inspired him to trap these text messages in photographic amber, as he anticipated they might serve some use in the future?

Maybe I’m missing something here. If I am, please enlighten me in the comments. As for now, this remains incredibly suspicious to me.

II. Mellon in the Middle.

According to Greenewald’s summary, between June 8-13 2023 – which is to say starting just three days after the airing of Coulthart’s NewsNation interview with Grusch and the article in The Debrief was published – the documents provided revealed that “[i]initial contact was made with known associates of Grusch, urging them to have him speak with AARO. These efforts were clarified during dialogues between AARO’s Director and individuals close to Grusch.” The memorandum, it read as follows: “Between June 8th, 2023 and June 13th, 2023, Director, AARO engaged in a dialog with [REDACTED] regarding AARO’s authorities and encouraged [REDACTED] to have Mr. Grusch contact AARO. Note that [REDACTED] is a known close associate of Mr. Grusch and the dialog made it clear that [REDACTED] was in contact with Mr. Grusch.”

As stated earlier, these email communications through the Signal app occurred through Kirkpatrick and Mellon, who is obviously the “REDACTED” referred to above.

As far as my general impression of the conversation itself, Mellon seems very cordial, polite, professional, and fair, whereas Kirkpatrick comes off as an aggressive asshole with a superiority complex. Despite his attempts to project the image of someone who is intimidating and – however intelligent and educated he may be – far more intelligent and educated than he actually is, he fails at every turn.

In any case, in the Signal text conversation, Kirkpatrick says:

“Grusch has made claims that he’s contacted us and we’ve never responded. That’s just not true. He’s also made claims that we don’t have access to investigate his claims. That’s also not true. If I recall correctly you indicated he refused to come talk with us, and you’re quoted as suggesting as such. I’d suggest you emphasize the need to come speak with us. You have the contact email.”

To this, Mellon expresses his confusion:

“Do you have a specific example of Dave claiming he’s contacted AARO and your office refused to respond? That sounds strange as during a conversation yesterday he told me AARO was not a [lawfully] designated recipient of his [whistleblower] info, hence his reason for not contacting AARO. I also do not recall saying Dave refused to come talk to AARO, I certainly did not do so in the Debrief article or my article in Politico and I’ve done no interviews yet about Dave.”

Kirkpatrick then says Grusch made those claims during the June 5 Coulthart interview. Mellon’s confusion was therefore understandable, as Kirkpatrick was either misunderstanding or purposely misrepresenting what Grusch actually said.

During the June 5, 2023 interview with Coulthart, Grusch claimed to have known Kirkpatrick for eight years. In April of 2022, prior to Kirkpatrick becoming the director of ARRO that July, Grusch said he’d had a classified conversation with him dealing with the concerns he had resulting from his discoveries while working at the NGA as the “agency’s co-lead in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and trans-medium object analysis,” as he put it in his July 27, 2023, Congressional testimony, which entailed him “reporting to UAP Task Force (UAPTF) and eventually the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).” According to Grusch, however, Kirkpatrick had failed to follow up with him since that conversation, at least as of July 27, 2023.

Grusch mentioned this conversation he had with Kirkpatrick at least twice directly, and would again do so indirectly. The first occurred during the aforementioned June 5, 2023 NewsNation interview.

“I told him what I was starting to uncover and he didn’t follow up with me,” he said. “He has my phone number. He could’ve called me. I hope he ultimately does the right thing. He should be able to make the same investigative discoveries I did.”

Then there was the Congressional hearing held at the end of the following month. When asked if he knew why Kirkpatrick had failed to follow up with him, Grusch seemed reluctant to assume any motivations.

“Unfortunately, I cannot read his mind,” he responded. “I wish he did. I was happy to give sage counsel to him on where to look when he took the helm of AARO.”

In other words, Grusch never claimed that he contacted ARRO and that they failed to respond, but rather that he had a personal and classified conversation with Kirkpatrick in April of 2022, three months before he became ARRO’s director on July 20, and that, despite having his phone number, Kirkpatrick never got back to him.

The third time it was referenced by Grusch, it was done so indirectly, with Mellon serving as the intermediary, as revealed in those same released text conversations between Mellon and Kirkpatrick. Mellon told Kirkpatrick that Grusch’s “claim about contacting you dates to a conversation the two of you had many months ago on a ‘Tandberg* (sp?) system and that you didn’t follow up after that call. I’m not trying to adjudicate that issue[,] just telling you what he said. Apparently that is what his statement was referring to.”

My immediate curiosity was what a “Tandberg system” was, so I did some Googling. According to John Gans’s May 13, 2019 Wired article, “How Tech Helped Unknown Staffers Change the US Way of War”:

“The Tanderberg Video-Teleconference monitor is sleeker than the average desktop computer but not much bigger. Developed by a Norwegian concern now owned by Cisco Systems, the desktop units — which look like knock-off iMacs, with a handset for dialing — support seamless and, when enabled, classified video-teleconferencing. Although businesses are the predominant market for the machines, they have become almost as common as the US flag in government offices around Washington, at embassies, and in war zones.”

So the alleged April 2022 classified conversation took place on a classified video-conferencing call. One might hope that the confusion would now be cleared up now that Kirkpatrick was informed that Grusch wasn’t talking about ARRO but about Kirpatrick himself. Not so. Actually, this almost seems to make things worse, as Kirkpatrick flat-out denies this conversation ever took place.

“All of that is both absurd and false,” he texts. “I [haven’t] had a conversation with him for years.”

He didn’t let up, either. Over four months later, Kirkpatrick continued to deny this conversation took place, this time in public – though in this case, in a strangely less forceful way. This is revealed on the DOD’s website, where there is a transcript entitled, “AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick Holds an Off-Camera Media Roundtable” dated October 31, 2023, where Kirkpatrick was asked about Grusch directly:

“Q: And so, he also says that he briefed you before you assumed your position in AARO. Have you had the chance to follow up on any of the inquiries that he made or talked to any of the witnesses?

DR. KIRKPATRICK: So, the last time I believe I spoke with Mr. Grusch was when I was in the J2 at U.S. Space Command about five years ago [2018], and it was not on this topic. Now, we have interviewed a whole range of people, over 30 people now. I think we’ve interviewed most of the people that he may have talked to, but we don’t know that. And we have extended an invitation at least four or five times now for him to come in over the last eight months or so and has been declined.”

Two interesting things in what Kirkpatrick said here.

First, as previously stated, he seems to deny the classified conversation Grusch claims they had in April 2022, and in this case he does so in a suspiciously indirect, wishy-washy, and semi-dodgy manner, at least it seems that way to me. Having initially given him the benefit of the doubt, I considered at first that perhaps Kirkpatrick could neither confirm nor deny this conversation legally given its classified status. I quickly found it difficult to swallow this, however. After all, given Grusch’s strict adherence to law and official procedure and the fact that he nonetheless referenced this classified conversation without providing details, it seems reasonable to assume that Kirkpatrick could’ve easily done the same. Then there came the text conversations in Greenwald’s FOIA documents, however, where Kirkpatrick flatly denied that it had taken place. Why deny it so aggressively in what, at the time, he must have presumed to be a private conversation (though, granted, he did screenshot the conversation… ) and then deny it in such a distinctly different and suspiciously qualified statement on public record?

Unless it’s clarified by Grusch or Kirkpatrick, or further materials are declassified and released through FOIA, I suppose this element will remain frustratingly ambiguous.

Now let’s delve into the second claim, which involves Kirkpatrick’s insistence that ARRO has repeatedly “extended an invitation” to Grusch for him to come talk to them and all invitations have been declined. In response to this allegation, Grusch reportedly texted NewsNation’s Brian Entin on November 2, stating in no uncertain terms:

“I have received zero emails or calls from them. That is a lie.”

It should be noted that what Grusch said here is technically true. While ARRO kept urging people surrounding and connected with Grusch to have him contact them, AARO never contacted him directly, at least insofar as the released documents specifically reveal. One should also bear in mind that Grusch’s comment was the only quoted portion of the text conversation between Entin and Grusch. The full text Grusch sent was not provided, nor any text Entin himself might have sent to Grusch, and the precise nature of how the question was worded might add some clarity.

III. Grusch’s Concerns Regarding AARO.

To get back to the June 11-13 text conversation between Mellon and Kirpatrick that Greenwald provided in his article, however, Kirkpatrick’s general vibe seems unmistakable to me. It’s familiar as well. On July 27, 2023 – two weeks after the temporal scope of this text conversation (aside from the short, undated ones at the end, of course) and a mere day after Grusch provided testimony to Congress – Kirkpatrick posted “Hearings and Transparency,” a public LinkedIn post that carried the same emotional atmosphere, though unlike these formerly private texts, clearly checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There, as here, he seems incredibly butt-hurt and frustrated, and the source of this seems to be the reluctance of Grusch to reach out to ARRO. The discussion between Mellon and himself in the texts seems to clearly indicate the concerns that reside at the heart of Grusch’s reluctance to do so as well.

One of Grusch’s concerns was referenced by Kirkpatrick, actually. At one point, previously quoted, he says that Grusch has “made claims that we don’t have access to investigate his claims” and that this was “not true.” To this, Mellon responded that he thought that sounded strange, as during a conversation with Grusch he’d apparently had the previous day he suggested that “AARO was not a [lawfully] designated recipient of his [whistleblower] info, hence his reason for not contacting AARO.” Kirkpatrick returned by insisting that Grusch’s “assertion that we aren’t lawfully empowered is clearly incongruous with the law.”

Is it, though?

During the April 19 Senate Armed Services Subcommittee Hearing on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Senator Jacky Rose asked him if he needed any authorities he didn’t have access to in order to do his job, and before she could even finish, Kirkpatrick blurted out:

“There are some authorities that we need. We are currently operating under Title 10 authorities, but we have good relationships across the other agencies. But having additional authorities for collection, tasking, counter-intelligence – those are all things that would be helpful, yes.”

According to “Case Not Closed: DoD To Review 2019 West Coast UFOs Which Harassed US Warships,” a May 2023 Liberation Times article written by Christopher Sharp: “This means that he can access information from DoD and military operations,” but not access data from the intelligence community (IC), more specifically “from intelligence agencies, intelligence activities, and covert action.” For this, Kirkpatrick and ARRO would require Title 50 authorities, allowing them to access and verify the existence of the programs the whistleblowers that had confided in Grusch were involved in. Without Title 50 authorities, ARRO cannot verify any whistleblower claims, even if they wanted to.

It doesn’t stop there, however. At least according to Matt Ford of The Good Trouble Show – an excellent and dreadfully underrated channel on YouTube, I might add – ARRO and its agents do not have 1811 authority, either, which is to say that while they could at least receive (presumably through their Title 10 authority) certain classified information, they weren’t Special Agents, and consequently “could not conduct search and seizure, they couldn’t make arrests, they couldn’t depose people, they couldn’t subpoena anyone.” Granted, this wasn’t mentioned in the text exchange, nor has it ever been mentioned by Grusch himself, but I find it difficult to believe that, if accurate, Grusch and his attorney wouldn’t be well aware of it.

If indeed ARRO only had Title 10 Authority and neither Title 50 or 1811 authorities, anyone who provided testimony to them regarding necessarily compartmentalized and illicit programs would never have a hope in hell of having those allegations being properly investigated, let alone legally “confirmed” or “verified”. On the contrary, upon receiving this classified data, all ARRO could legally do would be to call up the alleged authorities and politely ask them:

“Hey, do you have any illicit, compartmentalized programs that deal with the collection and back-engineering of recovered craft from Non-Human Intelligences and the acquisition and study of the bodies of their occupants? While we’re at it, do you also have any illicit, compartmentalized programs dealing with a broad cover-up and disinformation campaign against your very own citizens, which might have involved intimidating, discrediting, even murdering individuals who knew too much and/or were threatening to reveal your broad swath of illegal and deeply unethical activities? No? Are you sure? You are? Okey-Dokey artichokie.”

In short, ARRO was utterly impotent, and should we be surprised? ARRO is an office within the Pentagon, which it was in part tasked with investigating, which essentially amounts to demanding the fox guard the hen house. And the guy originally put in charge of this five-sided-body’s feeble appendage was a man that I honestly, originally suspected might just be a useful idiot but now confidently perceive to be a narcissist who knew he could ultimately get what he wanted if only he played the game and served his masters well. It is no wonder that, as Coulthart and others have expressed, many whistleblowers within the overarching Program that Grusch exposed didn’t feel comfortable coming to ARRO and confessing all, but instead went straight to Congress and the Office of the Inspector General.

This is not the only reason suggested in these texts that Grusch was reluctant to reach out to ARRO, however, as Mellon’s response to Kirkpatrick revealed.

In the Signal texts, Mellon conveyed to Kirkpatrick that he had spoken to Grusch and that his first question had been why ARRO has not simply gotten the relevant data from the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), where it was all “[fully] documented to include confirmation the program is real from active, cleared insiders.”

K: “DOJ has to release it since it’s part of a criminal investigation. They haven’t yet. He needs to come tell us separate from his criminal complaint.”

M: “He obviously doesn’t have to do so and he even said “How do I know Sean is not a target of the ongoing criminal investigation[!]”

And there we have the second potential reason why Grusch was reluctant to reach out to ARRO: that Kirkpatrick specifically, and not merely ARRO in general, may be the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. I again refer to my September 14, 2023 post, UFOs, Congress, and the Pentagon (Kirpatrick Vs Grush, Enter: Hicks), where I wrote the following:

“Let’s assume that Grusch had indeed briefed Kirkpatrick in April 2022 on what he’d gathered regarding The Program but that Kirkpatrick had failed to follow up with him. This would have certainly communicated to Grusch that Kirkpatrick either wasn’t taking the allegations seriously, or worse, that he knew these allegations were serious and was intentionally not following up on them — for reasons unknown.

If that were the case, and the reprisals Grusch spoke of happened afterward, why would he bother briefing Kirkpatrick a second time? If we instead assume that the [reprisals] had happened before April 2022 and Grusch had indeed told Kirkpatrick about the issue during the briefing and Kirkpatrick had failed to follow up, his concerns would understandably be even greater than in the first scenario.

Yet Kirkpatrick also said in his LinkedIn letter that “the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” which suggests that either Kirkpatrick or ARRO representatives have since reached out to Grusch – he doesn’t suggest when, but let’s assume for the moment that it was after Grusch went public in early June when he first spoke on how Kirkpatrick hadn’t followed up – and that Grusch has since refused to respond.

Well, I apply the same logic here as before: Why would Grusch be willing to have a conversation with him now, after he had been ignored for so long and Kirkpatrick suddenly had interest in following up after the public heat had been turned up? It’s also possible, and I’d go so far as to say probable, that Grusch’s lawyer – Charles McCullough III, senior partner of the Compass Rose Legal Group in Washington and the first ever Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) – had at this point advised him not to speak with Kirkpatrick.

He’d had his chance, after all, and now higher authorities were taking over the job he refused to do, and any further communications with Kirkpatrick might hinder the investigation.

Again, this is all assumption – I’d certainly like to think it is to some degree educated assumption, but it is an assumption nonetheless. Until more information is made publicly available on this circumstance, this is unfortunately what we’re left with.”

Well, we’ve got more now.

Accepting all that Grusch has conveyed directly and indirectly up to this point as true, or at least true from his perspective, we can surmise that his reluctance to reach out to, much less provide testimony to ARRO, comes down to at least four central concerns, some but not all of which have been covered above.

First, Grusch was not convinced that ARRO had the authorities necessary to hear, let alone properly investigate and verify, his testimony.

Second, even if ARRO were cleared to hear about and even investigate the information about UFO programs regardless as to their classification per se, there may be a loophole Grusch was concerned about, though he never stated it overly, at least to my knowledge. In any case, two journalists, Ross Coulthart (with whom Grusch has clearly been in close communication with both prior to and following the interview) and Micheal Shellenberger – both of whom have spoken with UFO whistleblowers, at least some of whom we can reasonably assume were the same ones who had spoken with Grusch – have mentioned how those whistleblowers tend not to trust ARRO as far as they could throw them. While neither journalist ever expressed specifically why, I suspect it comes down to the aforementioned “fox in the hen house” analogy, and seems to echo a suspicion some in the UFO communities on Reddit have developed. The general hypothesis posits that ARRO serves as the Pentagon’s “honeypot” and “legal trap.” They draw in UFO whistleblowers, make them feel comfortable in divulging classified information regarding UFO programs, and in the process goad them into briefing them about associated but ultimately non-related classified programs that may be necessary to provide context or confirm their allegations. This, as a consequence, could make those whistleblowers legally liable and enable the Gatekeepers to silence them for violating the law.

Even if he didn’t know for certain this was true, Grusch, having been the recipient of over 30 whistleblower claims in the course of his investigations while working for the government, would no doubt be well aware of this suspicion among them, and given what he had to reveal dealt with those accounts, would have been understandably concerned that by talking to ARRO he might also be falling into a trap. This trap would not only lead him to fucking himself, either, but the dozens of others who had confided in him, and were counting on him.

Third, he suspected that Kirkpatrick himself may be the subject of a criminal investigation, perhaps the one relating to his reprisals, and that providing him testimony may compromise that investigation.

The fourth concern requires that we keep in mind the far grander and more personal context here, namely the history between Kirkpatrick and Grusch. Consider that Kirkpatrick and Grusch knew one another for eight years, as Grusch attested, and they did indeed have that classified conversation via a Tanderberg Video-Teleconference call in April of 2022, before Kirkpatrick became the director of ARRO, during which Grusch provided the suspicions he’d developed in the course of his investigations. And despite the fact that Kirpatrick had his personal phone number, he failed to follow up with him – until, suspiciously, just three days after the groundbreaking June 5th, 2023 interview with Coulthart, where Grusch publicly spilled all beans DOPSR would allow regarding those classified concerns. And even then, Kirkpatrick didn’t follow up with him personally, but through an associate, and via text. And not personally, not really, the texts suggest, but as the head of ARRO. And to top it all off, Kirkpatrick flatly denied that the classified April 2022 conversation had ever happened at all.

If anyone of reasonable intelligence were in Grusch’s shoes, I feel confident that they would be incredibly suspicious of the whole situation, especially after having already experienced reprisals, particularly if the suspicion was that those reprisals seemed to have stemmed from (and I’m making an entirely unfounded assumption here, mind you) the concerns formerly conveyed to Kirkpatrick.

I mean, there is paranoia, yes, but there is also reasonable concern. In Grusch’s shoes, within the context of what I would imagine his personal experience must have been at that point – especially after having already experienced reprisals, as I said – I would imagine his noting of the fact that Kirkpatrick was intent on taking this indirect avenue of “reaching out to him” despite knowing how to contact him personally would raise alarm bells — nay, vibrant, neon-blazing, blood-red flags in his mind.

Despite all this, however, Grusch ultimately did reach out to ARRO. He sent them an email in November of 2024.

IV. Did Grusch Stand ARRO Up?

Again, from the Memorandum:

“On November 10th, 2023, Mr. Grusch contacted AARO, at the urging of Congressional Staff Members, and agreed to be interviewed in Arlington, VA on November 14th, 2024 [2023, of course — it seems clear this is a typo]. AARO provided Mr. Grusch with a memorandum from the Director of Special Access Programs, Department of Defense that made it clear AARO is authorized to receive compartmented information (Enclosure 1). Mr. Grusch was also told that AARO would obtain a similar memorandum from the Director, Controlled Access Programs Office, Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

Then Grusch allegedly stood them up, as the next item on the Memorandum documented.

“On November 14th, 2023, Mr. Grusch failed to show at the agreed upon location and time for an interview with AARO. Upon contacting Mr. Grusch, he stated that he is not convinced that AARO is authorized to receive varying levels of classified and sensitive information.”

At 10:34 in the morning, some half an hour after what was apparently the agreed-upon time of the meeting, an anonymous personal emails Grusch to ask:

“I’ve been waiting in the lobby over 30 minutes. Are you showing up?”

On the Vetted podcast, Armstrong and Greenwald both actually cut Grusch some slack in this case, too, it should be noted. As Armstrong says:

“It seemed like some miscommunication and misunderstanding, and to be fair to Grush, Grush did apologize for not showing up to that meeting. I do want to make sure that I read that as well. He did say thank you or I apologize for the confusion this morning about my whereabouts, I should have been more clear in my email on Monday. Because again, from what I could tell that’s what was holding up. He felt like, yes, I agreed to come in at 10 am on this date, but I asked some questions and in his mind those questions didn’t get answered so, therefore that’s why he didn’t show up to that meeting.”

To this, Greenwald responds:

“I think you’re absolutely right. I made sure that his apology was in the article and I made reference to that. I believe, just from a professional courtesy standpoint, I’m glad that he did that. I’m a little surprised though that it went so far as to it being scheduled. Something like this just isn’t, you know, a lunch date between buddies, but rather something pretty important, and it went right down to the wire, where these guys are are are sitting in the lobby for thirty minutes. So I’m kind of surprised at that.”

In his YouTube breakdown on the documents, Greenwald also provides commentary on this incident, justifying his continuing suspicion regarding Grusch’s integrity on its basis:

“If he didn’t set up the meeting and didn’t show, I can understand his concern was really the root cause of that, but how is it that he could go all that way, set up the meeting, the time, and just not show? What happened? Was it under advice of counsel? Maybe, but why wouldn’t he have that advice prior? We know who his attorney is. Charles McCullough, the former ICIG. So clearly he has got an incredibly intelligent attorney behind him. So if it was based on legal counsel, why didn’t he get that counsel prior? Because he was clearly proactively – after declining a bunch of invitations, it seems proactively – now reaching out to AARO and saying, ‘Hey, let’s chat.’”

Before I could finish writing this post, Grusch re-emerged from his months-long radio silence on May 3, 2024 to provide some clarification that confirmed many of my suspicions:

“AARO officially made contact with me in November 2023 as indicated by the email chain in the FOIA release. Prior to this, neither my attorney nor myself had been officially contacted in any way by AARO. To date, my 8 January 2024 email to AARO requesting them to answer my security-related concerns I sent to them via email on 13 November 2023 has gone unanswered. The DoD SAPCO and DNI CAPCO memorandums do not address the variety of serious procedural issues I voiced in November 2023 as it relates to non-UAP related compartmented programs, as well as National Security Council SAPs and CIA Directorate of Operations human intelligence programs. Protecting classified information is a lifelong obligation. To be clear, AARO does not have access to the information I provided to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) and the Congressional Intelligence Committees under the PPD-19 whistleblowing process. I trust in the investigative and law enforcement/criminal referral authorities ICIG has independent of DoD oversight.”

V. Conclusions.

David Grusch is a patriot. Despite having found evidence that an aspect of the US Government has gone rogue and has been engaging in incredibly illicit activities for decades, he seems to perceive this as at best an anomaly, at worst a cancer, and still finds value in this system if the lies and their crimes were properly investigated and exposed to the public in a slow, controlled manner.

I, on the other hand? I am not a patriot. While our system as it presently stands may be better than most if not all others in a relative sense, it desperately requires evolution. Even so, from the very first day I began looking into Grusch, I couldn’t help but respect the guy – and that respect has only been reinforced every step of the way.

His psychology naturally gravitates him towards serving a group, being part of a family, and fighting on behalf of that tribe. And early on, in his eyes, that family was his country, the ol’ US of A. For foreigners, as I’ve gathered, it’s known as The States. In service to his elected family, he has brought all he has in his psychological arsenal to bear, which includes his autism, his clearly high intelligence, his sense of integrity, and his unwavering knowledge of and commitment to following the letter of the law with all its elaborate nuances and intricacies. His military and civilian careers provide testament to this, as does his broad clearances – as does his ultimate choice to retire early to become a whistleblower.

As previously mentioned, while performing his duties he amassed sufficient evidence that a sector of the US government had gone rogue. Not only were they breaking the law in general, they had been dodging proper Congressional oversight, and he felt it his responsibility – damned be the personal cost – to inform the proper authorities, including inspector generals and the Congress, and after running what he wished to convey through DOPSR, bring this knowledge to the public so far as he could through legal means, and rally a crowd to rectify this illicit and immoral travesty.

In tandem with this, I’ve increasingly come to suspect there was an impulse to expand not only his sense of family to the whole of humanity, but to expand the whole of humanity’s sense of family to itself – to a species-wide global consciousness. After all, what he had discovered in his duties suggested that we were not alone as an intelligent, technological, planetary species, and that rogue sectors within world governments knew damn well that this was the case, and that if publicly known this knowledge might inspire cohesion amongst increasingly polarized human tribes, and tribes within tribes, in the light of a more cosmic perspective.

If what he desires to disclose proves to be the truth – and it should be clear that I, for one, am pretty much sold at this point – and he helps to generate its ultimate disclosure, I feel certain he wouldn’t want to be seen as a hero. And I get that perspective. But if he isn’t ultimately recognized as a key figure in shaping not only the history of our country but of human history, we have done our descendants a great disservice.

Not as great a disservice as we would do them if we were to continue to allow the Powers That Be – a small number of arrogant, power-hungry, unethical tyrants within the US Government, and likely other governments throughout the globe – to continue propagating the greatest of deceptions and the most heinous of crimes, however.

ARRO is just another tool for them to brainwash us all, Just like the disinformation campaign Robertson Panel recommended, just like Project Bluebook ended up, undoubtedly aiming for the former success of the Condon Report, they want to continue to cover up, misinform, disinform, and as I think this case demonstrates, fucking distract the populace with respect to the truth – and demoralize, stigmatize, bribe, and, if necessary, eliminate those who fight to bring it to light, all to convince the populace:

“There’s nothing to see here, folks.”

Bullshit. There is so, so much more to see here…

Physical Encounters With Mantis Aliens, Part II: Urban Encounters.

Physical encounters with humanoid Mantis beings don’t only occur in the wilderness, however, but also take place in more urban settings such as the yard, the home, and even the bedroom, and they not only echo the patterns found in the wilderness encounters but build upon them.

While my own, relatively recent experience may constitute such an encounter, the fact of the matter is that I have yet to have a conscious recollection of seeing a Mantis face-to-face. Consequently, that encounter and the earlier ones, though only strongly implied to me, don’t justify more than a mere brief mention here. I do know two people, however – two people, I should add, who do not know one another – who have both explained to me privately that they’ve had direct encounters with them. And for what it’s worth, I don’t for a second doubt the sincerity of either of them.

One was a fascinating, higher classmate from high school who I wish I would have had the courage to get to know better, whom I’ll call Ted, though I only learned of his experience through social media nearly a decade and a half after I had graduated. He told me this in the wake of my September 9, 2011 incident, specifically after I posted on social media something vague regarding it. I don’t recall how much detail Ted provided publically, but I messaged him to glean more detail, and the experience he was gracious enough to describe to me was most interesting. It was a profound experience, he said, and he remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Evidently, at some point in 1999, he awoke to find a 7-foot-tall Mantis being in a hooded robe holding him down as it made a sound akin to “someone running a finger down the teeth of a comb.” This is a fairly good description of the “clicking” sound described by others.

After some research, he came across similar accounts, which led him to believe it had indeed happened. Ted considered me fortunate for having had so many experiences with the aliens, though I sincerely believed he had lifelong experiences himself but was merely unable to recall them. He added that he believes that one day there will be a “mass awakening.” Though I don’t think I asked for elaboration, I certainly wish now more than ever I would have.

Just another item on an absurdly long list of regrets in my life.

The other individual is a close friend I first met when he was a coworker many years ago, and here I’ll call him Moe, as I have elsewhere. He has been sharing his strange experiences with me over the years. He began having experiences with an extremely tall and slender mantis entity in his house that seemed associated with a sort of “leaf-crunching” or “hissing” noise in July of 2016. Perhaps his most profound encounter, which I documented but to my utter fucking frustration I have been unable to find, dealt with him seeing the Mantis in his house, though it was cloaked in a manner akin, as he described it, to the alien in the movie The Predator. Much like Ted, he then began research and found disturbing associations between his encounters and those of others.

For all I know, they may have both explored many of the very anecdotes I’ve been exploring and will continue to explore now.

After the Hackettstown Mantis encounters he had previously posted (and which I detailed previously), Lon Strickler received some Mantis encounter accounts directly. These were not encounters in the woodlands, but as with the case of my two friends, occurred within the home. One such story was a bedroom encounter that could have either involved invisibility, as we’ve previously heard, or involved the phenomenon of lost or “missing time,” an experience common in UFO and alien encounters, and which seems to imply amnesia, perhaps induced through the aforementioned telepathic hypnosis.

Regardless, in April of 2016, a 65-year-old woman wrote Strickler to share an incident that occurred to her in late October or early November of 1993, when she lived in a two-story house in Seattle, Washington. She and her husband had been asleep beside one another in bed when, at around two in the morning, she had rolled over, bringing the open bedroom doorway, lit by the hallway light, clearly into view – where she saw a tall, robed figure standing. Sitting up in bed and grabbing her husband’s arm, she screamed that there was something in the doorway, and he shot up out of bed, grabbing the baseball bat he kept next to the headboard, ready to defend her, but as soon as she had screamed, she said, the figure was “gone, just gone.”

Afterward, she was understandably hysterical. After calming her down, he checked the house but found it secure and devoid of intruders. While apologetic to her husband for waking him like she had, she knew she had seen something and found it difficult to sleep, fearing the figure might return. Feeling as though she was losing her mind, she phoned her doctor and described the incident to him in tears, and the explanation he offered, at least as she explained it, sounded as if he was suggesting it was stress-induced sleep paralysis. He gave her a prescription and recommended she try and put it out of her mind, but she confessed that she never could.

Months later, she sat down and tried to let herself remember what she’d seen in clarity that night and draw it as best as she could. While some details jumped out at her, others were strangely vague, but the resulting drawing was disturbing enough that she immediately delivered it to the trash can. What she described having seen, and having subsequently drawn, however, was a robed humanoid with an insect-like head, enormous eyes, and only the vaguest impression of two slits where a nose would be. She had no recollection of a mouth.

“I remember in detail two nub-like things on its head,” she wrote, but only the vaguest sense of antennae sprouting out of them. It had similarly insect-like arms coming out of the slits on the side of the robe, which she recalled clearly enough, and while she recalled it having hands, she was unable to recall what they looked like or what they were doing. Given the vague nature of some aspects of what she recalled, she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t real, but it nonetheless continued to plague her, and she remains convinced she did indeed see something in the doorway that night.

In 2016 she read Strickler’s book, Cryptid Encounters, and found that others have described such Mantis beings, a creature she had never heard of. Reading these accounts, she confessed, “sent a volt of electricity through my body like an adrenaline rush and I got butterflies in my stomach. Everyone knows about Greys thanks to the movies – never seen one – never want to — but if other people had seen the big insect thing, maybe there really was something in my doorway that night. If other people have seen this thing, maybe they will feel better if they know I saw it too, even if only for a few seconds.”

There was a somewhat similar case provided to MUFON on August 15, 2014, which occurred on May 31, 2012, where an individual from Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, also had a disturbing bedroom experience. The individual awoke amid sleep and felt an intense, painful tingling sensation that traveled down and back up his body, from his head down to his feet, though he was ultimately capable of screaming and sitting up in bed. Upon doing so, he saw an eight to nine-foot-tall entity resembling a Gray alien that had backward “legs like a grasshopper” in his bedroom, who was “walking towards my bedroom patio door but stopped and looked at me” as if he was in a hurry, “like I did something wrong“ and “almost like he was angry” or frustrated that he had been seen. He was able to calculate its height because he knew the height of the television above his fireplace. Then, as he explained it, the creature was “just gone and I snapped up again in bed sweating and heart raising.” He adds “I’m positive it was not a dream.”

In this last encounter, we again sense that the Mantis being wasn’t the least bit happy it had been seen, a familiar feature also present in many Wilderness cases. In these last two stories, however, the same issue is raised. Thanks to a variety of cases, it’s clear that these Mantis beings can both cloak themselves as well as induce a sort of amnesia, the last of which is a consistent element in abduction cases. In the two cases above, it’s difficult to determine whether the Mantis beings in question utilized their cloaking abilities or whether they induced amnesia, resulting in the experience of missing time. Other reported experiences aren’t at all ambiguous, however, as factors are present that allow them to note the temporal gap.

One such case was a bedroom encounter provided on the Phantoms and Monsters website and entitled, “Tall ‘Mantis’ Guardian Angels?” It derived from a comment on one of the videos posted my one of my favorite YouTube channels, the aforementioned Beyond Creepy, and while the specific video is not referenced, the comment came from one Win Nys.

The experience occurred in July of 2013 in central Pennsylvania, where Nys, who had been injured, emphasized that she was neither drinking nor on any medication but merely “resting, trying to heal” in her bedroom. While she doesn’t describe how the experience came about save for that “they came through the air and walls”, she reportedly found four beings in her room that she described in a general way as “tall white angels that look like bugs.” More specifically, she described them as being roughly “8 to 9.5 feet tall,” though she didn’t know their “exact height because they had to duck” to avoid hitting the ceiling. They were “extremely skinny but muscular” with off-white skin and “extremely large, protruding black eyes which wrapped around the head.” She felt an overwhelming sense of “love and compassion” from them, she wrote, akin to how a parent might feel toward their child. One of them telepathically communicated to her, as she conveyed it, in this way:

“Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. She can see us. She can see us. Don’t be scared.”

“It was telling me this in my brain,” she wrote. “I was looking (and listening) at them around my room. The whole experience only lasted a few minutes before I blacked out.”

Upon telling her mother of the experience the following morning, her mother said that she had prayed for guardian angels to be around her, and this apparently served as confirmation to her that these Mantis beings were indeed angels. When she told her husband, he warned her not to speak of it again, lest they commit her to an asylum. When she eventually told a friend of hers in confidence she learned of a girl in her town who had been committed to a hospital because she had seen aliens, and so in fear had stopped speaking about the experience for years.

She recently began searching for similar stories online, however, but it had been difficult for her to find “stories about tall bug-like entities,” she said. “And, yeah, they are telepathic. They were as real as the glass of water I was holding. Never seen a UFO and I have never been abducted. Never a believer until that night.”

While she insists she’s never been abducted, I suspect her experience of having “blacked out” strongly indicates otherwise.

Another missing time episode involving a Mantis was posted on Reddit on January 3, 2021, by a woman who only identified herself as HC, and her account was entitled “6 Ft Tall ‘Mantis’ Entity Encountered Outside of Fillmore, NY Home”. The experience described had occurred in Fillmore, New York, just before midnight on June 22, 2018, while she was in the shed to find some privacy, to escape from the children and dogs in the house and to use the WiFI through her phone. As she describes it:

“While I was watching from inside the shed I noticed something an hour after I was in there. I heard [the sound of] movement[,] of something shuffling in the tall grass. I thought it was a deer until my cat started growling and staring at the shed door. When I scanned the tree line and bushes with my big LED light I thought I saw a head pop up into the dark. I pretended I didn’t see it and spotted my light to the left and heard it quickly get closer. I flashed the light back fast and it was very close, now about 30 feet in front of me. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever but I know it was probably only 20 seconds or so. I was so scared I couldn’t move. Also[,] it didn’t move as I watched it.

I noticed its limbs and features while we stared at each other. It was greenish-grey with very big mantis eyes. The skin was smooth and had broad shoulders, but as you followed down it got skinny. The eyebrow ridge stuck out with a wide head with an upward slant. Its eyes reflected green. There were light green flecks that shown yellow and orange from my light. It was over 6 [feet] tall.

I suddenly got the feeling that it was going to grab me, so I slammed the shed door and turned and ran to my house. When I got in I told my husband about what I had seen, I noticed that a whole hour [passed] by it was now a few minutes after 1 AM. I know I didn’t look at this thing for an hour. My husband came out with me with his gun but it was gone.

I was really scared after that. I will not be out at night anymore. I always feel like I’m being watched. I started to look into UFOs and abductions. I had never read up on this before my experience and now believe I was abducted, but have no memory of it.”

Another tale of missing time is provided by Strickler and comes from “CMB,” a 42-year-old woman who described an incident that occurred in either 1976 or the following year, when she was three or four and lived in Mr. Hicums Trailer Park in Greenville, South Carolina. And the incident, she emphasizes, has been confirmed by her mother.

And for the record, this might be the most disturbing physical encounter I have yet to document here.

She was the youngest of her parent’s three children, and when she was three or four years of age, she had been playing either tag or hide-and-seek outside one warm, sunny day with her two older brothers. As she bolted around the back of the trailer to hide, she almost ran into a creature standing next to their propane tank that she simply could not, at the time, comprehend. She stood there frozen, feeling as if the breath had been taken out of her. At the time, she said, she thought it was a giant insect – more specifically, perhaps in retrospect, she described it as resembling a humanoid praying mantis that was taller than her father. In any case, she stood there staring at this creature as it stared back at her until suddenly, all was a blank.

The next thing she remembered, she came running into their trailer screaming about a burning pain between her legs, and her mother was so concerned that she pulled down her underwear and shorts, but upon inspection found that nothing seemed to be wrong. She then cried herself to sleep.

Since then, the incident has always hung with her, haunting her from the back of her mind. After the incident, she mentions having developed a fear of monsters and suffering from a great deal of nightmares, though none of it seemed directly related to what she recalled having seen. Eerily, in this context she also references the fact that she had never been able to give birth naturally, and has always had to have C-sections, strongly implying that she feels at some level that this fact may be related to her experience.

As she grew older she had always reasoned that perhaps there had been a gas leak in the trailer, which makes little sense to me, as she had had this experience outside. A few years before her letter, however, she had caught wind of a UFO sighting reported by the Highland, Illinois police department – an area to which her family had moved when she was seven, before moving back to South Carolina when she was ten. This inspired her to tell her husband about her Mantis experience, and though they both laughed about it, she nonetheless insisted to him that it did indeed happen. The conversation suddenly inspired her curiosity to such a degree that she did a Google search for “praying mantis aliens,” and the results, she explained – and in particular, the images – felt like a punch to the fucking gut. It was exactly what she remembered having seen as a child. Her husband was shocked as well. In retrospect, she seems understandably concerned about the gap in memory she had between her eye contact with the mantis creature and her subsequent sprint into the trailer.

As in previous accounts, here we find that CMB’s experience involves a sudden experiential shift upon meeting the eyes of the Mantis being, though in this case, it wasn’t invisibility, but clearly involved amnesia, producing the experience of missing time.

To reinforce the notion that these Mantis beings display both the ability to cloak themselves as well as induce amnesia, there are incidents in which both abilities are blatantly displayed within the context of the same narrative.

One such tale comes from Dan, who grew up in the Medford area of New Jersey but lived in Missouri at the time of the letter. At the time of the experience he wrote Strickler to provide, however, it was around 1971 or the following year, when he was two years old and his family had moved into the third-story of the Top of the Hill apartments in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. He recalls having been on the sidewalk outside of the building one night, uncertain as to how he had gotten there, though certainly not of his own volition. Three Manits beings stood beside him, though he wasn’t afraid at all, but rather felt comfort that he was among friends. He recalls having been asked a question, though cannot for the life of him recall what it was. While he knows more took place, as the memories he recalled were segmented, all he remembers is watching them disappear as he “felt a warm assurance of friendship.”

The next thing he remembered, his mother rushed out of the door of the apartment building in a panic and picked him up. This memory, he said, always stood out, and it always puzzled him why. When he recently read the encounter Strickler published in the post, “The Musconetcong River ‘Mantis Man’,” he said, he “was shocked to find accounts of an exact description of what I saw as a small child.”

Dan’s encounter was distinct from the first two encounters I described of the Muscenetcong Mantis Man, as he was neither bearing the “whatever” attitude nor traumatized by the experience, but the extreme opposite trauma – he felt comfort, friendship, and warmth. While Dan’s experience described the “cloaking” ability described in the first encounter with the Muscenetcong Mantis Man, his tale also includes the element of lost or “missing time” described by Nys, HC, and CMB.

While all previous individual accounts that I’ve stumbled across who’ve had encounters with these Mantis beings report a single encounter, this is not always the case. Between August and September 2003, the website UFO*BC began communicating with one Jim G, a self-employed professional sound engineer who lived in a small town on the outskirts of London. While he claimed to have had strange experiences throughout his life, such as UFO encounters and OBEs, it was his most recent experiences, which began in April of 2001, that finally inspired him to reach out – and which have the most relevance here. Some of these encounters involved other types of entities, but it is the Mantis encounters that will be focused on here.

He awoke at roughly 2:30 one morning that April to find himself paralyzed with two strange beings beside his bed. One was a seven-foot-tall mantis being with a pointed head, large eyes, and long forearms that moved in a jerking fashion, and who had to bend its neck to avoid hitting the ceiling (much as reported by Nys). The other, shorter being was closer, crouching by his bed, and had black, leathery, reflective skin. It wore a hooded cloak, and beneath that armor that included a metallic breastplate. In retrospect, he seemed to remember that they had been doing something with his legs but could remember little detail concerning that. Thinking that he must still be in the grips of some strange and vivid dream, he closed his eyes, but upon opening them again, the figures remained.

Jim deduced that the Mantis was the one in charge as the smaller one turned to the mantis as if seeking instruction. In response, the Mantis turned back to him and made – you guessed it – “a series of high-pitched clicking sounds.” The Mantis then bent its upper body so that it was positioned over where Jim lay on his bed and, from a long, needle-like object held in his hand, shot a green, laser-like light directly into his right eye, which allowed him to see the veins in his eye. It was painful and, though he attempted to scream, nothing came out. Closing his eyes, he then felt something being jabbed into his skull. In a panic, his mind racing, he heard a “whooshing sound.”

The next time he opened his eyes, they were gone, but he remained shaken and was unable to sleep. He spent the next day in bed feeling, as he put it as if he had just undergone a major operation. That day he did manage to do an internet search on “mantis-type aliens,” though nothing came up, which in turn helped him convince himself that it was indeed just a fucked up dream. Far later he came across a drawing on alley.com by artist J. Westwood which depicted a mantis being holding a needle-like object. He panicked, as this was exactly what he had seen. On the same site, he also found a drawing by Sylvia Rayner which she dubbed the dark entity, and it was the spitting image of the shorter, cloaked being.

Ever since that incident, he outlined what had become a typical scenario for him which tended to happen roughly twice a week, though there were often troughs of inactivity that might last for perhaps a month. At night, just as he was about to slip into sleep, he would begin hearing that Mantis clicking inside of his head. Within a few minutes, he would again hear the clicking, but now it was coming from inside his bedroom, and he came to recognize this as a sign that within about ten minutes he would be fast asleep. Through his heavy eyelids, he would see a red glow on his far wall and tall, shadowy figures moving out of the light and approaching him. Despite his best efforts, he would soon be out like a light. The following morning he would wake up feeling just as he did following the original incident, and in addition would often find himself covered in bruises, on at least one occasion in the shape of a large hand.

His next encounter with a Mantis being, which he believed to be the same one he encountered in his initial encounter, occurred on December 18, as he was spending the night in the spare bedroom of his brother’s house. He suddenly found himself immobilized and acutely awake with the clicking sound in his head, and in response, he screamed and cussed, though none of it was expressed verbally. Managing to look towards the bottom of the bed, he saw the Mantis, and at the sight of it felt “waves of fear” washing over him, the terror “completely overwhelming.”

Unlike the previous occasion, he was able to study it in detail. Wearing what he described as a long and dark robe, the Mantis was over seven feet tall, bony, and vaguely humanoid in appearance with skin that “was liquidly looking, like oil shimmering in the sun.” It had a triangular-shaped, gray-black head reminiscent of a skull with round, bulbous, black eyes. The head was attached to the body by a long, black, snake-like neck.

“The arms were extremely long with multiple joints extending out in a messiah pose,” he wrote, with its “forearms … bent forward longer than the rest of the arm.”

It then ran in a “jerky and fast” manner, making “a clunking sound” as it did so, and exited directly through the wall of the bedroom, leaving “a strange red glow” on the wall in the wake, and a door on the same wall rattled at high volume, apparently prompting the neighbor – adjacent to the wall – to call out in annoyance.”

While Jim G had a vast array of subsequent experiences, they fall into a category that exceeds the limitations of the wilderness and urban encounters we’ve thus far explored, though such experiences are certainly implied in many of the “blackouts,” “amnesia,” or “missing time” aspects of the formerly described urban experiences.

In other words, this involves experiences that fall into the category popularly referred to as alien abduction, which is our final category of Mantis encounters in the realm of the physical.

Turner’s Explosive Valentine, Elizondo’s Briefing, and the Edging of UFO Disclosure.

On Valentine’s Day, 2024, Representative Mike Turner (R-AL, 3rd District), the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence, delivered what constituted a collective heart attack with a public statement issued through the committee – a statement that many media recipients considered cryptic, vague, and utterly bizarre. It read, in full:

“Today, the House Select Committee on Intelligence has made available to all Members of Congress information concerning a serious national security threat. I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat.”

The sounding of an alarm coupled with such ambiguity made this announcement rather pants-shitting, of course, and unsurprisingly, the default assumption of some of those in UFO circles was that the threat in question might have to do with UFOs — which I’m sorry, was a crazy notion.

After all, Turner is the same crooked asshat who – along with two other Mikes, namely Representatives Rogers and Johnson, as well as the shellless, potentially soulless, bipedal and sociopathic turtle-being with abrupt and unpredictable psychophysical commercial breaks, Mitch McConnel – pinned down and ruthlessly gutted the Schumer Amendment, which would have paved the most ethical and reasonable path towards controlled disclosure of what the US government knows regarding the UFO phenomenon. That he would have suddenly pulled a 180 and decided that The People had a right to know is absurd.

I mean, there is optimism and there is insanity.

After being briefed in a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) on the nature of this threat, many members of Congress – on both sides of the aisle, it should be emphasized – seemed to convey that it was all blown out of proportion. They came forward to assure the public that while the threat was certainly serious, as many threats in our modern world unfortunately are, there was certainly no immediate call for alarm. They couldn’t offer details or even generalities, of course, as they were legally bound to zipped lips, but leaks to the press swiftly sprouted.

As journalist Tom Rogan pointed out, Turner knew full well that there would be leaks once the House was briefed, too.

In any case, it came out that Turner’s statement referenced a Russian, nuclear-capable anti-satellite weapon with the ability to disrupt US communications – but that this weapon not only had yet to be deployed but was still under fucking development.

So why the bloody hell would Turner sound the alarm? Fellow Republican Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN, 5th District) had a good idea. In response to Turner’s announcement, he wrote to aforementioned House Speaker Mike Johnson:

“This revelation by the Chairman was done with a reckless disregard of the implications and consequences said information would have on geopolitics, domestic and foreign markets, or the well-being and psyche of the American people. In hindsight, it has become clear that the intent was not to ensure the safety of our homeland and the American people, but rather to ensure additional funding for Ukraine and passage of an unreformed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”

As Tom Rogan explains in greater detail:

“… the Washington Post reports that intelligence on the Russian system was gathered via Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — I understand from sources that other collection methods were also involved — which allows for warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S. While government agencies have reformed their use of FISA 702 in response to controversy over their prior use of it to surveil Americans, many in Congress oppose reauthorizing it. Turner, however, strongly supports the program’s reauthorization, which faces a House vote in the near future. Turner likely sees his disclosure of the Russian anti-satellite system as a means of bolstering support for FISA 702 in Congress.

Yet Turner had another possible reason to disclose the Russian program: securing new funding for defense industry interests in Ohio’s 10th Congressional District.

Turner is renowned in Congress and by Washington lobbyists — the CGCN Group is one of his top donors in the 2024 election cycle — for his securing of patronage for business interests in his district. And these interests would appear to be well-placed to benefit from Turner’s disclosure of the new Russian system. The defense firms Leidos, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris, and Northrop Grumman are all top donors to Turner in the 2024 election cycle.”

As absurd as the assumptions of some of those in the aforementioned UFO circles might have been, there may have been some association between it and the UFO subject after all – at the very least, a coincidental one.

While reportedly underwhelmed by the issue to which Turner threw unprecedented alarm bells, Republican members of Congress seemed more concerned, now more than ever, regarding another subject they had been briefed on that very day, the 14th of February.

According to Liberation Times, Republican members of Congress were briefed by five individuals at the Republican Conservative Opportunity Society regarding the UFO issue. These individuals included Lou Elizondo, former director of AATIP (who has not commented on the matter), as well as (2) “a former member of the UAP Task Force and decorated uniformed military officer,” (3) “a former military fighter pilot and eyewitness to a UAP sighting,” (4) ”a former DARPA scientist,” and (5)“a former political advisor within the Obama administration”, which, while it is, of course, unconfirmed, one can’t help but suspect is John Podesta, a persistent champion for UFO disclosure.

That Turner’s statement and the Elizondo briefing occurred on the same day was not the only apparently coincidental element between the two issues, however. As pointed out by Liberation Times:

“According to sources familiar with the matter, the wording of Representative Turner’s public statement coincidentally and ironically mirrored the sentiments conveyed by individuals who had received the briefing from Elizondo that same day … “

Their concern involved not only the issue of classification, which constipated their ability to discuss the national security implications of the issue, but stretched far beyond. Why did Turner issue that announcement on this exact day? Might it have additionally been used to distract the media from the Elizondo Briefing? If so, it appears to have worked, as the media – our alleged unofficial fourth branch of government, the supposed watchdogs there to keep an eye on the goings-on and provide the necessary data to the public at large so we can make educated decisions in what is ostensibly a representative democracy – were for the most part silent on the matter.

According to Journalist and founder of Ask A Pol, Matt Laslo, only they and their NewsNation colleagues were present outside the SCIF at the House of Representatives that morning. They both caught Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC), who was on his way out of the SCIF, with NewsNation first inquiring about the classified material Turner made available to the House regarding the not-so-immediate threat.

Laslo then questioned him on the briefing, with Norman confirming that Elizondo had confirmed to them the validity of the earlier information Grusch had provided them – which is to say, though he didn’t state it specifically, the existence of illegal programs that retrieve and attempt to reverse-engineer craft of non-human origin. Specifically, however, Norman said that “we’ve got a real problem” and that “this isn’t playland” and “this isn’t political” for “this affects all of us, young and old.”

Laslo also interviewed Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO). His reaction to Turner’s classified data regarding his warning was that he was more afraid of the consequences he would suffer as a result of releasing the information disclosed in the SCIF than he was regarding the actual information disclosed. While he thought the American people should know, he couldn’t say anything.

Interestingly enough, he then immediately shifted gears and mentioned, without prompting: “We did have Lue Elizondo today.” When asked if he had any takeaways, he said, “Those guys, from what they presented — of course, this is not in a secure setting, they’re not under oath — but what they presented is very similar to what David Grusch was presenting.”

“Yeah?” Laslo replied. “Why not hear from more of those folks?”

“I’m working on it,” he replied. “Right now, I’ve got something up my sleeve. I don’t want to talk. I’ll keep you informed, because I got a big thing that I’m gonna announce.”

“Nice. UAP related?”

“Yes,” he said.

So it would appear that the push for disclosure is ongoing after all, fueling my ever-cautious optimism. In addition, though part of Turner’s objective in issuing his warning may or may not have been to distract from this briefing, whatever the length of his motivations, it seems to have blown up in his face. In fact, this asinine act may end up being helpful for UFO disclosure and other issues.

In the aforementioned letter Ogles wrote to Johnson, he called Turner’s announcement:

“… poor judgement at a minimum and a complete breach of trust influenced by the pursuit of a political agenda at a maximum. Mr. Speaker, it is with great reticence that I formally request an inquiry as to any impact the Chairman’s statements may have had on U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Furthermore, as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence is solely appointed by the Speaker and under your direct purview, should the Chairman retain his post, you have a duty and an obligation to reassure this body (Congress) and the American people that the processes of the Intelligence Committee have not been corrupted by the very institutions they are charged with monitoring.”

That corruption is clearly present, too, and most certainly involves the gatekeepers of secrets regarding the UFO data and material, so there’s reason for cautious optimism there, too.

I must add that everything since the revelations of Grush since June of last year untl now brings to mind a clip I saw on YouTube from a relatively recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast featuring his friend and fellow comedian, Duncan Trussel. In the clip, Trussel equated the recent news cycles regarding UFO disclosure as akin to the practice of Edging, a sexual practice that involved stimulating sexual feelings until just before climax, then cooling off before repeating this process of approach-and-retreat. It both prolongs the build-up and intensifies the inevitable climax.

Well, we’ve certainly experienced the approach-and-retreat part. I just hope to see the load of disclosure blown before I die.

***

SOURCES:

https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/future-of-representative-turner-in-question-after-rare-public-statement-on-national-security-threat-later-deemed-underwhelming-amid-continued-dismissal-of-ufos-despite-growing-alarm-within-congress

https://www.askapol.com/p/sneak-peek-rep-norman-says-lue-elizondo

https://www.askapol.com/p/exclusive-rep-luna-this-has-been

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-security-threat-house-intelligence-mike-turner-biden/

https://rollcall.com/2024/02/15/ultraconservatives-criticize-turner-over-threat-statement/

Why did Mike Turner disclose Russia’s anti-satellite weapon?

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Empathy With the Enemy (Of Elizondo & Motivations).

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

It has for some time seemed abundantly clear to me that there are two ways in which people experience and consequently use the word “empathy.”

The first and lesser form of empathy merely requires, as it is often expressed, that one “walks a mile in another’s shoes” within the realm of their mind, and while this can certainly help increase one’s understanding of another’s circumstances to some degree, in the end, it merely requires imagining how you, as the specific, unique individual you undoubtedly are, would react in their particular circumstances.

A far deeper form of empathy not only extends beyond your own mere personal experience, as in the first form, but your own, personal ego as well. You not only “walk a mile in their shoes,” in other words, but walk that mile devoid of your personality, psychologically immersed, to the extent to which you are able, in the skin, thoughts, emotions, and historical context of the other.

You don’t walk their mile as you would, but walk their mile as they would.

That’s a far more difficult task, especially when you’ve christened the Other as your enemy, but if your aim is truly greater understanding, you’ll inevitably rise to the challenge.

In that spirit, I now reference a clip from the Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal podcast where Lue Elizondo, former military officer and former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), provides a hypothetical scenario that could potentially help explain one of the reasons behind the UFO cover-up, but he stressed more than once that it required viewing the narrative he was offering strictly through the lens of national security.

More specifically, he asks you to imagine you are a hypothetical General from the 1950s or 1960s, where it’s your job to protect the USA at the height of the Cold War. Suddenly, UFOs enter the scene, representing a technology “that can outperform anything you have” in your arsenal, rending all of your defense capabilities in this context “rather ineffective from a national security perspective.” In other words, any demands or warnings you issue to them through radio, any attempts made at shooting them down – all of it ultimately failed, and throughout it all, their intentions remained unclear.

As Elizondo said, given these circumstances, there are only three possibilities as to the nature of their intentions, at least from the national security lens through which you’re viewing all of this UFO behavior: (1) they’re benevolent, (2) they’re malevolent, or (3) they’re just as we are, with the capacity to be both either benevolent or malevolent, yet are just here to observe us. In any case, as this hypothetical General, it seems clear to you that they are engaging in ISR, which in the typical, acronym-fetishizing military-speak stands for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. Elizondo added that “some may look at that as what we call preparation of the battlefield,” where you gather intelligence regarding the environment and strategies of the enemy in preparation for a potential attack.

This is where I get a bit confused with the narrative Elizondo is weaving. At this point, knowing what we know, how on earth could we accept as a possibility that they’re merely here to observe us? Elizondo himself stated that, as the General, it is clear to you that the non-human intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon is engaging in ISR, or preparation for a potential battlefield. Even if one were to cough it up to being merely a precaution, nothing about that screams a motive of simple observation to me. On the contrary, it seems to suggest that in some way, shape, or form, we constitute a threat, and they want to know how to deal with that threat if it comes to pass that battle is necessary.

That they consider us potential adversaries is strongly suggested in their ISR since as early as the Second World War and continues to this day. The way they have engaged with our military aircraft, playing cat-and-mouse, chicken, hide and seek, and peekaboo: there are, so far as my feeble mind can manage to conceive, only two motivations for such behavior, and that is to ascertain our technological capabilities, which falls into military intelligence, and to demonstrate their technological superiority, which is more primal – like an “alpha” providing a show of strength as a warning to those who might elect to challenge that superiority. A high-tech version of puffing out simian chests and beating on that chest with their fists while crying out with a mighty fucking roar. For what it’s worth, I think both help explain this behavior.

It extends far beyond the engagement of UFOs with earthly, military aircraft. Like an “alpha,” they routinely enter another’s territory or personal space. As the thoroughly researched book UFOs & Nukes by Robert Hastings makes clear, a lot of this is also focused on close surveillance of and interference with our nuclear capabilities. They enter restricted airspace. They have hovered above missile silos. They have demonstrated their ability to both prevent and trigger our ability to launch nuclear missiles. In essence, they have demonstrated their ability to both prevent and instigate a global thermal nuclear war.

Again, they are either testing our capabilities, demonstrating their superiority, or both — and likely both.

So there aren’t three possibilities regarding their intentions, as Elizondo stated, but only two: they are what we would consider to be benevolent, or what we, from our perspective, would consider malevolent.

Mere observation? It’s off the table.

“And let’s just say, hypothetically, there’s a 10% chance that these things are bad, or one day they’re going to come here in force,” Elizondo went on, adding that this may perhaps occur some “fifty years from now.”

So why not disclose it all to the public?

He goes on to say that if you, as the General, were to disclose these facts to the populace, the populace would get prepared. They’d get prepared for the worst. And this frantic effort to prepare for the worst would undoubtedly become clear to the alien presence.

If they have us under surveillance, after all, we must imagine they’re monitoring our radio, our television, our internet – and those are just assumptions gleaned from our all-too-human capabilities. Realize that regardless of whether we’re talking about distant UFO sightings, close encounters, or abduction experiences – which constitute perhaps the closest of all close encounters, mind you – in all cases, there is a disturbing throughline that extends beyond current science and into what we currently regard as the paranormal and parapsychological. Specifically, I’m speaking of their clear displays of telepathy. Their ability to read (and yes, communicate and manipulate) your mind. In short, such a disclosure would become blatantly fucking obvious to them in no time at all. It would swiftly become obvious to them that we not only know that they exist but that an attack by them may be imminent.

Through Elizondo’s former experience as an Intel Officer, he tells us, he has a damn good idea as to the consequences of such a circumstance.

“I can tell you,” he said, that “in real life combat situations when we send in Long-Range Surveillance or LRS teams behind enemy lines, the moment the enemy finds out, that they know we’re there, the element of surprise? It’s over.” So while you, the General, might have had half a century to prepare countermeasures behind the veil of a cover-up and disinformation campaign – a good amount of time to reverse-engineer and replicate the recovered technology and build up an adequate defense against them – now that hope, however pie-in-the-sky it may have been given how far in advance of us they are, is utterly ruined.

“Now that the cat’s out of the bag,” he said, “that existential action will happen tomorrow.” And so “from a very real perspective, a national security perspective, the mere fact that you are acknowledging the existence of something may predicate an action or an act that you’re not prepared to have right now.”

So he asks you, the General, the looming question: “What do you do if the mere fact of talking about this could potentially cause a reaction that you’re not ready for as a country, as a civilization?”

At the opening of this monologue, he phrased it in this way: “What if there was knowledge, Kurt, that was so volatile and Earth-shattering that the mere knowledge of that getting out could predicate an action that could potentially threaten the entire species?”

You must admit, he seems to be saying, that put in the position of this hypothetical General, such a cover-up, however unethical from an outside perspective, makes a good deal of sense to you from the inside.

“Maybe that’s the reason why you decide to only brief certain presidents who have a background in intelligence,” he offered, and I feel I can’t be blamed for the fact that George Bush, Sr. pops into my head upon hearing this. “Maybe they were former directors of [the] CIA, but the other presidents, who are career politicians, will be here today, gone in four years. Maybe you can’t even risk telling them. And so maybe the reason why this has been kept secret so long is actually, in a weird sense, some sort of sense of patriotism by people. Maybe that’s how they justify it.”

I don’t think there was any sole reason for the cover-up. Though the circumstances this hypothetical General you are asked to truly empathize with may certainly have constituted one such reason, I think other motivations came into play – including but not limited to Victor Marchetti’s “hypothesis” that those in power (the CIA, probably) believe that public knowledge of an ETI in our midst would inspire social unrest and strip them of their power – a hypothesis that was likely in the minds of the Powers That Be from the beginning but which was undoubtedly reinforced by the 1960 Brooking Report, which suggested as much.

Even so, Elizondo offers a damn likely additional reason.

Consider this, though: Might it be the case that the NHI have demonstrated the behavior they have towards the world militaries because they knew those militaries would react in the way they have and try to cover up their existence and spread disinformation, thereby driving a wedge between the militaries and the people they’re meant to serve?

Might their displays to the public in part be done to reinforce the fears of Those in the Know?

Might the NHI have strategically planted crashed craft, even sacrificed some bodies in the process, to instigate the secret cold war — knowing full well that we hadn’t the knowledge to successfully reverse engineer and replicate their technology, but that the militaries of the world would have to try nonetheless in fear that there was just a chance it could be done and that a rival earthly foreign power might do it first — thereby driving a wedge between the militaries of the world?

Could this be a form of divide and conquer?

A strategy meant to avoid a global effort against the NHI in the style of Independence Day or Ronald Reagan’s infamous remarks? A strategy that serves to breaks us up into isolated units of power easier fir them to deal with — isolated units of power too busy fighting with one another to join forces against the real threat?

If so, maybe you, General, should stop postponing the inevitable.

Perhaps you should take the risk, lead by example, disclose the truth, and if that inspires retaliation from the potentially malevolent NHI because they know the jig is up, so be it. At the very least it would open up the possibility that the walls between might collapse, that the aforementioned wedges might evaporate, and we might all join forces globally, as a species, against a common enemy.

That we might not only have a chance at surviving ourselves, but them.

UFOs, Aliens, and Government Secrecy: Of Controlled or Catastrophic Disclosure.

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
– Robert Frost, The Secret Sits.

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”
– Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants.

The Sol Foundation is a California-based nonprofit organization that was established on August 15th of this year. On its website, the Foundation is described as “a new think tank that has been established to research the philosophical, policy, and scientific implications of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)” and aims “to be a leading source of research on the issue, while providing the most informed and insightful policy recommendations to governments. The Foundation will encourage greater government transparency, drive collaborative sharing and review of academic insight, and champion methodical, scientifically robust assessment and analysis.”

The two co-founders are Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor at the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, who also serves as the Executive Director, and Dr. Peter Skafish, a sociocultural anthropologist who also serves as the Director of Research. At present (which is to say towards the end of December 2023), the other board members include Timothy Gallaudet (Natural Sciences Advisory Board, US Government Advisory Board), Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka (Social Sciences Advisory Board), Avi Loeb (Natural Sciences Advisory Board), and Jonathan Berte (Board of Directors, European Union and Technology and Investment Advisory Boards).

The Foundation’s first, invite-only conference occurred at Stanford University – and sponsored by their School of Medicine, largely due to Nolan’s efforts – between November 17 and 18 of this year. Here select reporters, activists, former government officials, physicists, other academic researchers, and evidently, even abductees or “experiencers” such as Whitley Strieber were in attendance. The speakers included former intel officer and UFO whistleblower David Grush, Belgian AI entrepreneur Jonathan Berte, former Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell, former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community Charles McCullough III, and Dr. Hal Puthoff.

At the conference, Puthoff revealed that in 2004, in Washington DC, a think tank brought together present and former officials from the CIA, DIA, Pentagon “and elsewhere” to discuss, weigh, and debate the potential positive and negative consequences of lifting the decades-old veil of secrecy surrounding what Those in the Know knew about the UFO phenomenon. In the end, the apparently unanimous assessment was that the societal risks were simply too grand in scale and so the coverup should continue. Evidently, those fears were echoed by many of the speakers at the Sol conference, too – some of whom, such as Mellon, paradoxically pushed for disclosure. Another speaker, a retired US Army Colonel by the name of Karl E. Nell, issued a dire warning, however, and he was apparently less contradictory in his position. If this coverup continues, he cautioned, it could result in catastrophic consequences for the US, or what he called a “catastrophic disclosure.”

In fact, ever since the conference, the term “catastrophic disclosure” has repeatedly emerged in podcasts and news reports regarding the UFO issue, and most certainly in the online UFO community, though little time has been dedicated to actually nailing down what is meant by the term. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, it refers to a hypothetical state of affairs in which these truly “earth-shattering revelations” – the existence of these secret UFO programs, the information they’ve amassed, and no doubt the activities they have engaged in since the cover-up began – were released to the public, either by whistleblowers or US foreign rivals, and consequently generated panic and chaos among the American populace.

These fears, I should add, are by no means anything new. As I’ve written elsewhere, there was a NASA-commissioned study by the Brookings Institution released in 1961 that was entitled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs. In the UFO community, however, it is most often referred to as The Brooking Report. In a relatively small section of the report, entitled “The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life” it is written that:

“Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the public and other leadership groups.

The knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might lead to a greater unity of men on Earth, based on the ‘oneness’ of man or on the age-old assumption that any stranger is threatening. Much would depend on what, if anything, was communicated between man and the other beings […]

Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.

Since intelligent life might be discovered at any time via the radio telescope research presently under way, and since the consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances, two research areas can be recommended:

Continuing studies to determine emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes — and successive alterations of them if any — regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?”

While this section of the Brooking Report largely focuses on receiving radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, it would have undoubtedly served as a justification for a continuation of any coverup that was already taking place in the 1960s. Such notions were even echoed in a 2010 documentary television mini-series for the Discovery Channel written by Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist and cosmologist, and largely voiced by actor Benedict Cumberbatch. In the US, it premiered on April 25, where it was called Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. It subsequently premiered in the UK on May 9th, where it was called Stephen Hawking’s Universe. In any case, Hawkings “said,” in the first episode, entitled, “Aliens”:

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

If the conclusions of the Brooking Report or Hawkings strikes you as unnecessarily paranoid, or at least prematurely paranoid, you are by no means alone. For some time I’ve felt that the true nature of the circumstances was more adequately encapsulated by something Victor Marchetti, former Executive Assistant to the deputy director of the CIA, wrote in an article in the May 1979 issue of Second Look entitled “How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon.” While he claimed to have no evidence or first-hand experience that might imply the UFO phenomenon was real (as I suspect he would have to claim, whether or not that statement was true, given the clearance he must have had), his thoughts on the matter, I feel, are rather revealing:

“My theory is that we have, indeed, been contacted — perhaps even visited — by extraterrestrial beings, and that the U.S. Government, in collusion with other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public. The purpose of the international conspiracy is to maintain a workable stability among the nations of the world and for them, in turn, to retain institutional control over their respective populations. Thus, for these governments to admit there are beings from outer space attempting to contact us, beings with mentalities and technological capabilities obviously far superior to ours, could, once fully perceived by the average person, erode the foundations of the Earth’s traditional power structure. Political and legal systems, religions, economic and social institutions could all soon become meaningless in the mind of the public. The national oligarchical establishments, even civilization as we know it, could collapse into anarchy. Such extreme conclusions are not necessarily valid, but they probably accurately reflect the fears of the ‘ruling class’ of the major nations, whose leaders (particularly those in the intelligence business) have always advocated excessive governmental secrecy as being necessary to preserve ‘national security.’ The real reason for such secrecy is, of course, to keep the public uninformed, misinformed, and, therefore, malleable.”

Marchetti’s belief that the kind of chaos he described likely reflected the fears of the ruling class (though not necessarily reflecting actuality) seems to be reinforced by Putoff’s description of that 2004 meeting and its unanimous conclusions and seems to suggest that these fears of the elite (and others, given that other speakers at the Sol conference seemed to echo these fears) have not diminished over time. Even so, it seems strange to me that while Those in the Know harbor these secrets and have somehow managed to go on with their lives, they nonetheless feel that if the general population knew these secrets they would not only be utterly incapable of handling it, but that society itself would inevitably crumble as a consequence.

To my mind, this reeks of elitism and arrogance.

Yes, exposure of these secrets would result in what has been called in this context, as early as John Mack’s 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, “ontological shock” – which is the often intensely anxious and disorienting state of consciousness, state of being, that one typically endures when forced to question their former worldview in the presence of new, undeniable revelations. As I’m sure those In the Know are entirely aware of, though, however difficult it may be, one can learn to adapt to this over time, even if they are dealing with it alone – though in this case, their experience may echo an escaped prisoner in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his work, Republic, returning to the cave and striving to illuminate the other prisoners with his revelations. In such an experience, the others would (perhaps understandably) scoff at him, as they had not experienced the real world themselves. Even so, the escapee can adapt – and I know this from experience.

If the entire world was let in on the truth, however – if only intellectually, and not through direct experience – they would be bonded through this conceptual trauma, this ontological shock. It would strengthen the ties between us all, as we would all share the experience of this revelation’s shockwaves, and we would all have each other to share our thoughts and emotions with. And those of us who had been given a “heads up,” so to speak, through direct experience? We would be there to help guide the masses to some perhaps small but hopefully detectable degree, as we had been there, done that.

And really, the truth regarding this cannot be concealed forever, so the efforts to maintain it will ultimately prove to be in vain. To my surprise and relief, this was precisely what Nell seemed to be suggesting during The Sol Foundation’s first symposium this November. His perspective was that disclosure in some form is at this point inevitable, and the best means of avoiding potential “catastrophic disclosure” is to engage in a strategic campaign of “controlled disclosure” that would slowly and carefully reveal the formerly concealed truths in the least damaging manner conceivable. This would ultimately shine the proverbial disinfecting sunlight upon the rogue UFO programs, providing proper public transparency, restoring Congressional oversight, and advancing scientific understanding. Though confessing that the target may not be met, and that the goal may be delayed, he also stated that he projected that disclosure could be met in six years, specifically by the first of October, 2030.

Just hearing that gave me hope, but I reiterate: I am not faithful in the least, but merely strive to sustain cautious optimism. Given the recent gutting of The Schumer Amendment, I must confess I feel rather vindicated in my adopted attitude.

Let me try to explain.

One must consider this conference took place in mid-November, when hopes for official, controlled disclosure were still as high as the saucers littering our skies, as this was all due to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which determines the budget of the US Department of Defense for the year and as a consequence inevitably gets passed in some form of another. The upcoming year’s rendition, however, had within it a bipartisan amendment officially referred to as The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 (UAPDA), though informally – at least in the circles I tend to spin in – it’s been most often referred to as The Schumer Amendment. As I explained in that previous post:

“The meat of the act, according to Grusch, deals with where it demands that the president establish a 9-person Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Review Board within 90 days of FY24 NDAA’s enactment. It states that it must include at least one of each of the following: a current or former national security official, a current or former foreign service official, a scientist or engineer, an economist, a professional historian, and a sociologist and that all members must be granted necessary clearances and accesses. Government agencies and contractors would have 300 days to turn over any NHI data or recovered samples and technology to the board, which would be subject to the power of eminent domain – though, as NewsNation noted, it’s unclear how the legislation would compel them to do so if they showed reluctance. In my eye, it would be similar to how the Pentagon has recently failed its sixth audit in a row without penalty.

At any rate, once the board has received the data, samples, and tech, it would then have 180 days to investigate and then 14 days to publish its findings. The president would have the power to delay the disclosure of certain data if he judged that it posed a risk to national security, but any such postponement would require an unclassified, publicly available reason, and the delayed data would have to be periodically reviewed to assess whether or not conditions had changed and they could now be declassified and released.”

It passed the Senate this summer, yet ultimately got constipated in the House of Representatives by five key Republicans: Mike Turner, Mike Rogers, Mike Johnson, Roger Wicker, and the chinless, shell-less, consistently buffering turtle with a foot and four goddamn toes in the grave, Mitch Motherfucking McConnel. As it turned out, when the NDAA was passed on December 14th, the combined efforts of these five Agents of Epic Asshattery succeeded in removing two incredibly important aspects of the amendment – the presidential panel and the power of eminent domain. The presidential panel would have been cleared and have had the authority to review all data relating to Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) and decide whether and how that data should be disclosed, and their powers of eminent domain would have allowed them to acquire all NHI technology in the possession of government contractors. Now that those two provisions were gone, the UAPDA has essentially had its teeth and claws removed.

And why?

Really consider that question: why the effort to remove these two elements of the amendment specifically? After all, if it turned out what the Discreditors say is true, and there’s nothing of note here to disclose, what would have the harm been in merely passing the amendment in it’s original form? Doesn’t the fact that they defanged and declawed the amendment constitute a form of disclosure in and of itself, revealing with crystalline clarity that they do indeed have something to hide? I’ve yet to hear another suitable explanation.

Had it passed the House, the UAPDA would have surely been a long-overdue, beautifully bipartisan, and truly historic piece of legislation that would have served as the most ethical, rational, and national security-conscious manner through which the truths that certain aspects of the US Government have long held regarding the UFO or UAP phenomenon could have been disclosed to the public. Had the amendment passed without disembowelment, the fully cleared presidential panel with subpoena powers and the power of eminent domain could have collected and reviewed data from the compartmentalized programs in question and then slowly revealed all but the most sensitive data to the public in a carefully controlled fashion over the next six years. It was a fair compromise, methinks: the public slowly learns the truth and the concealers would be exposed, but in the best possible way, given the circumstances.

Now that it’s been defanged and declawed? Well, there have been mixed reactions.

There are those who, while disappointed and frustrated, nonetheless remain upbeat and show determination to keep up the fight that such legislation can eventually be passed – among them Schumer and Rounds, who held a colloquy on December 13, where Schumer said, part:

“… Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena are of immense interest and curiosity to the American people, but with that curiosity comes the risk for confusion, misinformation, and mistrust, especially if the government isn’t prepared to be transparent. The United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong and additionally breeds mistrust. We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which if true is a violation of laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch – especially as it relates to the four congressional leaders, the defense committees, and the intelligence committee.”

He went on to add that:

“… it’s beyond disappointing that the House has refused to work with us on all the important elements of the UAP Disclosure Act during the NDAA conference, but nevertheless, we did make important progress. First, for the first time, the National Archives will gather records from across the federal government on UAPs, and have a legal mandate to release those records to the public if appropriate. This is a major, major win for government transparency on UAPs and it gives us a strong foundation for more action in the future.”

In response, Rounds said:

“I would agree, sir, and I think probably the most significant shortcomings that I think we need to visit about as well, shortcomings of the conference committee agreement that are now being voted on were the rejection, first of all, of a government-wide review board composed of expert citizens, presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed, to control the process of reviewing the records and recommending to the President what records should be released immediately or postponed, and a requirement as a transparency measure for the government to obtain any recovered UAP material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people. We are lacking oversight opportunities, and we are not fulfilling our responsibilities.”

Hearing two congressmen from both sides of the isle reference not only a UFO coverup but UFO crashes and biological remains is amazing to me, and that helped to temporarily quell my anger and frustration over the gutting of the amendment, as did their commitment to pushing for that presidential panel in the future. It gave me some hope that Controlled Disclosure could still happen – which is to say that it could still unfold through legal means. That the presidential panel, perhaps under the guidance of The Sol Foundation, might reveal the truth to the American public and the world at large through a process least likely to inspire the gravest states of ontological shock.

Unlike Schumer and Rounds, however, some were not only disappointed and frustrated, but downright pissed, and any optimism they might have had with Congress has clearly evaporated, as they’re now calling on the president to circumvent the Congressional avenue and utilize his executive powers to formulate the presidential panel that the House shot down on his own.

In either case, in other words, there is still hope that Controlled Disclosure could still happen.

Others, while clearly just as pissed off, are calling on the powers of bottom-up. At least one person, anyway, and that would be David Grusch himself. His change in demeanor was quite evident in the interview Elizabeth Vargas had with him on NewsNation, and which was posted on December 12. Here Grusch displayed nonverbals that those such as myself, who have paid attention to him since his initial interview by Coulthart in early June, had thus far not been privy to. Removing the amendment’s teeth and claws apparently only sharpened his own teeth and claws.

“What we’re witnessing now is, quite frankly,” he said, “the greatest legislative failure in American history.” He called on the American people to vote out those in Congress, such as Mike Turner, who killed the amendment, and went on to describe how:

“… we have a severe constitutional crisis right now. This is not a laughing matter. We have a severe oversight issue where there’s a caste system of individuals. Previous presidents most likely were abusing their authority under the unitary executive theory, which is a theory that the president, the chief executive, has ultimate power and with the stroke of the pen can decide certain things. So I think we have a severe truth and reconciliation process that we need to start in this country…”

Personally, I advocate all avenues that could lead to disclosure: continue to push Congress to initiate it through legislation, vote out the asshats who gutted the Schumer Amendment, and even push the president to use his executive powers to create the perfectly reasonable panel they poo-pooed. I have the feeling that in the meantime, however, what Nell called Catastrophic Disclosure may unfold, slowly but surely, though it’s unlikely to be given the spotlight by the mainstream media, at least until it cannot possibly be ignored any longer.

Why do I think this?

One should keep in mind that the revelations of David Grusch back in June of this year inspired this modern movement, and I think a lot of Those in the Know with first-hand experience and the journalists they spoke to were following Grusch’s lead, at least up until this point. Rather than blow the whistle on illicit programs through illicit means, as Snowden had, Grusch did it all by the book, above board, under the law, and through appropriate channels. For all the corrupt bullshit he saw, Grusch nonetheless retained his faith his the system, held fast to his patriotism, and truly believed that adhering to this code would ultimately lead to the public knowing the truth. He was relying on the Schumer Amendment to pass, however, and while I imagine he still clings to strands of hope that he can help push for disclosure through legal means, I do wonder if he’ll ultimately reach a breaking point if these efforts continue to be thwarted. After all, regardless of the degree of faith one might have in their social system, ultimately the deep-seated need one feels to do the right thing and fight to expose the truth overcomes the need to adhere to those social conventions, traditional avenues, and established laws that obstruct the pathway to that noble goal.

Now that the amendment has been effectively castrated, no matter how much Grusch may be determined to stick to his guns, those who have been following his lead – those 40-plus individuals who confided in Grush and those who spoke with Coulthart, Shellenberger, and other journalists – may no longer have the confidence or patience in the legal avenue that he’s struggling to hold onto himself. They may become increasingly willing to provide more information on their own, through media or more illicit channels.

So assuming that The Powers That Be were the forces behind the scenes, which I strongly suspect, their act of gutting the Schumer Amendment may have very well have been a goddamn death sentence, as those who wish to pull back the veil and expose these secrets to the world may decide that catastrophic disclosure is the only sure route available to them now. Ultimately, however much chaos it may cause, their growing attitude may become that “that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”

SOURCES:

– The Sol Foundation website.

– The Sol Foundation: How a New Think Tank of Academics is Applying ‘Cutting-Edge Research’ to the UAP Mystery, by Micah Hanks, 9/12/23.

– “Retired US Army Colonel says secret UFO projects should be made public by October 2030 – to beat America’s rivals and get ahead of a ‘catastrophic’ leak,” by Matthew Phelan, 11/21/23.

– The Sol Foundation Conference: A Great Success and a Greater Issue to Face, by Whitley Strieber, 12/6/23.

– “Schumer’s Amendment, Three Mikes, and a Mitch: Constipations in UFO Disclosure,” by Benjamin Anderson, 11/28/03.

– Majority Leader Schumer And Republican Senator Mike Rounds Floor Colloquy On Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Provisions In The NDAA And Future Legislation On UAPs.

– David Grusch calls on Americans to make UAPs an election issue.

UFOs, the Office of Global Access, and the Spirit of the 4602nd AISS.

On November 28th, 2023, Josh Boswell, Chris Sharp, and Matt Ford published “CIA’s secret office has conducted UFO retrieval missions on at least NINE crash sites around the world, whistle-blowers reveal,” an article for The Daily Mail that reported on the role that the CIA’s Office of Global Access (OGA) allegedly played in UFO recoveries.

According to the article, among the 56 offices in the CIA, and the nine offices in its Science and Technology wing specifically, the OGA was established in 2003 to “integrate analysis, technology, and tradecraft to attack the most difficult targets, and to provide worldwide collection capability.” The OGA specializes in facilitating covert entry into and exit from anywhere globally where individuals would ordinarily be denied access, such as behind enemy lines. According to multiple sources, the article says, while the majority of missions conducted by the OGA deal with mundane and conventional retrieval operations – snatching up the downed tech of our earthly adversaries; that sort of thing – three sources to The Daily Mail, all of whom feared reprisals and so wished to remain anonymous, informed them that since it’s inception the OGA has also been coordinating UFO retrievals for the US from around the world. The office works in concert with Special Forces Operations – Delta Force, SEAL teams – to retrieve craft, be they landed or crashed. After the OGA acquires these UFOs or associated materials, they pass them to private aerospace government contractors. Here, the collected material can be subject to analysis while simultaneously being shielded from audits and oversights, and given the strict compartmentalization, many if not most involved in the analysis may not even realize the nature of what they are studying.

Reading the article, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the activities of the OGA and the activities initially ascribed to the US Air Force’s 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS). Created in 1952, the 4602nd was tasked with collecting downed foreign documents, crews, and hardware, and had over a dozen field units spread out all across the US. By the end of 1953 – and perhaps not coincidentally, just after the January 1953 Robertson Panel – the 4602nd was also assigned to investigate UFOs. As far as the public knew at the time, this was Blue Book’s job, but the 4602nd would now be the first to receive UFO reports, deal with those reports that concerned national security issues, and hand down the rest to Blue Book. In July of 1957, the unit changed names. No longer the 4602nd, it was reborn as the 1006th. It again died in April of 1960, now reincarnated as the 1127th USAF Activities Group. And as journalist Ross Coulthart wrote in his 2021 book, In Plain Sight, the efforts went on over time, under different titles:

“In 1961, an AISS operation named Project Moon Dust was tasked in a letter known as the ‘Betz Memo’ to ‘locate, recover and deliver descended foreign space vehicles.’ Another project, Operation Blue Fly, was proposed to deliver the recovered objects to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. In his 1990 book, Out There, the New York Times journalist Howard Blum asserted that the ‘foreign space vehicles’ the US Air Force sought included craft of extra-terrestrial origin and that Moon Dust was a kind of ‘UFO SWAT team’. The book described the secret team’s role as ‘field exploitation of unidentified flying objects, or known Soviet/Bloc aerospace vehicles, weapons systems, and/or residual components of such equipment.’ Surprisingly, declassified Project Blue Book and US Defense Intelligence Agency files do show the US was involved in a covert worldwide ‘UFO’ investigation and recovery program. Operation Moon Dust definitely involved retrieval of ‘foreign technology’ from other countries, but it also specifically sought ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ and ‘flying saucers’.”

At the request of the Air Force, a committee was established in 1966 to review the best of Blue Book. Based out of the University of Colorado, it comprised four psychologists, one astrogeologist, one assistant dean of a graduate school, and one physicist – the chairman, Edward Condon, which is why it is often referred to in UFO circles as The Condon Committee. Two years later, in 1968, after studying 59 UFO reports, the Condon Committee released their results, officially entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” though it has since been far more popularly referred to as the Condon Report. In it’s summary, it states that “[n]o UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security”, though given that since 1953 UFO reports that were judged by the 4602nd and its reincarnations to be matters of national security never even fell into the hands of Blue Book, this conclusion is clearly bullshit. And if one needs further evidence that this is the case, there is the “Trick Memo” found by staff member Ray Craig, handed down to research associate Norman Levine, who in turn provided it to David Sanders, the principal investigator. This memo makes it clear that the whole thing was a ruse from the start.

Nonetheless, based on the recommendations of the Condon Report, Blue Book was terminated in 1969, which for years the US Government as a whole insisted was the end of its interest in the UFO topic. Despite this allegation, we have what is popularly known in UFO circles as “The Bolander Memo,” received through FOIA. Dated October 20, 1969 and signed by Brigadier General C.H. Bolander, it makes clear that, regardless of Blue Book’s closure, UFO reports would “continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose” and “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security […] are not part of the Blue Book system.”

In other words, despite the fact that the Air Force’s public relations front was gone, behind the scenes the spirit of the 4602nd remained as embodied and active as ever – at least at that point. While this is the extent of my limited knowledge regarding the incarnations of these efforts, there are strong suggestions of its survival, if only in spirit, beyond 1969. And if there is any reason to think that spirit continued its clear tendency to reincarnate, there are these recent allegations regarding the CIA’s OGA, which seems to be tasked with executing the same damned activities, though they’ve evidently gotten better at it over the decades. According to The Daily Mail article, after all, one source claimed that the CIA has some sort of “system in place” that can detect cloaked UFOs, and regardless as to whether the “’non-human’ craft land, crash or are brought down to earth, special military units are sent to try to salvage the wreckage” and that at least nine such craft have been recovered, two of them entirely intact, the rest damaged.

There has been a little pushback here, however, and from one I’ve come to consider in-the-know. In a clip from Cuomo’s show on NewsNation on November 29th, in an interview he had with Representative Tim Burchett and Coulthart, Coulthart said:

“What I can tell you is the Office of Global Access is the office in the CIA that has been coordinating this. They have been doing crash-retrievals for many years. One of the things I do take issue with in The Daily Mail’s story today is that they say there’s just nine craft that have been recovered. My understanding is that there are considerably more. And as the article accurately reports, this is done in collaboration with JSOC, the Joint Operations Special Command, notably with special forces drawn primarily from the US Air Force. So yes, the article is accurate, and I’ve got it also confirmed independently by multiple senior intelligence sources.”

Concerning the number of UFO retrievals, he’s not alone in pointing out this discrepancy. In his recent Joe Rogan interview, David Grusch has stated the number of UFO retrievals are in the double-digits, and in his June 7th Substack article, “US Has 12 or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors,” a title that I feel speaks for itself, journalist Micheal Shellenberger made the same claim.

This article in The Daily Mail curiously emerges just as the Schumer Amendment (officially known as The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023) to the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (FY24 NDAA) has passed in the Senate, but is currently receiving pushback in the House of Representatives. If passed, it will set up a means by which the US Government could, at the presidential level, collect, evaluate, and systematically disseminate over time a disclosure of what the government knows regarding NHIs and their technology to the American people. If the amendment does not pass, many attest, the government will be unable to control the narrative and disclosures through the media, private efforts, and potentially through global adversaries will be the means by which the truth will be delivered to the public.

If the amendment fails to pass, in other words, those in the know who have already spoken to the likes of David Grusch, Ross Coulthart, Micheal Shellenberger, and Congress will have no choice but to enlighten the public through other means, which means that regardless as to whether it’s a global adversary or efforts within the US that spill the beans, such an uncontrolled disclosure may be catastrophic – if not to the populace, at the very least to those Gatekeepers of the Big Secret that sit atop the compartmentalized silos, given safety only by the shadows they have thus far been capable of hiding in.

Schumer’s Amendment, Three Mikes, and a Mitch (Constipations in UFO Disclosure).

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is an annual act that specifies the annual budget of the US Department of Defense – in short, it funds the military. As a consequence, as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s an act that inevitably passes in some form or another every fucking year. Well, this upcoming year’s version – known as the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (FY24 NDAA) – has an amendment officially known as The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. However, it’s been frequently referred to as The Schumer Amendment. As with the recent, historical UFO hearing, the act is bipartisan, sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mike Rounds (R-SD), as well as Rubio, Gillibran, Young, and Heinrich.

At roughly forty-six minutes into a recent The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (#2065), whistleblower David Grusch revealed that a few months before he went public he learned about The Schumer Amendment, and this served as just another reason he blew the whistle. Given the data he’d gathered from his duties, he felt he was the only one who had the opportunity to do so, and he also felt those behind the amendment would be hesitant to go forward with it all unless they had something to point to publically.

The meat of the act, according to Grusch, deals with where it demands that the president establish a 9-person Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Review Board within 90 days of FY24 NDAA’s enactment. It states that it must include at least one of each of the following: a current or former national security official, a current or former foreign service official, a scientist or engineer, an economist, a professional historian, and a sociologist and that all members must be granted necessary clearances and accesses. Government agencies and contractors would have 300 days to turn over any NHI data or recovered samples and technology to the board, which would be subject to the power of eminent domain – though, as NewsNation noted, it’s unclear how the legislation would compel them to do so if they showed reluctance. In my eye, it would be similar to how the Pentagon has recently failed its sixth audit in a row without penalty.

At any rate, once the board has received the data, samples, and tech, it would then have 180 days to investigate and then 14 days to publish its findings. The president would have the power to delay the disclosure of certain data if he judged that it posed a risk to national security, but any such postponement would require an unclassified, publicly available reason, and the delayed data would have to be periodically reviewed to assess whether or not conditions had changed and they could now be declassified and released.

Though I have thus far been unable to find it in the act myself, according to Grusch, it also outlines a controlled UAP disclosure plan that is six years in length, conceivably from 2024 to 2030.

During his Rogan interview, or conversation, or whatever, he mentioned how it passed the Senate with flying colors, but – as he was told by his connections on The Hill – it was receiving pushback in the House. He mentioned only two individuals during the podcast: Mike Turner and Mike Rodgers.

Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) is the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Grusch went to Turner’s committee in December of 2022 to give them a classified briefing, and while Turner himself wasn’t there, his staff and lawyers were. Despite providing all the data he could in the time he was given, after the UFO hearing in late July, Turner went on Fox Business and, though only calling him a “whistleblower” and not calling him out by name, essentially claimed Grusch didn’t know what he was talking about.

Not coincidentally, I strongly suspect, he’s from Dayton, Ohio, where he once served as mayor. Dayton, of course, is the home of Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the former location of Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, which collectively studied UFO sightings from 1948 to 1969, and is also where Roswell wreckage is allegedly stored, home of the mythical Blue Room – and so on, and so on. As Grusch himself stated, that’s, well, more than slightly suspicious. It also doesn’t help that – as Grusch made mention of and I subsequently confirmed for myself – Turner was listed in 2010 by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as one of the 26 most corrupt members of Congress. Among his top donors are Lockheed and Boeing.

Aside from blocking the bill, according to staffers Grusch says he’s talked to in the past two weeks Turner is also looking to fund an opposition candidate for Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN 2nd District) in 2024. I immediately saw the relevance here. While I no longer pledge allegiance to either of the political parties, by nature I lean to the left, and though I know nothing of Burchett’s values and ideals beyond his determination to overcome the political polarization in this country and his outspoken stance on the UFO issue, I’ve come to deeply respect the guy since Grusch came on the scene – and yes, despite the fact that he’s a Republican. He comes across as a nice guy, constantly calling his interviewers “brother” and frequently spouting the phrase “dadgummit,” much to my amusement. He has spoken on numerous news programs and podcasts in support of UFO disclosure, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that those like Turner who clearly desire to sustain the government secrecy and cultural stigma surrounding the UFO subject would want to kick Burchett off the Congressional podium and slap the megaphone from his hands.

So, yeah: fuck Turner.

Mike Rogers (R-AL, 3rd District), is the Chair for the House Committee on Armed Services, and Grusch seemed confused by his participation in this, though he didn’t go into any detail as to why.

According to Grusch, the alleged reason for the pushback was essentially that the proposed UAP Review Board demanded by the Schumer Amendment allegedly echoed the duties already ascribed to the DOD’s ARRO office which, as Grusch described it, is a load of horse shit. ARRO is within the DOD and the Intelligence Community (IC), he explained, not above it, at the presidential level, where the board would be – where it would have presidential authority over all other agencies, capable of extracting the aforementioned data, samples, and technology and having the authority to declassify them and provide them to the public.

The efforts of the two Mikes were bothersome enough, but more dire bullshit was to follow.

Subsequently, via Reddit, I came upon more fuel for my pessimism. This is where I learned of an article published in the Liberation Times, written by one Christopher Sharp on November 24th entitled, “Black Friday: Republican Leadership Takes Axe To UFO Transparency Legislation,” and, given my clearly masochistic bent, I proceeded to read it. To no surprise, this article confirmed what Grusch had already announced three days earlier, namely that Rogers and Turner have sought to squash the Schumer Amendment. They added, however, that the disclosure-phobic Mikes had also recruited to their cause the new Speaker of the House, Representative Mike Johnson, thereby completing a trinity of Mikes that I passionately want to slap the everliving shit out of. In addition, they recruited the chinless, perpetually buffering, turtle-devoid-of-a-shell, and presumably sociopathic Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel.

I should add that I wasn’t exactly a fan of McConnel before all of this, but now, now that he’s joined the Disclosure Resistance Campaign? Now? Now the only two things preventing me from supporting his lynching by a mob are my fundamental ethics (rooted in my empathy, reason, and respect for due process) and the fact that it would be far, far too difficult to ascertain where his face ends and his neck begins.

And yes, this is a joke, not an authentic death threat. I’m not serious. It’s a dark joke, but a joke nonetheless. Don’t, like, cancel me and shit.

To go on, however, on the same day the article was published, Ross Coulthart tweeted on X, or whatever it is you now call posting something on what was formerly known as Twitter, regarding the Liberation Times article:

“This story is 100% accurate. An extremely powerful Defense Aerospace lobby is pushing key politicians in Congress to block the Schumer Amendment to the NDAA.”

Count me among the utterly unsurprised.

And wait, dear readers: there is even more disturbing news.

“It is understood that the four powerful Republicans are prepared to ‘compromise’ by amending language contained in the Act,” so The Liberation Times article went on to say, “although that would involve stripping it of its key provisions and crippling the Act of any meaningful power.”

Of course, I couldn’t help to think to myself. Of course, that’s the case. Why would I expect any different? Please, please tell me there’s still hope…

“One source familiar with the current NDAA conference process, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions through negotiation,” the article went on, “told Liberation Times,” and I quote:

“It’s a shame that such monumental legislation is the victim of political brinkmanship. Neither of the detractors gives a hoot about serving the public interest and instead wants to use this amendment as leverage to get their own political interests codified.

When supposed “leaders” like this use the American people’s interests as their fodder, we should be reminded of what sparked the American Revolution in the first place. These individuals would be wise to remember that.”

The article goes on to emphasize, however, that bipartisan members within the Senate, House, and White House are determined to resist any attempts to soften or terminate the language of the act – and specifically mention, among this joint effort, Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, as well as long-standing disclosure proponent John Podesta, as well as members of Congress that include Rubio, Luna, Gallagher, and – of course, dadgummit – that outspoken motherfucker Burchett as well.

Here’s the thing: if the true motivation behind the effort to maintain the secrecy and prevent disclosure isn’t just for a minority to sustain power over the majority (as knowledge is power, after all), then it has to be the fear of how the populace will react or respond to these revelations or how the NHI will respond to the disclosure to the populace. And if that’s the case, the true, underlying motivation is to kick the can down the road, to pass the buck, to postpone the inevitable.

The inevitable, however, is the inevitable, and the act – or rather, inaction – inherent in not disclosing it yourself does not prevent its disclosure, it merely prevents you from disclosing it, and if someone else discloses it before you, they have the power, they have the greatest conceivable amount of control over the narrative, and in the aftermath you’re left in the dark, dethroned. Silence and lies: they can serve you for a time, but never forever. Best to get ahead of it. Best to do so before someone else steals your thunder.

Do you feel it? Do you sense the penetrating silence? That’s the experience one has before a storm. And make no mistake, that thunderous monster is rolling in.

The three Mikes and a Mitch? They signify nothing less, nothing more than the death rattle of the biggest secret.

In the article mentioned above, The Liberation Times provided a quote from an unnamed source who they claimed had “knowledge of the current situation regarding the NDAA negotiations,” and this source had a damned good point:

“We’ve got a problem. Russia or China may beat the United States to disclosing the facts around a non-human intelligence if we don’t get our act together fast. This should be motivation enough for Republican leadership to fight for the UAP Disclosure Act.

They should be doing everything in their power to get it passed expeditiously. I’m baffled.”

As am I, anonymous source to Liberation Times. As am I.

On the Smear Campaign Against David Grusch.

“… the four basic rules of the true UFO non-believers:
1. Don’t bother me with the facts; my mind is made up.
2. What the public doesn’t know, I am not going to tell them.
3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people. It is much easier.
4. Do your research by proclamation rather than investigation. No one will know the difference.”
– Flying Saucers and Science, by Stanton T. Friedman, MSc., (p 39).
(Emphasis mine.)

Before Ross Coulthart’s interview with David Grusch, portions of which were first aired on NewsNation on June 5th, I had never even heard of NewsNation. It would appear I’m not alone, either, as that interview has apparently increased NewsNation’s popularity (which makes it a likely target of the Discreditors in the future, I realize).

In that light, it should come as no surprise that they’ve continued following the story. And given my interest in the subject, and in Grusch’s claims in particular, I suppose it should come as no surprise that I’ve been following the story through NewsNation and anyone else that has been willing to follow it, which, in the media, has been restricted, for the most part, to Rising and Breaking Points.

After Grusch’s NewsNation interview, the next time he was seen on video was the House Oversight Committee’s hearing on July 26th, 2023, where he reiterated all that he knew, or at least that which he could speak about publically, in generalities: that due to interviewing over 40 high-ranking military officials with direct access, he had concluded that aspects of the US government, along with it’s “five eye” allies and defense contractors, were conducting a broad, ongoing, multi-decade Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering program that has shielded its activities and efforts within Special Access Programs (SAPs) nested within several different agencies of the US Government in an effort to dodge Congressional oversight. Furthermore, our adversaries had similar programs and we have been engaging in a secret Cold War with them with respect to replicating this otherworldly tech, and a broad disinformation campaign has been underway to keep the public in the dark.

It was only a matter of time before The Powers That Be, those Gatekeepers of secrets, fired back at him publically, and that time? I see evidence that it has come.

1. Grusch’s Phone Call From The Intercept.

I’ve been following the currently developing chapter of the story since August 9th, when it broke on Cuomo’s new show on NewsNation, where he had a brief interview with Coulthart. Evidently, Grusch was contacted the previous day by The Intercept, an online news magazine, ahead of an article they planned on publishing and they were asking him about his medical records from five years ago. The article, he learned, was to deal with – as Grusch phrased it in his statement to NewsNation – “two incidents in 2014 and 2018 that highlight personal struggles” he endured “with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Grief and Depression.”

Assuming the journalist had simply done his homework, Coulthart said, Grusch then checked with the local sheriff’s department where he had lived at the time to confirm his suspicion that the journalist had received the police records dealing with the incident through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, though the department allegedly denied that this was the case. Having seemingly eliminated this possibility, the only other source that could have provided this data was the intelligence community (IC), who had previously reviewed these incidents due to his security clearance. They would have access to the police reports, one would imagine, and certainly have access to his medical records as well – the medical files that, again, according to Coulthart, The Intercept had asked him about specifically during their phone call to him. Such medical files are supposed to be private, so if the IC had indeed leaked these files to the journalist, which was what was implied, they would have done so in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

It immediately struck me that this would be a suspiciously dumb move of the IC, as it had been the determination of the Inspector General of the IC over a year ago, in July of 2022, that Grusch was already a victim of reprisals and that there was an ongoing investigation. So while additional reprisals such as this, which could be rather easily confirmed through a process of elimination, seemed to me to be sloppy at best, given Grusch’s history of reprisals, his assumption that someone in the IC had leaked this in the wake of his congressional testimony in an effort to discredit him wasn’t that much of a leap. Not from his perspective or those closest to him, anyway.

In addition to Grusch’s own historical context, there is a greater historical context to take into consideration as well. As Coulthart explained in Cuomo’s interview with him, this wouldn’t be the first time the IC has taken such illicit action against whistleblowers. He was quick to bring up the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who just passed away on June 16th of this year. He provided the news media with The Pentagon Papers in 1971, in turn inspiring the Nixon administration to create “The White House Plumbers,” a covert unit assembled to deal with leaked, classified information. The Plumbers subsequently broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an unsuccessful effort to obtain information they could use to discredit him.

In a later interview Cuomo had with Representative Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), Donalds mentions how several people running for Congress have also had their military records illegally released by someone in the IC or Pentagon. In addition, there is the fact that the IC has been warned against taking action against UFO whistleblowers in particular.

While all of the above occurred ahead of the article’s publication, it’s most unfortunate that the interview Coulthart had with Grusch on June 5th wasn’t subsequently released in its entirety, as it might have at least minimized whatever negative impact the article, now published, will ultimately have. There was a portion of that interview in which these incidents, however briefly, were indeed addressed – though this portion was not aired at the time. They did play it during Cuomo’s August 9th interview with Coulthart, however, and they reveal that Grusch wasn’t trying to hide these struggles. On the contrary, he was instantly open and honest about that period of his life, going so far as to encourage others with PTSD – particularly his fellow veterans – to get the help they need.

“I served in Afghanistan and I had a friend that committed suicide after I got back,” Grusch had told Coulthart. “I dealt with that for a couple years and I’m proud as a veteran not to become a statistic. Totally took care of that issue in my life and it doesn’t affect me anymore.”

2. The Article.

Until the article was published on August 10th, no one in the media who bothered to cover the story felt it fit to point an accusatory finger at the reporter, even in the subtlest manner. Cuomo, Coulthart, and (though granted, it was only implied) even Grusch seemed to accept that the reporter, who to my knowledge they even failed to mention by name at this point, was simply doing his job: he was given tips, following up on leads, doing research, putting it all together, and writing up a story. To the contrary, all accusatory fingers were pointed at whoever leaked the information, which – based on available and, in retrospect, perhaps naively embraced information – was presumed to be the IC.

Then, however, the article was published.

In that article, it was claimed that rather than medical records leaked by the IC, as Grusch and the rest had apparently been indirectly led to believe, the reporter had indeed received police records through FOIA – and, if there was any doubt, the FOIA request and the records obtained were provided along with the article. The names and other information that would directly identify the individuals had been redacted, and only the addresses remained, though it would be easy to tie individuals to the residences they lived in at the time.

The first incident, of which there is very little data, occurred on October 13, 2014, when Grusch, then 27, reportedly threatened suicide at a Leesburg, Virginia property owned at the time by both him and his now ex-wife, Kendall McMurray, with the report making references violence as well as his access to a weapon – though the call was canceled shortly thereafter, prior to the dispatch of any officers.

Almost four years later, on October 1st, 2018, the second and more enduring incident occurred, and given it occurred during the same month, it leads me to suspect that October was, for at least some time, a trying month for him. In any case, at roughly 6:51 PM Officer Lewis R. McClenahan was dispatched to 15624 Avebury Manor Place in response to an alleged suicide threat reported to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office by Jessica, the present wife of David Grusch. In talking with her, McClenahan learned that earlier that evening, upon seeing that he was drunk, she had confronted him, informing him that he was an alcoholic and needed to get help, to which he replied, “I’ve just been waiting for you to kill me.”

He was reportedly also quite upset that his three handguns were locked up in the closet in their master bedroom, which she had apparently done out of concerns that he may use them to follow through with his former threats of suicide – which she also said he often made when intoxicated, though added that he had never actually harmed himself.

The report added that he may be suffering from PTSD.

Another officer tried to call him to no avail, so McClenahan then went to his house and knocked on the door. He didn’t answer. They then explained the process for obtaining an Emergency Custody Order (ECO) to his wife, and she decided to get the magistrate to issue it. At 8:30 PM, the magistrate issued the ECO and McClenahan returned to Grusch’s house at 9:45, placed him into custody, and transported him to a local emergency room, where he was interviewed by a mental health professional who determined he should be put under a Temporary Detention Order, after which he was transferred to Loudoun Adult Medical Psychiatric Services.

In an interview Saagar and Krystal Ball had with the reporter on their show, Breaking Points, the reporter mentioned that he believes Grusch was released the following day.

To be fair, neither Grusch in his brief statement to NewsNation nor in the newly released portion of his original NewsNation interview with Coulthart — nor Coulthart when he was interviewed by Cuomo — mentioned the factor of alcohol in these incidents, though I do think it may have been an innocent omission. After all, when The Intercept contacted Grusch ahead of the article, they allegedly asked him about medical records, not police reports, and given the apparent faulty information given to Grusch by the sheriff’s office, the implication was that the focus of the article would be on his PTSD, which I assume would have been the emphasis in his medical records. As it turned out, his PTSD diagnosis had but a single, passing mention in the article when it was ultimately published, which makes sense, given what turned out to be the actual source of the data.

In the days that followed, those who were pro-Grusch tended to focus on the PTSD, without any mention of the alcohol abuse; those who were anti-Grusch tended to focus on the boozing while critiquing his supporters for only focusing on the PTSD. Both parties seem to miss the point, in my opinion, which is that many of those who suffer from PTSD often turn to alcohol as a form of self-medication, as it quells their anxiety, dulls their constant state of alertness, and allows them to drift into a state approximating sleep, which is rather difficult when your dealing with flashbacks of the traumas in question.

Grusch confessed to having had issues dealing with what he saw during his time in Afghanistan, during which I imagine he saw many of his friends die rather gruesomely, and with respect to an incident, after he returned home, in which a friend of his committed suicide shortly after speaking with him on the phone. Given his character, which betrays his desire to belong to a group, a family, or something greater than himself, it doesn’t surprise me at all that these circumstances would have hit him hard and ripped him up from the inside out. The police report of 2018 reported that he was treated for his understandable trauma, however. After openly confessing to the general issue in Coulthart’s interview with him, he openly and boldly proclaims he got the help that he needed and got beyond it, and it doesn’t affect him anymore.

The clear implication of the article, however, is that it does – and that furthermore, it somehow disqualifies him and all he has revealed, to both the public and our elected representatives, regarding the 40-plus high-ranking officials he speaks on behalf of. That strikes me as fucking ludicrous.

3. The Klippenstein Interviews: PTSD, Alcohol Abuse, & Security Clearances.

On August 11th, on Breaking Points, both Krystal and Saagar interviewed Ken Klippenstein, the journalist who wrote The Intercept article in question, and from what can be gathered from that interview, this is how the article came about and the motives behind it.

Klippenstein had heard Grusch’s claims, certainly through the hearing and presumably elsewhere, and freely admits he didn’t “believe in the UFO stuff” and thinks that Grusch “is incorrect about it,” yet is also convinced that Grusch himself is being sincere in the sense that he believes what he’s saying. To anyone familiar with the UFO subject as a whole, this perception is one that many Discreditors and Skeptics have chosen to express in recent years. It essentially amounts to a style of character assassination that is at once more compassionate and more patronizing than simply calling someone a liar, as while they are not questioning the sincerity of the character of the individual in question, they are at the same time implying that they’re incredibly gullible at best, at worst insane, and that they, the Discreditor/Skeptic, are at the very least sufficiently less so.

In this particular instance, Klippenstein submits that a recovery program exists, though he refers to it as a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) recovery program, implying that it is a program that collects downed vehicles manufactured by earthly foreign powers that are either remotely operated or perhaps controlled by artificial intelligence. In other words, not manufactured and piloted by a Non-Human Intelligence (NHI).

Given that Grusch believes what he believes as the result of his interviews with over 40 high-ranking intelligence officials, and that Klippenstein doesn’t doubt the man’s sincerity, this would seem to imply that Klippenstein believes Grusch was misled by these 40-plus members of the IC, which would further imply that he believes Grusch is the target of a disinformation campaign. I find it confusing, then, that when Saagar brought it up, Klippenstein also conceded that there is indeed sufficient evidence of Grusch being retaliated against after probing the issue of recovered NHI craft and finally bringing it public. After all, why would the IC badger Grusch into silence if he was being an unwitting mouthpiece for a cover story?

When pushed by Krystal on whether he thinks Grusch is lying or being misled, he also seems to suggest Grusch was misled, implying that the substance of Grusch’s claims is not a personal fault — which in effect seems to make the substance of his attack on Grusch’s character in his article irrelevant to the true matter at hand. When asked by Saagar whether his past PTSD and alcohol abuse disqualifies all he’s said since, his answer is confusing in its inconsistency.

“I don’t think it necessarily is disqualifying,” he confesses, yet then adds, “I think it might be. I mean, that’s kind of why I put it out. People can look at it and decide what they think.”

As perplexing as his viewpoint seems to be to me, I will now do as he suggests and “look at it” and tell you what I think.

According to Klippenstein, in the course of his surface investigation into Grusch he kept hearing how he was a “decorated war hero,” and while he freely admits that he doesn’t dispute that fact, it bothered him that, as he seemed to frame it, this served as a “be all, end all,” and little else was provided. His took issue with the fact that Grusch’s claims were being bolstered by his personal reputation and credibility, but he saw no efforts to truly vet the guy, and so made it his mission to do so. His first step was to speak with his contacts in the DOD and IC, he said, and they all suggested that Grusch was unreliable. Not wanting to just stick with those that he knew, he said, he then called out for tips, be they positive or negative, but those who reached out to him, Klippenstein emphasized, told him essentially the same general thing as contacts he knew.

The bulk of these contacts – his buddies as well as the newbies – didn’t technically “leak” him any information, however. They only gave him “bits and pieces,” he argues, “and the way in which that influences the reporting is a little bit more subtle than I think the discourse gives credit to. It’s not like they’re pointing you at one specific event. They give you a sense, and then you use that to go and use other methods to try and substantiate.” Ultimately, he sought to do so through legal FOIA requests.
In an interview with John Greenewald Jr., he elaborated on this a bit.

“It wasn’t one person,” he emphasizes. “There was, like, multiple people telling you something that’s kind of this vague thing. So I thought, what’s an evidence-based way that I can look at that? And I thought, oh, I guess I can do some local law enforcement searches. I just looked up his house in NEXIS and it gave me an address and I just did a search for a few years, and that was that.”

“If you want to say it was planted because I was talking to people and getting the rough impression of what he was like, I guess that’s true,” he said elsewhere.

Assuming, for the moment, that Klippenstein’s being honest, I can only conclude that he is simultaneously being naive as fuck. If Klippenstein already had connections in the DOD and IC, as he claims, those connections would undoubtedly be well aware that elements within the DOD and IC were trying to discredit or silence Grusch — efforts that Klippenstein himself said that there appears to be evidence for. So why would his connections stick their neck out to contradict the official narrative and the efforts of their superiors?

And as for him calling out for “positive or negative” tips beyond the scope of his familiar contacts, apparently via Twitter, which he claims he did to do his best to “cast as wide of a net” as he could “so that it’s not just reflective” of his circle of contacts and friends, is it really damning that he only received negative reviews of Grusch? Given the context provided above, why would anyone in the IC contact him in defense of the guy?

Klippenstein also states that he tries to talk with mid-level people, which he seems to believe works in his defense, as he believes they’re more honest than those at higher levels. Maybe the logic is just above my head here, but why would this be the case? Isn’t it conceivable, even likely, that such mid-level people would want to earn brownie points with their superiors to avoid retaliation, the kind of “administrative terrorism” Grusch referenced in the recent hearings, so as to at the very least maintain their positions — and perhaps even be promoted for their efforts?

Sagaar, as politely as he can, suggests Klippenstein might be a victim of selection bias, which I don’t think was out of line. However softly, he also dodges this allegation — or at least that was my potentially bias assessment.

Also, there was what I consider an incredibly important question that Saagar asked Klippenstein: why didn’t he quote these people? He responded that it was because he didn’t want to use innuendo, but to substantiate their claims, which also strikes me as a dodge. After all, he could have quoted these people with names — or even devoid of their names — and in addition provided evidence that substantiated their claims. Hell, doing so would also dissuade allegations that the article was a hit piece on behalf of himself or The Intercept more generally, and yet, as Saagar pointed out, he didn’t do this. And as formerly implied, this strikes me as naive at best, and at worst, dishonest.

Klippenstein also said his focus wasn’t on the PTSD, but the alcoholism, and reading his article clearly confirms this, but again, it overlooks the fact that alcohol is known to be a form of self-medication in those suffering from PTSD prior to getting treatment.

In any case, one wonders what possible relevance either PTSD or the related alcohol abuse might have given the fact that Grusch overcame it. Again, Grusch openly confessed to his issues, though in a general manner, during his original NewsNation interview, though it was cut from the edited version that aired due to the fact that it was deemed irrelevant to the issue at hand (which I still feel is the case) and only provided shortly ahead of Klippenstein’s article. If one chooses not to take Grusch’s word on the matter, however, there is also the fact that his authorities clearly felt confident enough in his recovery that his clearance wasn’t revoked.

When Sagaar pushed him on this point, Klippenstein feels that the fact that he retained his clearance is irrelevant, accusing the IC of essentially serving as a (gender-neutral) “boys club,” which is to say “senior-level people tend to look out for each other”.

This seems counterintuitive — contradictory, in fact — given the clear over-classification tendencies of the US government, which I imagine Klippenstein would agree with in other contexts. I must wonder, then: how would Killepenstien attempt to square this circle?

4. Klippenstein & The Intercept.

Digging up the backstory of Ken Klippenstein and The Intercept may seem irrelevant, and I accept that this may indeed be the case, but if so, digging up Grusch’s history with PTSD and alcohol abuse would also constitute irrelevancy. Given that Killepenstien and The Intercept do not seem to see Grusch’s past as irrelevant, however, but merely feel that in their act of exposing it, they are merely representing the other side of the coin, showing an opposing view, I feel free in providing just such an opposing view of Klippenstien himself and the media outlet he works for.

Let’s start with a question asked by Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN.) at about two hours and fifteen minutes into the hearing, a question that he directed at Fravor, Graves, as well as Grusch: “Is there any indication that the Department of Energy is involved in UAP data collection and housing?”

Fravor and Graves responded in the negative, as could be expected, given it would be beyond the scope of their knowledge. Grusch, however, replied, “I can’t confirm or deny that.” This is also expected, as such information would undoubtedly be classified.

“Could you do it in a secure setting?”

“Yes,” Grusch answered.

Of course, they were blocked from such a secure setting after the hearings, as later revealed, and given Grusch’s by-the-book adherence it’s unlikely that he has yet to reveal what he knows to Congress. In any case, his answer basically implicates the DOE, which is easy to imagine rubbed them the wrong way.

It was interesting to discover, then, sometime after reading Kevin Klippenstein’s article, to find that the journalist is the son of Stephen Killpenstein, a theoretical chemist for the DOE that works at the Argonne National Laboratory. On his profile page at Argonne, his research interests are described as follows:

“Developing theoretical methods for predicting the kinetics and dynamics of gas phase reactions and applying them to interesting problems in combustion, interstellar, and atmospheric chemistry. Our studies typically involve some combination of electronic structure calculations, transition state theory, trajectory simulations, and master equation modeling. One focus of our work involves exploring and improving the accuracy of such calculations. Another focus involves the use of such methods to understand novel experimental observations and to improve global models for the chemistry of complex environments. Recently, we have begun automating our computational procedures in order to utilize leadership class computing facilities for the in silico development of global chemical models.”

One could argue that Grouch’s answer to Ogles’s question, however vague given the open setting, could suggest a conflict of interest for Ken Klippenstein. It would also suggest that his contacts may be aware of his father’s position and that he may have had an interest in discrediting Grusch — and that due to this obvious association with his father, his “call for tips” may have attracted those who wished to discredit Grusch and inspired those who would have otherwise wanted to support him to avoid Ken Klippenstein like the goddamn plague.

Then there is the subject of the publication that provided his article, The Intercept, and its relation with whistleblowers – which, admittedly, in the beginning, was considerably warm, but then turned dreadfully cold.

Cuomo on his new show and Robbie on Rising both have taken the time to point out that The Intercept was an interesting avenue for them to go through to smear Grusch, as they had protected Snowden back in the day and based on that, one would expect them to side with whistleblowers. While it’s true they sided with Snowden, it’s important to realize that things can change — and in this case, they allegedly did.

Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded the Intercept in 2014 and was one of the journalists to whom Edward Snowden provided thousands of classified NSA documents revealing global surveillance programs, resigned from The Intercept in late 2020, claiming that the site was no longer carrying out the mission that was intended when it was founded, which was to amplify voices otherwise unheard in the context of American journalism. As recent as the 7th of August this year, he posted on the site formerly known as Twitter:

“If someone had told me the Intercept would be used to attack the current enemies of the CIA and Pentagon and, worse still, used to pressure Big Tech to censor dissent from CIA’s agenda, I’d have canceled it all. Why don’t you go write this in the NYT or MSNBC or Daily Beast?”

Unsurprisingly, The Intercept disagreed with his assessment, as sharply articulated in a statement by their editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, which reads, in part:

“The narrative [Greenwald] presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.”

In the end, it’s all “he said, she said,” I suppose.

To provide what could potentially be an additional reason for suspicion, however, there is the timeline of events leading up to the article. The aforementioned Congressional hearings took place on June 26th, with Klippenstein making his FOIA request only four days later, on the 30th.

Four days: in which time Klippenstein implied he had spoken to his familiar contacts, spread a net to receive tips outside his comfort zone, and ultimately received a “mosaic” of general suggestions as to where he should look to substantiate their claims.

The FOIA request was received and responded to by August 1st, where they informed him it was being forwarded to the Leesburg Police Department in Virginia. FOIA requires that an agency gets back to whoever sent the request within 20 business days after receiving it, and perhaps the speedy response is due to the fact that this FOIA request was directed at the police rather than, say, the CIA, but agencies (at least with respect to UFO material) seem to delay responding far beyond the legal limits (without any consequence), so it may — and I repeat, with emphasis: may — be suspicious that the process was so swift in this case.

5. Of Medical Records & FOIA Requests.

An issue that I feel must be delved into is The Intercept’s call to Grusch ahead of the article’s publication, in which they allegedly asked about his medical records, and Grusch’s subsequent call to the police department, where he asked if any relevant FOIA requests and responses had taken place, and they denied any had, despite the article providing evidence that they had indeed received and responded to such FOIA requests.

With respect to all of this, there are, so far as I can see, only four possibilities.

First, Grusch and Coulthart lied – potentially about the nature of The Intercept’s call, but certainly about the results of Grusch’s subsequent call to the police. I honestly doubt this possibility, as they had to have known it would come out in short order that they were bullshitting and that this fact would subsequently serve to discredit them. In other words, this would be incredibly stupid on their behalf, and both seem rather intelligent.

The second possibility is that Killpenstein is lying, which would be as dumb a suggestion in my eyes as the former suggestion. Not only would this require him to forge all the FOIA documents provided in his article, but these would almost certainly be confirmed to be forgeries once the police department was contacted.

There are two remaining possibilities, however. The third is that Grusch was misinformed, which is say he was unintentionally fed false information by the sheriff’s office, a hypothesis Cuomo himself proposed. This is certainly possible, and one could make the argument that given the nature of bureaucracies, it might even be elevated to the most probable explanation. It may very well be.

There is one remaining possibility, however, and it removes that assumed innocence. This is that Grusch was fed disinformation, which is to say he was intentionally fed false information, most immediately by The Intercept, and then by the police department, perhaps in both cases at the behest of the IC. Is this a paranoid suspicion? One’s natural inclination would be to say yes, it certainly is, but Grusch has already claimed – and most recently, under oath, before Congress and the public – that he was a victim of reprisals, both professionally and personally, and this would certainly resonate with those previous allegations and be well within the power of those who’s power he seems to be threatening.

Despite this, in the days following the article, Klippenstein wasn’t attacked and The Intercept was attacked at best minimally, with the true target of critique and angst directed at the Powers That Be, presumably operating, pulling strings Behind the Scenes in at best an unethical, and at worst illegal, manner.

At the end of the day, I still fail to see how Grusch speaking on behalf of over forty high-ranking officials working in a decades-old program focused on the retrieval and reverse-engineering of UFOs and disinforming the public about the subject has anything to do with the understandably traumatic issues he dealt with after returning home from war – particularly given his triumph over that dark period in his life.