Disclosure is a hot topic among the various factions of the UFO community. It is perhaps the most divisive issue in the field, polarizing believers of various stripes who otherwise might have little to quibble about.
Unidentified cigar glides silently above San Paolo, Brazil, a country that is at the forefront of UFO Disclosure!
Will disclosure finally happen?
Will the United States or some other sightings-besieged nation finally go public and declare the UFO phenomenon to be real? Or will the cover-up, what some in the disclosure community call the Truth Embargo, continue without letup in the hope that the problem will simply go away? My editor and publisher, Timothy Green Beckley, and my (sometimes) writing partner, John Weigle, and I made up the team that wrote the recently published Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecy, available now from Global Communications. While we knew going in that we would not be able to provide readers with any definite answers, we did discover a wealth of interesting material that has recently been declassified by several nations throughout the world, including the U.K., Argentina, Canada, China, Russia and a handful of other countries.
The timeline of the Disclosure movement can be said to have started in the l950s with Major Donald Keyhoe, a naval aviator and US Marine who wrote Flying Saucers from Outer Space. Major Keyhoe was Director of NICAP and a major force for open Congressional hearings for more than a decade starting in the mid 1950s. Keyhoe retired as NICAP Director in the 1960s.
For my part of the book, I spoke to several experts and advocates of UFO Disclosure, which I was told by lobbyist Stephen Bassett should always begin with a capital D. Bassett told me that the recently disclosed files, while still valuable and interesting, only amounted to disclosure with a small “d,” not the government’s open admission of the ET reality that is Steven Bassett’s long sought after Holy Grail.
According to Bassett, what the newly declassified documents do achieve, however, is to reinforce the familiar patterns of sightings and abductions that we have collected data on for many previous decades. What has been released not only functions to strengthen what we already knew, but it opens up a new international dialogue on the subject and makes available to masses of people on the internet files that are a confirmation of all the research conducted since 1947, and in some cases even earlier.
“What those files contain,” Bassett said, “is of course not all that we know. But if one took the time to review the entire tens of thousands of documents, they would clearly find some very interesting material. You put it all together and you’ve got a massive amount of evidence.”
One researcher interviewed for the book who is more than pleased with the newly released files in his own country is A.J. Gevaerd of Brazil. Gevaerd, now cheerfully middle-aged, has been the editor and publisher of Brazil’s “UFO Magazine” since his early 20s, and was able, along with the small team of fellow Brazilian UFOlogists working with him, to bring meaningful pressure to bear on the government and Air Force there. Brazil not only released several thousand pages in batches by decade, they even invited Gevaerd and his team to visit the Air Force’s Integrated Center For Traffic Control and Air Traffic Control and Defense installations.
“In both places we were welcomed by the military and briefed,” Gevaerd said in our interview. At one point during the visit, Gevaerd and his group were led into a room with several files on top of a big table and were allowed to scrutinize all the material contained in the files, though they were not permitted to make photocopies or even to take handwritten notes. One of the files detailed a case Gevaerd calls “The Official UFO Night In Brazil.”
“The Official UFO Night In Brazil.”
The night in question took place in May of 1986. Seven jetfighters were scrambled to pursue 21 huge spheres, each of them a whopping one hundred meters in diameter.
The enormous objects appeared over most of the inhabited places in Brazil, forcing the Minister of Defense to go on national television and admit that something had indeed happened. The Minister acknowledged that 21 objects had been seen in the skies of Brazil and that the matter was being thoroughly investigated. He promised that a report would be issued within 30 days.
The report never saw the light of day, but Gevaerd was able to ascertain that a report had indeed been done and sent to the highest authorities in Brazil because he now has a copy of it, written in June of 1986. “This material is one of the treasures that we have in all these 5,000 pages,” Gevaerd said. “It declares that the objects detected by radar and pursued by jetfighters on that night were solid and under some sort of intelligent control. That was a full admission the objects were intelligent in origin.”
Above, Antonio Huneeus confers with General (Ret.) Ramon Vega, former Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Air Force, at his office in Santiago in 1997. Gen. Vega (then a Senator) is holding a copy of the Laurance Rockefeller-funded UFO Briefing Document, co-written by Antonio Huneeus. This report helped Vega to convince the Chilean authorities to launch an official UFO investigation called CEFAA (Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena) attached to the Chilean Civil Aviation Agency.
Gevaerd also said that he has a staff of people going over the pages to classify and organize them. Many of the pages are out of order, with pages from one document mistakenly grouped with another. Some of the files are available at Gevaerd’s website at UFO.com.br. Gevaerd hopes that the Brazilian government will be even more forthcoming in the future, and he promises to post everything he obtains on the internet, in both English and Spanish, so that the information can spread throughout the world. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Brazilian disclosures, he has been inundated with invitations to lecture and media requests for interviews. “After disclosure,” he said brightly, “things have been upside down. Thank God!”
Presidents in the Light and in the Dark:
From Roosevelt to Clinton
Canadian researcher Grant Cameron also granted me an interview for the book. Cameron specializes in collecting files and evidence pertaining to just what the United States presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, really knew about UFOs. I learned that Bill Clinton had made a few public statements to the effect that he had sought, on more than one occasion, the truth behind the Roswell Incident and the rumor of an alien being held captive at Area 51. Clinton’s requests for information were denied, in spite of the fact that he was the commander-in-chief and ostensibly the most powerful man in the world.
It was quite often the case, Cameron told me, that merely being president did not afford one sufficient “need to know,” and that it is doubtful that any of the past several presidents were ever told the entire truth. Harry Truman was maybe the last to be fully informed, perhaps by some of the original members of MJ-12, if one can take MJ-12 at face value.
Meanwhile, Cameron doesn’t believe disclosure would necessarily be a good thing.
“I don’t think there’s any way to do it,” he said, “without everything falling apart. It’s not exactly ‘The War of the Worlds’ or the stock market crashing. The problem with politicians, with government, is that they only want things that are predictable. And this is the most unpredictable thing, because once you let it out . . “.
“I looked at Jimmy Carter,” Cameron continued, “a guy who’s taught Sunday School since he was 18-years-old, and always says he’s going to tell the truth. He’s going to be honest, to be upfront with people. He always seemed to be an honest-type guy. And I said to myself, ‘How did they turn this guy?’ The guy was into UFOs and he wanted to release it. He gets to be president and suddenly he turns, he becomes one of them. What did they tell him to convince him to be quiet?”
One of the longest serving White House Correspondents Sarah McClendon spoke frankly about UFO Disclosure with President Clinton and covered the topic in her numerous syndicated columns. John Podesta, a high level Clinton Staff member also called for UFO Disclosure publicly (until very recently).
Cameron speculates that whatever has convinced the government to keep quiet on the subject of UFOs, it must be a legitimate reason, something they feel is the right thing to do morally in spite of the Utopian dreams some people in the UFO community cling to so tightly. Perhaps we’re not being denied the truth so much as being protected from it.
I also spoke to Nick Pope, the former UFO officer for the United Kingdom, a position he held for three years, from 1991 to 1994.
“I was posted to an area,” Pope explained, “where my duties included responsibility for the UFO phenomenon, both in terms of policy and investigation – investigating the sightings that were reported to us. We received about 200 to 300 reports a year.”
Just before the writing of Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecy began, the U.K. released the fifth in a series of declassified files packages, this time consisting of over 6,000 pages of documentation. But still, there was no obvious smoking gun or concrete admission of the ET reality. I asked Pope if the new files were really just part of a larger smokescreen. “First of all,” Pope replied, “I would say that in general terms the entire release program is hugely significant. It’s what I call ‘disclosure with a small d.’ I know a lot of people in the UFO community talk about disclosure and they tend to spell it with a big D. They imagine some scenario with the president going on television and the hangar doors of some military establishment swinging open and some great revelation of an alien spacecraft. This is not what is in these UFO files. There is no spaceship-in-the-hangar smoking gun.”
Nevertheless, the declassified files are “the real deal,” according to Pope. “There are literally tens of thousands of pages and this is a government-sponsored release program,” he said. “So, unlike a lot of documents making the rounds, there’s no dispute over the authenticity of this material.”
I also spoke to John Greenewald, a wunderkind of UFO research. Greenewald operates a website called “The Black Vault” on which he makes over a half million pages of formerly classified UFO documents available for download. Greenewald provided some excellent anecdotes about his experiences working with the Freedom of Information Act in order to wrestle UFO documents from the viselike grip of numerous government and defenses agencies such as NORAD and the NSA.
However, Greenewald does not share in the optimism about future disclosure as espoused by advocates like Stephen Bassett and A.J. Gevaerd.
“Everyone wants to think,” Greenewald said, “that the government is going to come clean. They don’t have to. We are intelligent enough to figure it out. Will disclosure happen? I say that disclosure is going to happen on a case-by-case basis within yourselves. We have to make it happen for us. If we believe it…great. That’s the disclosure. We don’t need an official acknowledgement.”
Along with my contributions, the new book Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecy also presents the research of John Weigle, who has been in the newspaper business for 46 years and has been interested in UFOs since the early 1950s. Weigle did yeoman work in tracking down some of the recently released UFOs files available on the internet and gathering them together in book form for, in many cases, the first time. The book concludes with Weigle’s summation of what disclosure on the internet is really like nowadays, as well as arguments both for and against disclosure and a list of the relevant internet website addresses so you can see firsthand what is actually out there.
Then there is of course the work done by editor and publisher Timothy Green Beckley. Tim not only wrote several of the chapters, he also organized the book and assembled a wonderful cross section of articles from little-known government documents, UFO publications and private researchers into a large format book that is nearly 300 pages and very lavishly illustrated with many, many photos that combine to form a visually exciting whole.
For instance, Beckley reprints an article from his now-defunct “UFO Review” about a strange Saturn-shaped object that seemed to follow the presidential helicopter when Jimmy Carter made a visit to Panama in 1978. There is even a photo of the incident taken by a woman on the scene that is reprinted here as well. In the course of his research, Beckley learned the bizarre photo is on file in the Carter Presidential Library, which adds a little to the overall mystique of the event, though of course that does not imply any kind of endorsement on the part of Carter or his archivists.
Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecywas truly a team effort, with each of the three of us providing crucial elements that were essential to providing the reader with an up-to-the-minute overview of the disclosure effort both here and abroad.
But the story of disclosure continues unabated. As I was writing this article, in the first week of July 2010, I ran across an online article that talked about an Italian member of the European Union who was circulating a petition encouraging member countries to share all of their UFO data with the world. While expressing the hope that scientific and technological breakthroughs would be one result of the new openness he proposed, the European Parliament lawmaker, one Mario Borghezio, said:
“I think that, under the principle of transparency, the EU member states have a duty to make public and available to all scientific data on UFOs which today are partially or wholly withheld.”
Borghezio is admittedly just one small voice, and he has managed to gather only 18 signatures so far in an assembly that has 736 members. But the point is that there is some kind of momentum to be observed, some kind of growing worldwide consensus that the truth should be told for the good of the people everywhere. Nick Pope, for one, believes that disclosure would not necessarily bring with it mass hysteria, and Stephen Bassett passionately argues that the public can handle the truth.
Maybe you can make up your own mind about that when you read Disclosure! Breaking Through The Barrier Of Global UFO Secrecy. Once you have digested the available evidence and the opinions of the experts interviewed for the book, you can start a disclosure movement of your own, one that doesn’t require the belief of anyone but yourself.
source: www.ufodigest.com
