Tag: transparency

We Need To Make UAP Mainstream — In Scientific Research and Transparent Government Policy

While today’s headlines are dominated by the politically polarized 2024 U.S. election runup, an increasingly destabilized geopolitical landscape, as well as an accelerating tech revolution in artificial intelligence and space, a new epoch in human history is unfolding that warrants more attention than all these stories combined. I am talking about the recent revelation to the public about the reality of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, formerly referred to as UFOs) and the reports of non-human intelligence (NHI) using them to visit our world.

If it sounds too astonishing to be true, let’s review what has come to light in the past few years. In 2017, the New York Times published a stunning piece about a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) program to collect and analyze data on UAP, as well as materials recovered from them. Included in the article were videos captured by U.S. Navy pilots of aerial objects whose flight characteristics were impossible to reproduce with modern military aircraft. Over the next few years, these pilots provided eyewitness accounts of UAP to the media, including a remarkable appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes program in 2021.

Later that year, the U.S. Congress directed the DOD to investigate UAP by establishing an office now called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which recently provided a report to Congress. Perhaps the most astounding development was a hearing earlier this year before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee, during which a former DOD intelligence official testified that the U.S. government was concealing from the public and Congress materials recovered from crashed UAP, as well as non-human “biologics” who presumably controlled them. Not only have these reports been confirmed by other former U.S. intelligence officials, but the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y). and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to implement a controlled public disclosure program for the UAP materials in the U.S. government’s possession.

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UAP DISCLOSURE ACT RECEIVES PUSHBACK FROM LAWMAKERS ON CAPITOL HILL, AS BIPARTISAN FIGHT FOR TRANSPARENCY CONTINUES

A bipartisan measure aiming to disclose U.S. government records related to UFOs has come under fire from top politicians in Washington, as advocates continue working against time to save the imperiled transparency effort, The Debrief has learned.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) united with Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) to introduce a 64-page proposal to bring about the disclosure of official information on what the U.S. government now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Dubbed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023 (UAPDA), the proposal was cut from the same mold of an earlier law in 1992, which outlined the disclosure of records related to the JFK assassination in 1963.

The act was introduced as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual piece of legislation that authorizes funding for the U.S. Armed Forces and outlines the budget and operations for the Department of Defense in accordance with Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Among the key components included in the legislation is a provision concerning eminent domain, whereby the U.S. government could effectively confiscate and appropriate any UAP technologies that are revealed to exist, as well as the creation of a presidential records review board similar to the one outlined in the 1992 law.

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NYPD “TRANSPARENCY” SITE LEAVES OUT MISCONDUCT LAWSUITS SETTLED FOR MILLIONS

LAST YEAR, a series of headlines in New York City buzzed with excitement about a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead.” 

New York Police Department Sgt. David Grieco — his actual name — had reached a milestone: Police misconduct lawsuits naming him as a defendant had exceeded $1 million in settlement payouts. Since the raft of news stories, Grieco has been named in at least two additional suits, according to publicly available information as of July, and payouts in complaints naming him have now reached $1,099,825. 

In the 13 years it took for Grieco to be named in 48 suits alleging police misconduct, he’s been promoted twice. In 2016, he was elevated from officer to detective and, a year later, to sergeant. 

The New York Police Department’s officer profile database, meanwhile, lists no applicable entries for disciplinary history in Grieco’s profile. 

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Tracking Orwellian Change – The Aristocratic Takeover of ‘Transparency’

“Transparency” was one of America’s great postwar reforms. In 1955, a Democratic congressman named John Moss from California — who served in the Navy in World War II, was nominated for office by both Democrats and Republicans, and was never defeated in any election for public office — introduced legislation that would become one of the great triumphs of late-stage American democracy.

The Freedom of Information Act took a tortuous path to becoming law, opposed from the start by nearly every major government agency and for years struggling to gain co-sponsors despite broad public support.

In a supreme irony, one of Moss’s first Republican allies was a young Illinois congressman named Donald Rumsfeld. After a series of final tweaks it eventually passed the House 307-0 in 1966, when it landed on the desk of Lyndon Johnson, who didn’t like the bill, either. Johnson signed it, but decided not to hold a public ceremony, electing instead to issue a public statement crafted by none other than Bill Moyers, which concluded, “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society.”

The Freedom of Information Act gave reporters and citizens alike extraordinary power to investigate once-impenetrable executive agencies that conduct the business of government. FOIA requests gave windows into the affairs of the Hoover-led FBI, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the “Afghan logs” story made public after a bitter fight put up by the National Security Archive and the Washington Post. The irony alert here was this last FOIA lawsuit ultimately revealed behaviors unflattering to none other than Donald Rumsfeld.

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The NSA’s Intellipedia Decision: A Precedent for Reduced Transparency?

In a recent development that has raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken a firm stance against the release of information from Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community’s collaborative platform. This decision comes as a stark departure from the agency’s previous protocol, which for over a decade allowed the release of records from this platform under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Appeal and the NSA’s Response

As first reported by The Black Vault, this issue came to light when a series of FOIA requests were recently closed by the NSA, all seeking information from Intellipedia. The newly found stance produced a “GLOMAR Response” in each case where the agency could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.” However, for more than a decade, The Black Vault received a long list of Intellipedia entries released by the NSA.

There have been 130 appeals submitted by The Black Vault fighting this obfuscation.

The first of these 130 appeals has now had a decision rendered, and it was met with a response that has set a concerning precedent for future requests along with the remaining 129 appeals that are still being processed.

The NSA stated, “Based on my review, the appropriate response in this case is to neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.”

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Cruz-Klobuchar Amendment Would Give Lawmakers Powers To Scrub Private Information From The Internet

In a move that will raise eyebrows amongst transparency proponents, US Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are gearing up to put forth an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that could provide lawmakers with unprecedented powers to censor a plethora of internet-based information. The proposed change, however, has sparked concerns around potential censorship of news reports and impingements upon freedom of speech.

The proposed legislation would extend the privilege to lawmakers, their family members, select congressional staff identified as high-risk, and individuals cohabitating with lawmakers, enabling them to demand the extensive elimination of certain personal data online, referred to as “covered information.” The amendment enumerates “covered information” to include home addresses, secondary residences, personal email accounts, cell phone numbers, and other personal and sensitive travel details.

Furthermore, the amendment equips lawmakers with the power to obliterate private data amassed by digital devices, including apps. This is proposed as a response to fears of lawmakers being located precisely based on this data. Despite the legitimate anxiety around personal data being traded by data brokers, the new amendment would equip lawmakers with a set of privacy rights which would be inaccessible to ordinary citizens, who might be similarly vulnerable to security risks.

The proposed amendment, though, has precipitated concerns about press freedom. Investigative journalism often requires accessing private information of lawmakers. The new amendment could seriously impede such investigations.

Past instances of influence peddling, often cloaked by home-related favors, might have gone unexposed under this amendment, Lee Fang opined.

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Senators to offer amendment to require government to make UFO records public

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is part of a bipartisan group of senators who have offered an amendment to the annual Defense authorization bill requiring the federal government to collect and make public records related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would direct the National Archives and Records Administration to create a collection of records on UAPs and UFOs to be disclosed to the public immediately unless a review board provides reasons to keep them classified.  

“For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained and it’s long past time they get some answers,” Schumer said in a statement. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.  

“We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public,” he added.  

Schumer said he is carrying out the legacy of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who more than a decade ago pushed funding for the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. 

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Senators want to boost Pentagon UFO office funding, transparency

Senators want to give the Pentagon’s unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, office a major funding boost to scan the skies and near space for threats from China and beyond – part of the fallout from the Chinese spy balloon that U.S. jets shot down after it drifted across the U.S. continent.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced a funding boost for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with researching and analyzing UAPs, in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. House lawmakers have not made their funding request for the office public. The final spending bills will be debated later this summer.

“With aggression from adversaries on the rise and with incidents like the Chinese spy balloon, it’s critical to our national security that we have strong air domain awareness over our homeland and around U.S. forces operating overseas,” Gillibrand said in a statement. The Senate bill covers more than just the office’s basic operating expenses, as the 2022 defense budget did last year. It also includes measures to reveal more of what they are finding,which will “reduce the stigma around this issue of high public interest,” she added.

The funding push comes after the Chinese spy balloon served as a reminder that U.S. adversaries are increasingly operating in Earth’s upper atmosphere — and as the public’s fascination with unidentified phenomena grow. In a 2021 Gallup poll, more than 40% of respondents blamed alien spacecraft forat least some of the unidentified incidents in recent years.

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Why does the government keep obstructing UFO transparency efforts?

It’s been nearly 27 years since I submitted my first Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA , request on UFOs . I was 15 years old at the time. That request unearthed a four-page Defense Intelligence Agency document detailing a 1976 event in which multiple UFOs shut off the communications and instrumentation panels of two separate Iranian F-4 Phantom jets. The advanced capabilities of these UFOs sparked my interest, and through the FOIA, I quickly discovered the incident was not an isolated one. I learned that there was much more to discover within official files.

My website, The Black Vault , showcases thousands of UFO files I’ve received from the government. The documents, overall, hint at a mysterious phenomenon the U.S. military and government have struggled to identify adequately for decades. Indeed, they appear to have often kept the public in the dark using various tactics to block legally or at least severely prohibit accessing some of these records that date back to the 1940s.

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If the Government Has UFO Crash Materials, It’s Time to Reveal Them

Since 2017, my life has been dominated by efforts to help Congress and the public discover the truth about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), what many still refer to as UFOs. I’ve lost count of the number of cities visited, meetings attended, books read, articles written, media appearances and hours spent on the phone. At the outset, my goal was simply to help our government overcome a glaring intelligence failure. UAP were routinely violating restricted U.S. airspace but these encounters, documented on cockpit videos, weren’t being reported up the military chain of command because of the stigma surrounding this issue. It wasn’t clear if these bizarre craft were Russian, Chinese, extraterrestrial or some combination of the above, but it seemed unacceptable and outrageous that no effort was being made by the intelligence community to alert policymakers or undertake an investigation.

Working closely with former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo and later a group of U.S. Navy aviators, we quickly captured the attention of Congress. We managed to convince them the phenomena were real and America needed to take action to determine the capabilities of these craft and the identity and intentions of their operators. To my surprise and delight, in 2020 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) adopted my proposal to seek an official report on UAP from the intelligence community. The resulting “Preliminary Assessment” arrived in June of 2021. Although it was wildly incomplete, it did identify 144 military UAP encounters since 2004, a figure which has since jumped to over 800 military UAP reports by early 2023. Spurred by growing evidence of the problem, Congress took additional steps, establishing the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

But despite breakthroughs in government transparency about these sightings, there’s one thing the Pentagon and the intelligence community have so far not addressed, and that is whether they have had any direct contact with these objects. There are persistent rumors that the U.S. government recovered “crash materials” from UAP, and even that the government has been working secretly to reverse engineer the technology.

AARO is charged with reviewing all non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) pertaining to UAP; evaluating all historical UAP intelligence documents; and extending protections to anyone who has signed an official U.S. government secrecy agreement related to UAP, thereby allowing them to come forward without fear of prosecution. In one stroke then this new office could resolve one of the greatest government conspiracy theories and most profound scientific questions of all time: Are we alone in the universe?

It’s time they did.

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