Tag: transparency

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. 

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

What Would Happen If American Elites Told The Truth?

It seems a ridiculous question to ask. It’s obvious to most of us here that our politicians, bureaucratic managers, and state-associated business leaders hardly ever tell the truth. What use is it for us to ask, “What if?”

There seems to be a considerable amount of social pressure urging us to abandon our better judgment, not for the sake of reason, but for cooperation.

If we don’t, the uncritical mob will label us “conspiracy theorists,” placing us in a box with schizophrenics in tinfoil hats who babble on about aliens and flat earth.

Any mature person notices the obvious discrepancy between what we see with our own eyes and what our country’s elites tell us.

When covid-19 hit, we knew from the beginning that “fifteen days to slow the spread” was fraudulent, yet the masses blindly expected us to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. When the feds churned out as much as 80 percent of the money supply in a matter of two years and they said inflation was merely “transitory,” we again knew better yet were expected to remain silent.

Sure, we might not always know exactly what the truth is, but we can generally get an idea about what it isn’t. Something is telling us that the truth is not what the people in charge say it is.

The proper thing to do is to accept what we can’t know and home in upon what we do. We should take what our public officials do and say and ask ourselves, “How does this compare to what they would say and do if they were telling the truth?” By performing this thought experiment, we can be sure our skepticism is well guided.

When we ask ourselves this question, let’s place ourselves in the shoes of the elite: our legislatures, judges, executives, and bureaucrats, particularly those on the federal level. Let’s also consider the state-sponsored business leaders, the spokespeople of the corporate press, and established celebrities.

Let’s assume (against our strongest inclinations) we are incorrect in thinking what they tell us is dishonest. We can even take at face value that they are acting in good faith in everything they say and do, intending wholeheartedly to be completely honest both in their words and their actions.

What would they say and what would they do?

Keep reading

Congress unanimously passes bill to declassify origins of Covid-19

Congress has officially passed a bill aimed at forcing the White House to declassify intelligence reports on the true origins of the Covid-19 virus, with the House on Friday unanimously passing its version of the Senate bill which also passed with unanimous consent last week.

As the New York Post reports, the 419-0 decision will send the measure to the desk of Joe Biden, who has not yet indicated his stance on vetoing the legislation.

If signed by Biden, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines will be required to declassify “any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and Covid-19, as well as “make available to the public as much information as possible” regarding its origin.

According to Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, the legislation is aimed at helping the public understand “why the FBI director has indicated that a COVID-19 lab leak is not just a possibility, but approaches the idea that is likely.”

“[The information provides] a unique insight as to what was happening at biosafety level laboratory in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and early 2020,” Turner added during a Tuesday hearing on the subject. “The laboratory and who was working there might be the key to unraveling the truth.”

In February, the US Department of Energy (DOE) joined the FBI in suspecting that Covid leaked from a Wuhan, China lab after discovering “new intelligence.”

Keep reading

CDC Won’t Release Review of Post-Vaccination Heart Inflammation

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will not release its review of post-COVID-19-vaccination heart inflammation.

The CDC has been performing abstractions on reports of post-vaccination myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

But the agency is saying that federal law prevents it from releasing the results.

The abstractions “are considered medical records which are withheld in full from disclosure,” the CDC told The Epoch Times in a recent letter, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request.

One of the exemptions in the act says that agencies can withhold materials that are “specifically exempted from disclosure by statute, if that statute (i) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue; or (ii) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types of matters to be withheld; and (B) if enacted after the date of enactment of the OPEN FOIA Act of 2009, specifically cites to this paragraph.”

The CDC pointed to the Public Health Service Act, which was enacted in 1944, and says that vaccine injury reports and other information that may identify a person shall not be made available to any person except the person who received the vaccine or a legal representative for that person.

The information sought is available through the CDC website without details that would identify patients, the agency also said.

The CDC said that it does not have a formal definition of “abstraction” but that it means the process of reviewing medical records, including autopsy reports and death certificates, and recording data in a database. “Please note that this definition means that any abstracted data, because they originate from medical records, is also considered medical records,” a CDC records officer told The Epoch Times in an email.

Keep reading

Police are Still Weaponizing Copyright to Prevent Transparency

YouTube and other social media websites have strict rules on playing copyrighted content. Police have been using that to prevent embarrassing videos from being posted on the platforms.

Residents in Santa Ana, California were woken up by blasting music around 11pm on April 4, a Monday. But the music was not a bass bumping rap song or a heavy metal piece with screaming vocals, it was “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” from the animated Disney film “Encanto.” And it was not being played by a teenage house party or an inconsiderate driver with a loud sound system, but a police vehicle.

Police responded to a stolen vehicle call in the neighborhood when an observer who runs the YouTube channel Santa Ana Audits started recording the activity. That’s when officers started blasting the Disney owned track, in an apparent attempt to prevent the video from being posted on YouTube and Instagram. Thanks to those platform’s algorithmic copyright enforcement, any video that includes a copyrighted song is susceptible to being removed. Its channel owners are also subject to warnings and even getting banned from the platform.

Unfortunately for Santa Ana Police, they happened to be in the neighborhood of city councilman David Penaloza who, like many of his neighbors, was awakened by the ruckus caused by the city’s police department.

Penaloza came outside and confronted the officer, who admitted that what he was doing was intended to prevent the video captured by Santa Ana Audits making its way onto YouTube.

Keep reading

BLM Co-Founder Says She Gets ‘Triggered’ by Charity Transparency Laws

Patrisse Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder who cashed out and got millions of dollars in media contracts, says that the recent scrutiny of BLM’s “charitable” finances upsets her.

Black Lives Matter is embroiled in several scandals involving the $90 million they raised in 2020 to end police brutality and racism. The most recent eyebrow-raiser was the revelation that the group purchased a $6 million mansion in California that has rarely been used for the purposes they say.

There’s also the matter of the $60 million in funds that no one at BLM Global appears to be in charge of.

Cullors says she gets “triggered” when anyone mentions the IRS form 990 — the form charities must complete that reveals donors and sources of money.

Washington Examiner:

“I actually did not know what 990s were before all of this happened,” Cullors said, an apparent reference to the Washington Examiner’s reporting in January about BLM’s lack of financial and leadership transparency that led multiple states, including California, to order the charity to cease raising funds until it discloses what it did with the $90 million it raised in 2020.

Cullors said activists suffer trauma and that their lives are put at risk when charities under their control are required to disclose publicly what they did with their tax-deductible donations.

“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure,” Cullors said. “This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”

The system that was designed to prevent fraudsters like Cullors from fleecing people is “deeply unsafe”? Isn’t that sort of like a bank robber complaining that it’s too difficult to open the safe and questioning why the cash can’t just be laid out in the open so it can be easily grabbed?

Keep reading

Hospitals Make $120 Billion While Skirting Federal Transparency Law

Three of the largest for-profit hospital chains in the U.S. made a combined $120 billion in 2021, while violating federal transparency laws, according to an investigation by Patient Rights Advocate.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2021, the Affordable Care Act required hospitals to be transparent about what they charge patients.

The Hospital Price Transparency Rule requires providers to post prices for their medical services online in a “machine-readable standard charges list for all items and services for all payers and plans” as well as a “standard charges list or price estimator tool for the 300 most common shoppable services,” according to the report.

The idea was to promote competition between hospitals, thereby lowering prices.

The Patient Rights Advocate report found that only 14 percent of the 1,000 hospitals reviewed were compliant with these regulations, and only 0.5 percent of hospitals owned by the three largest U.S. hospital systems – HCA Healthcare, CommonSpirit Health, and Ascension – were compliant.

None of the HCA Healthcare system’s 118 hospitals were compliant, the report found, and those three large systems made a combined $120 billion (page 3).

Keep reading