"There is no better time, in other words, for anyone who has documentary proof to figure out how to be a hero of disclosure and democracy. If you have the goods and you want the public to know more and if you think the Schumer push for transparency has been fatally wounded (as many U.F.O. believers seem to think), then this is the hour to bring your secrets forward."
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| Last week on the Senate floor, two senators rose to express disappointment with the House of Representatives. This was by itself routine enough, but the senators, Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and the New York Democrat and majority leader, |
By Ross Douthat
The New York Times 12-16-23 |
The back story, for those who don’t follow every twist of what we’re now supposed to call the unidentified anomalous phenomenon (U.A.P.) debate, is that the National Defense Authorization Act, on Schumer’s instigation, included provisions to establish a presidential commission with the power to declassify a broad swath of records related to U.A.P.s, modeled on the panel that did similar work with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
But this disclosure effort was watered down by some House Republicans, making it more of a collection effort by the National Archives, with a weaker mandate to declassify and release.
As ever with this issue, the Senate discussion of these developments veered from the banal to the superweird. One moment, Rounds was talking as if the whole legislative effort was just an attempt to “dispel myths and misinformation about U.A.P.s” — sunlight as a disinfectant for conspiracy theories. The next, he was complaining that the House had stripped out a requirement that the government reclaim “any recovered U.A.P. material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.” Which is an odd thing to emphasize if you don’t think there’s a possibility that, say, Lockheed Martin is keeping something strange inside its vaults.
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