New Commission to Declassify ‘Documents About UFOs And Extraterrestrial Matters’?

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, is pushing legislation to create a commission with broad authority to declassify government documents about U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial matters, in an attempt to force the government to share all that it knows about unidentified phenomena.

The measure offers the possibility of pushing back against the conspiracy theories that surround discussions of U.F.O.s and fears that the government is hiding critical information from the public.

By Julian E. Barnes New York Times 7-13-2023

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Declassification Deadline Remains in Force

Classified records that turn 25 years old this year will be automatically declassified on December 31 — despite requests from agencies to extend the deadline due to the pandemic — unless the records are reviewed and specifically found to be subject to an authorized exemption.

By Steven Aftergood Secrecy News 11-24-20

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Old NSA Records Remain Inaccessible to Researchers

Last year, the National Archives (NARA) acquired a large number of historically valuable National Security Agency records. But they remain inaccessible to researchers, at least for the time being.

By Steven Aftergood Secrecy News 7-17-17

David Langbart of NARA described the situation at a closed meeting of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee late last year. According to recently published minutes of that meeting:

“The [NSA] records consist of approximately 19,000 folders without any real arrangement. These records mostly consist of technical, analytical, historical, operational, and translation reports and related materials. Most of the records date from the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, but there are also documents from the 1920s and 1930s and even earlier. The NSA reviewed the records for declassification before accessioning and most documents and folder titles remain classified. Langbart concluded that the finding aid prepared by NSA was the only practical way to locate documents of interest for researchers, but it is 557 pages long and is classified.”

The National Archives confirmed that this description remains accurate today.

So not only are these thousands of half-century-old records still classified or otherwise unavailable, but the finding aid that would enable researchers to locate specific documents of interest is itself a classified document.

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‘…Bringing Transparency To Federal UFO Records’

Pushing for a game change

Seriously, man, what does John Podesta know about the national character that we don’t? The Clinton machine has opened a massive lead over Bernie Sanders and is steamrolling toward the Democratic nomination. No reason to go off-topic, no reason to tweak the game plan, and certainly no reason to give political adversaries additional targets, not with the Justice Department and the FBI poring over Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails in search of illegalities. This is when you coast on autopilot and stick with the talking points.

By Billy Cox De Void 4-4-16

And yet, this week, HRC’s campaign manager went and did it again. Little green men, space aliens, beam me up – Podesta didn’t say any of those things but that’s the funhouse door he opened when he went on record, once more, about bringing transparency to federal UFO records. Granted, he gave the interview to KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, where George Knapp is the only investigative mainstream broadcast reporter in America who’s got their *#@! together when it comes to covering The Great Taboo. And Podesta took responsibility/blame for the remarks Clinton made in December about wanting to “get to the bottom” of the UFO mystery

“I think I’ve convinced her,” Podesta said in an interview that aired Tuesday, “that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and to declassify as much as we can so that more people can have their legitimate questions answered. And more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life, who are serious about this, being ridiculed.”

Podesta’s UFO offensive is so unprecedented and counterintuitive that De Void can’t even come up with an analogy. There’s no demographic constituency here, no political capital, certainly no way to monetize this elephant in the room. The only parallel that comes to mind is hypothetical, like if, say, Walter Mondale had campaigned for legalized weed in 1984 against Mr. Morning in America. But even weed had a libertarian constituency during the notorious prison-swelling Just Say No era. And the last time De Void bothered to look, the free-marketplace-of-ideas Cato Institute ran like a firehosed monkey when confronted with the prospect of treating UFOs as a legitimate political issue.

The dialogue Podesta advocates is so revolutionary, in fact, its realization might even challenge the anthropocentric conceits we use to define ourselves. In the groundbreaking 2008 Political Theory journal essay “Sovereignty and the UFO,” Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall argue that such a sober reassessment could prove more subversive than anyone predicts.

“The ontological threat is that even if the ETs were benign, their confirmed presence would create tremendous pressure for a unified human response, or world government,” they write. “The sovereign identity of the modern state is partly constituted in and through its difference from other such states, which gives modern sovereignty its plural character. Any exteriority that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten what the modern state is, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction.”

Well now, there’s an image. And a remote one, at this point. On the other hand, maybe Podesta understands more about our capacity to manage new ideas than we’ve been allowed to demonstrate. Maybe smearing someone as a “UFO believer” doesn’t reap the same dividends it used to; curiously, no one has tried to weaponize Podesta’s agenda against HRC. At least, not yet. Which is weird, because that’s the obvious play here. Maybe the GOP is too busy fussing over the size of Donald Trump’s schlong to unleash the Little Green Men noise right now.

Either way, a veteran political strategist has given the press a license to ask questions without fear of stigma. But whether the media has the smarts for it – that’s like giving a cigarette lighter to a 7-year-old and telling him to act responsibly.

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Release All the UFO Documents! says, Clinton Campaign Mgr

The Clinton campaign keeps teasing real-life Fox Mulders with hints that a Hillary Clinton presidency would reveal the truth about what the government knows about extra terrestrials and unidentified flying objects.

AJ Vicens www.motherjones.com 3-2-16

In an interview with a Las Vegas TV station published Tuesday, Clinton campaign chairman and longtime Washington, DC, power broker John Podesta said that he has pressed Clinton to "get to the bottom of" of what the federal government knows about aliens and "unexplained aerial phenomena"—ET enthusiasts' preferred term for UFO sightings.* "I've talked to Hillary about that, this is a little bit of a cause of mine which is that people really want to know what the government knows, and there are still classified files that could be declassified," Podesta said during a campaign stop.

The interview comes a few months after Clinton told a reporter in New Hampshire that she thinks "we maybe have been [visited already]," and that she might get to the bottom of the alien-visitation question by sending a task force to Nevada's Area 51. [...]

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John Podesta: I've Convinced Hillary Clinton To Declassify UFO Files | VIDEO

"I think the American people
can handle the truth about this," Clinton's campaign manager said.

John Podesta, campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a longtime advocate for government disclosure of UFO files, said Clinton is ready to look into the issue. "I've talked to Hillary about that," Podesta told KLAS-TV Politics NOW co-host Steve Sebelius during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. "There are still classified files that could be declassified." He continued: "I think I've convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered. More attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people -- who are in public life, who are serious about this -- being ridiculed." [...]

By Lee Speigel The Huffington Post 3-3-16

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Clinton Aide Seeks UFO Files

Several U.S. presidents are on the record, talking about the UFO mystery. Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan say they had UFO sightings of their own, but the current presidential campaign might be the first in which UFO disclosure has been championed by a major party candidate.

George Knapp , Matt Adams www.lasvegasnow.com 3-1-16

During a recent campaign stop in Las Vegas, the campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told Politics NOW co-host Steve Sebelius that Clinton will try to get to the bottom of the UFO question.

John Podesta has always been a strong advocate for declassification of government files in general and UFO files in particular. [...]

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Set Priorities for Declassification, Study Urges | SECRECY NEWS

By Steven Aftergood
fas.org
12-15-14

     Each year millions of pages of government records are declassified that few if any members of the public will ever look at. This is an awkward fact which is not often discussed because it might call into question the whole declassification enterprise.

“Statistical Records Relating to Ship Stability, 1918-67,” anyone? A new collection of declassified records on that subject was among those processed for release recently by the National Declassification Center. Like too many other such records, it seems unlikely to generate or to justify much public attention.

In response to this problem, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an official advisory committee, said that agencies should do more to selectively prioritize topics of high public interest for declassification review rather than trying to declassify most records as they become 25 years old.

“After studying declassification practices in use at agencies and at the National Declassification Center (NDC), we concluded that a coordinated government-wide policy focused on declassifying historically significant records with greatest interest to the public made most sense,” wrote former Congressman David E. Skaggs, the acting chair of the PIDB, in a letter to President Obama last week transmitting a new PIDB report on the subject.

“Currently, all classified records of a certain age receive the same attention, regardless of their historical value or potential research interest,” the PIDB report said. “Such indiscriminate use of dwindling government resources makes no sense.”

PIDB therefore proposed that agencies move away from broad-based “automatic declassification” (which is rarely if ever automatic) to “topic-based prioritization [that] would ensure declassification review of records of the greatest potential for use by the public, historians, public policy professionals and the national security community itself,” the report said. . . .

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