Been a long time comin'
Clinking a glass to today’s milestone of bipartisanship: The appearance of
democracy getting a break after nearly four generations of military
intelligence resistance to opening the books on UFOs is better than no
appearance at all.
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The moments that shape who and what we’ve become can
take years to assume full stature, but sometimes the details linger,
waiting for proportion to catch up. My backyard neighbor, eyes fixed on
the catastrophe blossoming across the immediate sky, placing the
microphone to the cancer hole in his throat and issuing a pronouncement
filtered through an electronic and otherworldly monotone: “I think the
space shuttle just blew up.” A newborn daughter’s first screech and the
snip of the umbilical scissors in the launch of a fresh adventure. The
slant
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By Billy Cox
lifeinjonestown
12-15-21
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of the late afternoon light through the kitchen window when Mom calls from 650
miles away to say her diagnosis is terminal.
What I remember: It was clear-blue cool the day the Earth stood still,
arid, low 70s, invigorating for Florida. The December sun drew the critters to
the surface at the state park down the road. A couple of gopher tortoises, an
armadillo, the biggest glass lizard in memory, maybe two feet long, or more.
Following the five-mile hike came a long exhale on the 10-speed home; by time
I shook the sand off everything and hit the laptop, it was early afternoon.
The breaking news headlines were consumed by tiresome disaster porn, floods in
Chile, California on fire, stalemate in Afghanistan, etc. The usual reruns.
Men behaving badly. #MeToo updates. The Detroit Lions coming up in a few …
ugh. Maybe a movie? But then. Wait a minute. The New York Times. Whoawhoawhoa.
Stop.
“WASHINGTON – In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the
$22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
was almost impossible to find …”
UFOs — the white whale. At last. Lead image above the lead graph: official
U.S. Navy gun-cam footage, alternating from television to infrared modes, F-18
pilot exchanges recorded in pursuit. “There’s a whole fleet of ‘em, look on
the AESA.” “My gosh!” “They’re all going against the wind, the wind’s 120
knots to the west … Look at that thing, dude …” “Look at that thing!” “It’s
rotating.”
And within the space of 30 seconds, a single video packed with digital
metadata accomplished what 70 years of “modern” UFO documentation had not –
confirmed that those of us who’d looked up and gaped at the incomprehensible
weren’t crazy or hallucinating. Well, many of us. And the Pentagon – those
publicly indifferent star-spangled uniforms who for generations thought it
better to let us doubt the sanity of our own curiosity than to toss us a bone
– turns out those sneaky guys and gals had a few secrets of their own.
I raced through
the article, the names, the acronyms, the numbers, the dates, the places, all of it
pointing toward something I knew viscerally to be true. But I didn’t laugh out
loud until I got to the sidebar, to the part where Navy pilots David Fravor
and Jim Slaight emerged fearless in retirement. They described the aftermath
of their 2004 encounter, in which a UFO shaped like a breath mint had run
circles around their jet fighters.
“They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar
had again picked up the strange aircraft. ’Sir, you won’t believe this,’ the
radio operator said, ‘but that thing is at your cap point.’ ‘We were at
least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute, this thing was already at
our cap point’ …”
Good god. This wasn’t just about propulsion, hardware and technology – this
was about reality itself, demanding new definitions. But there was no lag time
in this scoop’s impact; I knew right then and there, the world had changed.
And I knew I had changed, too. Because this was personal, as the news no doubt
was for countless other fellow Earthlings who had learned to table this very
real conversation for some other time, some other place.
Now.
I went noodling around for more — and there, a second story, from Politico,
not Alex Jones, independently corroborating details on the Pentagon’s
clandestine dive into the The Great Taboo. Then another story. And another.
And the minutes turned to hours, and the wire services and global newsies all
piled on, some with the urgency of a terrorist bombing or a celebrity fashion
disaster. Just as my parents had saved the paper from JFK’s blood-splattered
limo dash out of Dealey Plaza, this was history, and I needed an old-school
memento.
I headed out to the bookstore early Sunday morning, where the Times was
sitting on the rack. Its top stories were more reruns, including two (2)
analyses of Republican tax bills. A third threw a spotlight on how “reformer”
Mohammed bin Salman had annexed Chateau Louis XIV outside Versailles for $300
million. Six bucks later, there it was, underplayed below the fold, but a
headline on 1A real estate nevertheless: “Real U.F.O.s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know.”
So much has happened since then. So many moving parts and falling dominoes,
enough to fill a book, too dense to tally here. But all those interlocking
efforts have brought us an overdue payoff. Consequently, today, this day, is
like none other in American history.
Just one day shy of the four years since the Times broke the AATIP story,
Congress has passed and dispatched the National Defense Authorization Act
spending bill to the Oval Office for a rubber stamp. Included in the mandate
is an order for the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National
Intelligence to collaborate on getting a grip on the UFO challenge. The nerve
center of this joint effort is a laughable acronym, AOIMSG, or the Airborne
Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. But amid this most
dangerously polarized Congress in living memory, a bipartisan show of lawmaker
support isn’t laughing.
AOIMSG is commanded to be up and running within 180 days of President Biden’s
signature, and to brief the heads of select congressional committees in
classified settings twice a year. By the end of 2022, it will issue an
unclassified report. The itemized areas of interest are broad. They include a
presentation of UFO/UAP incidents involving nuclear assets, physiological harm
suffered during such encounters, and “an update on any efforts underway on the
ability to capture or exploit discovered unidentified aerial phenomena.”
The bill on Biden’s desk is flawed, of course. One the strongest parts of the
original language — proposed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) to include an
advisory board of 25 civilian scientists — didn’t make the cut. And for now,
AOIMSG will answer to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence & Security, or OUSD(I&S). This is the bureaucracy that,
according to Pentagon whistleblower Luis Elizondo and former USD(I&S)
Chris Mellon, is unqualified to handle these chores and have actively resisted
outsider scrutiny.
Whether this effort becomes the envisioned window into transparency on
America’s darkest closet or just another cynical exercise in information
control/image rehab remains to be seen. We’ll hash out some of those
reservations in the near future. For now, until the brass begins to disappoint
us, let’s just say well done, to the lawmakers who proved they actually are
capable of working together, to the persistence of Elizondo and Mellon, to the
journalists who’ve made this moment possible, and to everybody who got off
their asses and actually contacted their public servants.
The only analogy that comes directly to mind is the bitter feuds that preceded
the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. In a world where radioactive
fallout from WMD testing poisoned the food supplies of friend and foe alike,
military-industrial complexes on both sides of the Iron Curtain pushed back
against calls to take this insanity underground. Establishment heavyweights in
the West, like Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, and hydrogen bomb
architect Edward Teller, once argued the very fate of our nation hinged on the
continuation of atmospheric atomic experiments.
Anyway … here’s hoping that today marks the beginning of the end of the Cold
War’s final chapter, a line of demarcation where future generations will look
upon our pathological insecurities and wonder, “What the hell was that all
about?”
You may say I’m a dreamer. But …
