Unpacking “the phenomena”
ReasonTV:
A journey inside the “disclosure” movement seeking to reveal that the government is hiding alien technology
Are aliens visiting Earth? What would that mean for human society? Are we in danger?
The “disclosure” movement, which includes former intelligence officials and sitting members of Congress, is fighting to declassify everything that the government has concealed about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. They say we’re already in the process of coming to terms with the truth about extraterrestrial life.
“People say, ‘When are we going to have disclosure?’ I think you’re living through it right now,” says former intelligence official Luis Elizondo.
But one former government scientist tasked with examining UAP claims tells Reason that the entire movement is based on a carefully orchestrated web of lies.
“All of them are the same players,” says Sean Kirkpatrick. He calls the movement “a conspiracy…to get resources to pursue a storyline and to propagate this storyline.”
But the believers accuse Kirkpatrick of orchestrating a government cover-up.
After speaking with skeptics and believers, and poring over the government’s most recent document dumps, most UAP images remain blurry, but the bigger picture has become more clear: Government officials have misled the public for decades about the mysterious objects in our skies, hyping aliens when it provided cover for clandestine research, while in other instances discrediting whistleblowers attempting to reveal unusual government programs and alarming encounters to the public. At the same time, a well-funded group of believers in the paranormal has successfully captured the imaginations of influential members of Congress, which has translated into millions of federal dollars funding paranormal research that’s yielded few meaningful results.
The following is an attempt to step out of this hall of mirrors and carefully examine what we know—and don’t know, maybe can’t know with scientific certainty—about what’s really out there.
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/05HV-PudJrA?si=hFoCVopavnKTedc8