Portal to the Politics of Disclosure

The early years of the pre-paradigm period, beginning with 1947, held a certain quaint innocence. The interest in and investigation of UFO sightings had the quality of a high school science project - little money, lots of enthusiasm, marginal science, noted but not taken seriously.

It would have been convenient if the phenomena could have remained contained within a gradually evolving scientific discipline. This century has been characterized by a series of extraordinary scientific breakthroughs presented to an increasingly jaded public come to accept technological invention as if it were a constitutionally mandated privilege of citizenship. The truth about UFOs would be but another.

It was not to be.

Two parallel tracks have carried us to this moment in time. On one track we have seen a cascade of extraordinary phenomena, and on the other track we have experienced the institutionalization of extraordinary secrecy by the government of the United States. This secrecy was driven by the political implications of these unfolding events coupled with an ongoing nuclear Cold War. Whatever its past merits, this institutionalized secrecy has become a recipe for a poisonous concoction which threatens democracy itself.

Thus it was inevitable the UFO research effort would become politicized. This process, gradual at first, began to escalate around 1991. It is now a full-force movement on the brink of triumph. To understand this process it would be helpful to have an historical template as reference. Fortunately we have one.

It is the politics of discovery and disclosure residing in the history of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. There is no better reference on this than Richard Rhodes’ 1987 National Book Award winning masterpiece, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

In March of 1944 a most momentous decision was being made - it involved a consummate act of disclosure. The eminent physicist Neil's Bohr was involved in shuttle diplomacy between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. The question at hand was whether to inform a major ally, the Soviet Union, of the nature of the Manhattan Project and its goals to build an atomic bomb. The principal argument for disclosure was this: to not inform the Soviet Union would be to permanently estrange a potential adversary and set the stage for an intractable distrust and perhaps a financially devastating arms race leading inevitably to nuclear war.

By September of 1944, based primarily on the objections of Winston Churchill, the decision was made to keep the project a secret from this ally (later it would be learned the Soviet Union was well informed by its agents). Quoting Richard Rhodes:

"How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard."
The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The act of secrecy is fundamentally hostile. When it is matched with scientific facts of enormous implications, it becomes world shaking, even world destroying. If the public chooses to merely spectate these events and withdraw from the politics of disclosure, then the tenor of the post-paradigm world will be set by bureaucrats in private meetings, in sound proof rooms, off the record and off the radar of our hopes and aspirations for a world of our own making.

The Politics of Disclosure is going to use every tool available. Here are some:

Right to Petition Right to Lobby Direct Activism Political Representation

Go To Paradigm Clock Hub Page