How will official transparency progress?

 

Introduction

What are the plausible developments of what seems to be a genuine openness about UFOs/UAP from, particularly, the U.S. Government (USG)?

In the following, I am going to give some plausible answers to that question. Or speculate on the question, if you will, because I do not have any facts to argue with certainty for any of the scenarios presented below.

The reader should note that my presupposition is that a disclosure process, or greater official transparency, about the physical and technological aspect of UFOs/UAP, is ongoing since late 2017. I also think the disclosure, or whatever the right term, is benign at this point in time. Not everyone in the UFO community agrees with my assessment. But I have chosen not to go into the different views and arguments on the question "disclosure or not?" or "disclosure or Psyop?" in this text. 

Public transparency doesn't guarantee unrestricted information flow from officials. That is neither surprising nor necessarily suspicious. There are, however, legal limits to the extent of control that government officials can exert. 

I started to write this text before UFO historian and author Mr Richard Dolan made his show "The End of UFO Disclosure?" on his YouTube channel (live-streamed on August 19, 2020). Even though I disagree with Mr Dolan's pessimistic (or realistic) outlook on the future of disclosure, I think he raises some relevant points in his analysis from August 19, 2020. 

I will come back to Mr Dolan's video further down, but now to my thoughts on plausible scenarios to the question mentioned at the beginning of this text. 

Political scientist Alexander Wendt on UFOs

 The link at the end of this text takes you to an interview with professor of international relations, Alexander Wendt, done by Sean Illing for Vox. The article was updated on July 24, 2020, due to the New York Times (NYT) article about the Pentagon´s Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (there is a link to the NYT article in Illing´s article). 

My main point with this text is to highlight the fact that most people who study credible data on the UFO phenomenon will end up with the conclusion that there is a real phenomenon worthy of a scientific investigation. Most people reaching that conclusion can separate the issue of UFOs being real from the issue of what they are. Unfortunately, unsound sceptics like Seth Shostak and Neil deGrasse Tyson tries to make it the case that everyone interested in, or all believers of the reality of, the UFO phenomenon cannot differentiate between those two issues. 

For sure, some UFO believers have a hard time understanding the difference between saying that UFOs are real and what/who is behind UFOs. But Sean Illing and Alexander Wendt do not fit into that category. I think both Illing´s and Wendt´s approach to the UFO phenomenon, and their conversation in the interview, can serve as a model of how to be and stay, both open-minded and sceptical. 

Beware of the so called "skeptics"

 

"Whatever you do ... don't go West." Uploaded on YouTube channel 1967sander on the 11 August 2020. Duration: 5:15 minutes.

Among UFO skeptics he is considered as a main source of information and many debunkers see in him a real image guru but is he really that professional as they say? We are of a different opinion!

Licens
Creative Commons-licens – attribution (återanvändning tillåten)

 The reason I post this video is that I agree with what the representative of the imagery analysis team, 1967sander, says about the self-proclaimed "sceptics" of the UFO phenomenon. In this case, the "sceptic", or debunker, is Mike West. I do not know Mike West personally so I cannot judge his character, values, etc. Neither am I agreeing with 1967sander on the "Area 51 UFOs" mentioned in the video above. 

More specifically, I agree with 1967sander (the representative of the team) when he in the video says that criticism and scepticism are important and welcome if done professionally. My experience with most of the so-called sceptics, or what I call unsound sceptics, is that they seem to have gone to the same course in "unsound scepticism 101." It seems like that course is teaching people to become cognitively rigid, close-minded, and to repeat the same sceptical-sounding phrases. Also, to have an extremely stubborn attitude, and at no cost change an opinion. 

Of course, you have the same rigid thinking and stubbornness among the halleluja-believers in UFOs (referring to people believing all ETs are about peace, love, and understanding).

Scientists think UFOs deserve scientific investigation

**This text is copied from my article on Medium. Therefore, most of the links will not open in a new window.** /Janne 

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In an opinion piece in Scientific American, two scientists write that UFOs are a scientifically interesting problem and deserve objective scientific analysis.

The two scientists and authors of the article in Scientific American, Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, suggest that interdisciplinary teams of scientists should study UFOs, or UAP (UAP, referring to “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon”, is the preferred term by the U.S. Department of Defense).

Why should scientists spend their time and energy, and risk their reputation, on studying UFOs, according to the authors? Their answer in the article published on July 27, 2020, is partly based on the released videos by the Department of Defense (DoD) showing UFOs/UAP, the recent confirmation by the DoD that the videos are in fact genuine, and that the flying objects are still classified as “unidentified”, or “unexplained.”

But the authors' main answer to the question of why study the UFO phenomenon is also the most pertinent one:

Progress in the status of the UFO phenomenon as a legitimate subject to study

  

"UFO News Update: 8/2/2020." Uploaded by YouTube channel UFO News Network Sunday, 2 August, 2020. Duration: 34:04 minutes. 

Frank discusses even more NY Times article fallout and their follow up article, the Mellon CNN interview where he confirms crash retrievals were brought up in Congressional briefings, the Scientific American article calling for more scientific study of UFOs and a review of Episode 4 of Unidentified.

Host Frank Stalter comments on the latest UFO news from the past week, for example, Blumenthal´s and Kean´s New York Times article "Do we believe in U.F.O.s. That´s the wrong question." (see first link below), CNN´s interview with Chris Mellon (see second link below), and Scientific American´s article about UFOs deserving scientific investigation (see the third link below). 

• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/insider/UFO-reporting.html

• https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/08/01/pentagons-ufo-unit-will-make-some-findings-public.cnn

• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-better-known-as-ufos-deserve-scientific-investigation/

Enjoy the progress in the status of the UFO phenomenon as a legitimate subject to study. 

Take care!

/Janne