Introduction
In my previous post, I argued that a global UFO/UAP disclosure is necessary because the ontological acknowledgement of the phenomenon's reality belongs to all of humanity, and because our institutions have both the duty and, I believe, the capacity to deliver it wisely. I outlined what such an acknowledgement might look like and why the meaning-making conversation that follows cannot and should not be controlled from the top down.
What I deliberately left out of that post were the harder questions. The ones I find genuinely difficult to think through without arriving at conclusions that are uncomfortable and, unfortunately, realistic.
This post is an attempt to go into that uncomfortable territory honestly. It is a more pessimistic, or realistic, text than my previous one. Pessimistic in the sense of looking clearly at the barriers to global UFO disclosure without softening them into something more manageable than they are.
What I explore and claim in this post is nothing original. Many UFO researchers, and armchair commentators like myself, have considered the barriers to an official UFO/UAP disclosure throughout UFO history. For example, Richard Dolan recently commented on the UAP briefing at Capitol Hill on the 9th June, featuring David Grusch, members of Congress, and several prominent figures involved in the disclosure effort.
What Mr Dolan says in his YouTube-video (duration: 12:34 min.) about the key issues for disclosure being "legislative power" (e.g., whistleblower protection) and "the system defending itself" apply to what I write below.
However, I do not believe the encouraging and courageous disclosure effort in the USA is sufficient for a global ontological acknowledgement of the reality of the UFO/UAP issue. One crucial thing that was said at the UAP briefing on Capitol Hill came from Representative Eric Burlison. Mr Burlison said something to the effect that the disclosure effort is a "world-wide call to action" (Rep. Burlison appears between 4:00 min. and 10:20 min., and to the end of the video by News Nation).
I agree with Representative Burlison that a truly global ontological acknowledgement of the reality of the UFO/UAP issue is necessary. The problems of "legislative power" and "the system defending itself" can be generalised to the entire world order, or the transnational and transactional power structure, if you will.
This post addresses the real nature and scope of barriers to global UFO/UAP disclosure. The USA is courageously and persistently leading the disclosure effort. But because of the complex and entrenched power relations and systems on a global level, I worry the current effort by the USA will not drive a global disclosure process.
In the text below, I begin with what I believe is the primary barrier to global UFO/UAP disclosure. After that, I will present scenarios of what information (or revelations) disclosure likely entails, and how a specific scenario is connected to the theme "the system defending itself". Then follows a section on why secrecy becomes harder to break over time (the "compounding betrayal-dynamic") and a section on the problem of institutional "capture" (or co-opting) of global UFO/UAP disclosure. This post ends with a summary of the most relevant points and clarifications on what I am saying or not saying about global disclosure.
The primary barrier is political-economic
Most discussions about why UFO/UAP disclosure has not happened focus on epistemological barriers: the evidence is not yet compelling enough, the public is not ready, the scientific establishment needs more time, the phenomenon is too complex to communicate clearly. These are real considerations. But I am increasingly convinced that they are secondary barriers to global UFO disclosure.
The primary barrier is political-economic: the power to set the agenda, decide, and fund those agendas and decisions.
Consider what an institutionally honest UFO/UAP disclosure would mean for the major power structures of our world, materially and structurally (i.e., relations of power and control over mutual interests).
If the UFO/UAP issue involves non-human energy and propulsion systems that could be understood and eventually applied - and I believe this is among the most important possibilities on the table - then disclosure is not merely a cultural or existential event. Global UFO/UAP disclosure is an earthquake, or perhaps the most subversive knowledge, to the current geopolitical and economical world order.
Fossil fuel capital ("capital" in the sense of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu), which underpins enormous concentrations of wealth and geopolitical power, potentially becomes obsolete. The entire military-industrial complex - its weapons systems, its procurement economy, its strategic doctrines built on current assumptions about what is technologically possible - faces fundamental disruption. Political institutions that have actively deceived their populations for decades face legitimacy crises of a kind that democratic systems are not well-equipped to absorb. Especially not in the current historical era, with decreased trust in our institutions and affective polarisation on most social issues, etc. The scientific establishment, which has practiced boundary work against the UFO issue and dismissed credible witnesses for generations, loses enormous authority in the event of global UFO/UAP disclosure.
None of these power holders need to coordinate consciously to produce secrecy regarding the UFO issue. That is a crucial point. Each institution, or each field of power and legitimacy, following its own internal logic of self-preservation, arrives at the same outcome independently. The suppression of UFO/UAP truth is not a conspiracy in the conventional sense: a group of people in a room deciding to lie (even though that has happened, e.g., the Robertson panel).
The UFO secrecy has a structural nature of overlapping fields of power and mutual interests whose rules of the game depend on the current order remaining stable. On a social psychological level, you can think of the actors in these fields of power behaving according to Social Identity Theory (a theory about social identity and conflict and collaboration between ingroups and outgroups). In this post, I am looking at the barriers and resistance (or "inertia") from a macro-sociological and institutional perspective, but keep in mind that there is an interaction between agents/agency and structure (refer, for instance, to Anthony Gidden's structuration theory or Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of "habitus", "field", and "capital").
The structural nature makes the political-economic barrier exceptionally robust. You cannot dismantle it simply by exposing a conspiracy, because there is no single conspiracy to expose. The suppression of the UFO/UAP issue is, in a sense, nobody's fault and everybody's fault simultaneously. Individual agents are reproducing (usually unconsciously or without reflection) the structural nature through training and socialisation of the game. It is what happens when multiple powerful institutions share a common interest in remaining dominant and relevant, and without ever needing to discuss it explicitly.
And it means that the common expectation held by many in the UFO and disclosure community - that sufficiently compelling evidence will eventually force disclosure - may be based on a misunderstanding of where the resistance lives. Evidence is persuasive within epistemological contexts, among people whose primary commitment is to truth. But the UFO secrecy is held within a global political-economic system, where the essential commitment is to the preservation and accumulation of power, capital, and institutional survival. In that system, evidence has much less leverage than we would like to believe.
What moves political-economic structures is not evidence. It is power and dominance. Global disclosure is made possible by making the cost of secrecy exceed the cost of disclosure or by structural disruptions that destroy the institutional architecture of UFO secrecy itself.
We might experience one or several of these strategies being applied in the disclosure effort by the USA. The question is, will they disrupt the global political-economic system? How powerful is the USA in relation to other nations regarding the UFO/UAP issue? Or perhaps the most relevant question is: What power relations between nations are maintaining the UFO secrecy? And what and how can disrupt and shift the power balance between those nations?
Three scenarios and why Scenario B matters most
I find it useful to think about the barriers to disclosure in terms of three distinct scenarios, each involving a different version of what information disclosure contains.
Scenario A is the most manageable. The UFO phenomenon is real, non-human, and ontologically significant, but the institutional response has been primarily one of secrecy and denial driven by confusion, fear of public panic, and the competitive logic of national security, rather than by deeper crimes. In this scenario, institutions could, in principle, position themselves alongside the public as fellow discoverers of an astonishing reality. The narrative available to them would be: "We were cautious, perhaps overly so, but we were trying to protect stability while we understood what we were dealing with. Now we know enough to tell you". This is a story institutions could survive telling (this is what should have happened in the 1950s or the early 1960s).
Scenario B is the one I find most likely, and the one that I believe is the primary driver of the 70-year UFO secrecy. In this scenario, the suppressed truth includes not just the reality of the phenomenon, but evidence of what institutions did in response to it: retrieval and reverse engineering of non-human craft with no democratic mandate or public knowledge, deliberate psychological operations run against civilian populations, the systematic destruction of careers and reputations of credible witnesses, and decades of coordinated, knowing deception at the highest levels of government, military and intelligence power (including private contractors).
Scenario C is the one most frequently invoked by institutional actors to justify continued secrecy: that the truth contains something so threatening, so destabilising to human psychology or social order, that it cannot yet be responsibly released. I am skeptical of this scenario, not because I dismiss the possibility that the truth is deeply strange, but because the "people can't handle it" argument has historically been used by every paternalistic power structure to justify withholding information that the public had every right to know. It is the oldest self-serving justification in the arsenal of secrecy.
If Scenario B is even partially accurate, then the disclosure effort is not, from the power holders' perspective, foremost about UFOs/UAP. It is simultaneously a profound political and moral rupture: a revelation of institutional betrayal on a civilisational scale.
Thus, Scenario B is categorically harder to absorb than Scenario A. And it is, I think, exactly why the UFO secrecy has been so durable. Because the global power holders know that UFO disclosure is not about transferring the truth to the public, rather disclosure implies a civilisational transition that has never occurred in human history before.
The compounding betrayal-dynamic: Why secrecy becomes harder to break over time
The longer the UFO/UAP secrecy continues, the worse the eventual betrayal narrative becomes. Every decade of continued UFO secrecy adds to the weight of what must eventually be disclosed. This creates a self-reinforcing trap (or a positive feedback loop in the entire system) from which it becomes progressively harder to escape:
Early disclosure - in the 1950s or early 1960s - might have been institutionally survivable. The UFO cover-up was young, the lies relatively few, and the institutional fingerprints not yet too deep. But each passing decade raises the cost of eventual disclosure. Which increases the rational incentive for continued secrecy or cover-up, which makes the eventual disclosure worse, which in turn raises the cost further (i.e., a self-reinforcing and compounding betrayal-dynamic).
The institutions and power holders implicated in UFO/UAP secrecy are not foremost protecting a secret about the nature and intent of the phenomenon. They are protecting themselves from accountability for the management of that secret. And that accountability grows more devastating with every year of continuation.
Therefore, I have become skeptical of the gradual-pressure model of disclosure, i.e., the hope that congressional hearings, whistleblower legislation, and accumulated evidence will slowly force the truth out through normal institutional channels. Those channels are controlled by the same power holders who have the most to lose from what those channels might reveal. The system is, in a way, self-sealing.
The closest historical analogy I can think of is the Catholic Church's handling of institutional abuse. Decades of compounding cover-up. Enormous resistance to transparency at every level. Partial admissions carefully framed to minimise accountability, and so on. And even now, after decades of external pressure, journalism, legal action, and enormous reputational damage, incomplete transparency.
The structural logic governing that situation and the one surrounding UFO/UAP secrecy are, I think, remarkably similar. The difference is one of scale and subject matter, not of institutional sociology.
The problem of capture or co-opting of well-intentioned disclosure efforts
Let me set Scenario B aside for a moment and steelman the most optimistic version of the situation: A group of institutional actors who genuinely want to make the ontological acknowledgement, who understand the importance of doing so wisely, and who are trying in good faith to navigate the challenge. Even in this best case, serious structural problems remain.
In my previous post, I argued for a joint acknowledgement delivered by relevant authorities, framed carefully to open uncertainty rather than close it, etc. I stand by the reasoning behind that recommendation. But I have become more alert to a danger embedded within it.
The very act of authoritative declaration - however wisely framed - risks positioning the declaring institutions as the legitimate interpreters of what the UFO phenomenon means for humanity. The public, quite reasonably, may conclude: "These are the people who knew, and now they are explaining it to us". That conclusion reproduces institutional authority rather than distributing it. It is a form of capture, or co-opting, of the disclosure story. That is, the narrative becomes owned by the same power structures that managed the secrecy, even if their intentions at the moment of disclosure are good.
And in Scenario B, this capture problem becomes acute to the point of paradox. The institutions with sufficient authority to make the ontological acknowledgement credible are also the institutions whose acknowledgement would destroy the very legitimacy of an official (or top down) UFO/UAP disclosure.
If the executive branch of the United States government stand before the world and say we can now confirm the reality of non-human intelligence interacting with Earth - and if the next question is inevitably how long have you known, and what have you been doing about it - then the ontological acknowledgement and the betrayal arrive simultaneously. The moment of UFO truth is also the moment of institutional indictment.
Thus, the deepest structural paradox I have encountered in thinking about global disclosure is:
- There may be no institution or authority currently in existence who has both the authority to make the ontological acknowledgement credible and the clean hands required to facilitate what comes next.
What this means for the meaning-making conversation and for all of us
My previous post argued that the meaning-making conversation after an ontological acknowledgement cannot and should not be controlled from the top down. This post adds a harder edge to that: in Scenario B, it cannot be facilitated from the top down, because the would-be facilitators are implicated parties whose primary interest in any post-disclosure conversation is the management of their own accountability.
This does not make the meaning-making conversation impossible. But it means it needs to be built from different foundations, for example, from the communities, organisations, researchers, experiencers, and independent thinkers who have been engaging seriously with the UFO/UAP issue outside institutional frameworks for decades. The epistemic authority for meaning-making has, I believe, already been slowly and quietly shifting in this direction.
But I want to be honest about the limits of this observation as a source of comfort. Those communities - including the digital conversations happening across social media and languages - currently lack the organisational capacity, the financial resources, and the platform reach to drive a conversation that raises the ontological and epistemological legitimacy of the UFO issue at the scale that is necessary for a global disclosure process. Hopefully, I am mistaken, but I do not see any signs that I am.
The playing field remains profoundly unequal. The global political-economic system controlling the secrecy and narrative has enormous advantages that good intentions and intellectual rigour cannot overcome. Again, I hope I will be proved mistaken.
I find myself genuinely uncertain, when I look at this "disclosure field" honestly, about how the deadlock breaks. The most likely mechanisms I can identify are not reassuring: a crisis that makes continued UFO/UAP secrecy and denial technically impossible, a catastrophic failure of institutional credibility that creates an opening for alternative voices, or the phenomenon itself forcing the issue in ways that bypass the entire human institutional apparatus.
That last possibility is not as sensational as it might sound. The phenomenon has been disclosing itself for decades, through encounter experiences, through its apparent indifference to the preferences of the institutions tasked with managing public awareness of it (e.g., the UFO flap over Washington DC in July 1952), etc. Whether one attributes intentionality to this behavior by UFOs/UAP, the empirical observation stands:
The phenomenon does not require institutional permission to make itself known.
Closing thoughts. Neither naïve nor paralysed
I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying in this post.
I am not saying that global UFO/UAP disclosure is impossible. I am not saying the situation is hopeless. I am not abandoning the argument that people have a right to know the truth about the reality they are living in, and that this truth belongs to all of humanity.
What I am saying is that the barriers are structural, not merely psychological or evidential. That the primary barrier is the current global political-economic system (power and control), not epistemological (evidence). I have argued that the institutions currently controlling the relevant UFO information have powerful rational incentives to continue doing so, and that those incentives compound over time rather than diminish (i.e., from their perspective and position in the field of power). Furthermore, I have claimed that even well-intentioned disclosure carries structural dangers that need to be thought through honestly (the problem of institutional capture or co-opting). And that the communities with the clearest epistemic relationship to the phenomenon are currently not in a position to drive the legitimacy of the UFO/UAP issue that is necessary for global disclosure.
Thus, we find ourselves in a (potential) deadlock regarding moving the UFO disclosure process to a global level. To a process where humanity reaches an ontological acknowledgement of the UFO/UAP issue.
I am saying all of that because I think realism about the barriers is more useful than wishful-thinking. Understanding clearly why something is hard is the first step toward engaging with it in ways that are adequate to the challenge. If we do not perceive and understand the problem correctly, then our methods and strategy for change will not impact the problem. What I have been claiming is that the USA cannot bring about global disclosure on its own. The USA needs and should have support from other nations regarding UFO/UAP disclosure.
The structural deadlock described in this post is, I believe, real. The deadlock is also likely not permanent. Deadlocks of this kind dissolve through external disruption: events that force contradictions into the open in ways that existing institutions cannot deny or control. Or through the slow accumulation of acknowledged reality until the official secrecy becomes not just dishonest but visibly absurd.
Both processes are, I believe, already underway. At least in the USA, but not in the rest of the world. And that is the most important point in this post and my deepest worry:
Is the courageous disclosure effort in the USA sufficient for global disclosure? Or will the transnational and transactional power system react with self-preserving counter-measures or co-opting the disclosure narrative (i.e., we go from one lie/illusion to another regarding the UFO/UAP issue and the disclosure story)?
What those of us outside the institutional apparatus can do is continue to build the interpretive infrastructure that will matter when the moment comes. Rigorous thinking, honest acknowledgement of uncertainty, documentation of testimony and evidence, and the maintenance of epistemic spaces that do not require official validation to function. That is modest work relative to the scale of what is at stake.
But it is real work, and it is ours to do. Who knows how many people will find your work useful in their personal meaning-making process of the UFO issue, what it implies, and so on? So, whatever you are doing on the UFO subject, do it well and with integrity.
Take care
Some ideas in this post were developed through conversations with an AI model. The sociological frameworks referenced, particularly regarding field theory and institutional self-preservation logic, draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
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