Introduction
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| The production and reproduction of the political-economic structure, the primary barrier to global UAP disclosure. Source. |
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. Realistic 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 disclosure throughout UFO history. For example, Richard Dolan recently commented on the UAP briefing at Capitol Hill on June 9, 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.
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 - duration 30 min. - by News Nation).
I agree with Representative Burlison that collaboration between nations is necessary to trigger a global UFO disclosure process. 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 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 dynamics on a global level, I worry the current effort by the USA will not drive a global disclosure process (i.e., the acknowledgement that we are not alone and the following meaning-making conversation).
In the text below, I begin with what I believe is the primary barrier to global UFO/UAP disclosure. After that, I 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 risk of institutional "capture" (or co-opting) of the disclosure narrative (i.e., whitewashing historical and contemporary ethical and legal transgressions).
This post ends with a summary of the most relevant points in the main text below. A recommendation for the reader is to start with the summary ("Closing thoughts") to get a general sense of what this post is trying to convey about the current disclosure situation.
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 scientific establishment needs more time, the phenomenon is too complex to communicate clearly. These are relevant 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. And I am referring to a global (not only in the USA) political-economic structure. This lecture on the power elites in the Danish welfare state gives you a more nuanced example of the modes and sources of power of the political-economic structure. Use the lecture as inspiration or as a point of departure for thinking about "how" and "why" the UFO secrecy has been so durable over the decades.
Consider what an institutionally honest UFO/UAP disclosure might mean for some of the major power structures (or "fields of power") 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 more than a cultural or existential event. Global UAP disclosure is an earthquake, or perhaps the most subversive knowledge, to the current geopolitical and economical world order.
The fossil fuel industry, 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 (which lacks common sense and wisdom, but the link inspires both), 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 (with some exceptions), loses enormous authority in the event of global UFO 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 current suppression of UFO truth is not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, i.e., a group of people in a room deciding to lie (even though that has happened, e.g., the Robertson panel).
The current UFO secrecy has a structural nature of overlapping fields of power and mutual interests (which involve both competition and collaboration, depending on what is at stake) whose rules of the game depend on the current order remaining stable, i.e., certain and predictable. (In reality, certainty and control are vanity and an illusion, but that is another story).
From a social psychological perspective, 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 within and 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".
So, to understand "how" and "why" the political-economic structure produces and reproduces today's UFO secrecy, you have to analyse the problem from different levels (macro-meso-micro). But again, in this post, I am looking at the problem from mainly a bird's-eye view, which has its strengths and limitations. Back to the main thread:
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 UAP issue is, in a sense, nobody's fault and everybody's fault simultaneously. Individual agents are reproducing (usually without reflection) the structural nature through training and internalisation of the rules of the game. Today, the UFO secrecy is likely more about institutional design (rules, norms, conformity, hierarchy, etc.) than some Majestic 12 committee calling the shots regarding the UFO issue.
Or, more correctly, whether the control over and accountability for the UFO secrecy is centralised or distributed is still an open question. The research presented in the lecture above on power elites in the Danish welfare state, seem to support the centralised alternative, or the "onion model", which David Grusch advocates.
Furthermore, the structural nature of UFO secrecy means that the common expectation held by many in the UFO community - that sufficiently compelling evidence will eventually force disclosure - may be based on a misunderstanding of where the inertia to disclosure lives. Evidence is persuasive within epistemological contexts, among people whose primary commitment is to truth. But the UFO secrecy is reproduced within a global political-economic system, where the essential commitment is to the preservation and accumulation of power, profit, and institutional survival.
What motivates 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 dismantle the institutional architecture of UFO secrecy itself.
We might experience one or several of those strategies being applied in the disclosure effort by the USA. The question is, will they disrupt the global political-economic power structure?
Or perhaps the most relevant question is:
What power dynamics within and between nations and transnational entities are reproducing UFO secrecy? And what and how can shift the power dynamics between those nations and transnational entities?
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 from an institutional perspective. 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 disclosure 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 (i.e., the career bureaucrats), military and intelligence power. And, of course, the true power holders within the political-economic structure, like Lockheed Martin and Palantir, which should cement the already obvious fact that there are no clear boundaries between "politics" and "economics/finance".
Note that I did not mention the worst acts done in the name of "the ends justify the means" in Scenario B.
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 sceptical 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 a disclosure effort is not, from the power holders' perspective, foremost about UFOs. It is simultaneously a profound political and moral rupture: a revelation of institutional betrayal on a civilisational scale. That betrayal or earthquake will be the ontological shock of UFO disclosure.
Thus, Scenario B is categorically harder to absorb and manage 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 information to the public, rather disclosure implies a civilisational transition that has never occurred in human history before.
And the worst nightmare of the political-economic power structure is uncertainty, the threat of social disorder, and the rules of the game shifting against them.
The compounding betrayal-dynamic or 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 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 or compounding betrayal-dynamic).
The institutions and power holders implicated in UAP secrecy are not foremost protecting a secret about the nature and intent of the phenomena. They are protecting themselves from accountability for the mismanagement of that secret. And that accountability grows more devastating with every year of continuation.
Therefore, I have become sceptical 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 political-economic powers 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. 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 risk 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 control 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 (mis)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 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 questions are 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 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 or unimportant. But it means it needs to be built on different foundations. For example, on the communities, organisations, researchers, experiencers, and independent thinkers who have been engaging seriously with the UFO/UAP issue outside institutional frameworks. The epistemic authority for meaning-making has, I believe, already been slowly and quietly shifting in this direction.
But I want to be clear about the limits of this observation as a source of comfort. Those communities - including the digital discourse happening across social media - 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 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 silence 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 or through its apparent indifference to the preferences of the institutions tasked with managing public awareness of it. 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 or that the current disclosure situation is hopeless. Neither am I 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 reproducing the 70-year UFO secrecy have 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 efforts carry structural dangers that need to be thought through carefully (the risk 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.
Therefore, I claim 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 fact that we are not alone and likely never have been.
I am saying all of that because I think realism about the barriers is more useful than wishful-thinking. 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 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 (e.g., national security vs. transparency) 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. To keep putting pressure on relevant actors and continue educating the mainstream media and public on why the UFO issue is legitimate to care about. That may seem modest work relative to the scale of what is at stake.
But it is democratic 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
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