Confirmation, transparency, or disclosure?

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash

Introduction

A lot of positive things have happened to the UFO subject during the last ten years, compared to the status of the UFO subject before 2017. 

For example, we have had U.S. military and intelligence confirmation that some UFOs/UAP are real and unidentified, and, therefore, a national security issue, which has been both an enabler and a constraint in making the UFO subject credible. The public has also experienced U.S. Congressional hearings on different aspects of the UFO issue and institutional transparency. 

There has been some political and news- and social media movement in other countries as well regarding the UFO/UAP issue. (The link goes to a study on the "transparency effect" on r/UFO and r/UAP subreddits, but more relevant here is that the study note the "rich semantics associated with ‘disclosure’ and ‘transparency,’..." (p. 19, in the pdf-version)).

In short, the UFO phenomenon as a legitimate subject has made progress that was hard to imagine before 2017.

Nevertheless, let us pause and consider the current UFO-situation. What is happening, and how can we accurately describe it? Are we living in an era of confirmation, transparency, or disclosure? Or are we experiencing a mix of all three? (The question of psy-ops is complicated, so I will not address it here, but suffice to say is that the entirety of what started in 2017 is not a psy-op).

Personally, I am confused and thought I would write a blog post with the purpose of trying to clarify those three terms for myself.

What follows are my "definitions" of confirmation, transparency, and disclosure in relation to the UFO issue. You do not have to agree with my view. At the same time, I hope my distinctions can be of some use in clarifying the current state of the UFO subject and perhaps even the direction the UFO-situation is heading. 

Three terms that answer three different questions

Confirmation is a claim about the phenomenon itself: it asks, Is the phenomenon real? And what are unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)? Take note: we have official confirmation that we have detected UAP, but it is not officially confirmed if any are non-human intelligence. The confirmation most people are awaiting would determine if a UFO/UAP case involves non-human technology or intelligence, based on independently verifiable and replicable evidence.

When Disclosure seems Co-opted: Recognising deception in the current UFO disclosure battle

A follow-up to "The Barriers to Global UFO Disclosure: Power, Betrayal, and the Compounding Cost of Secrecy"

Background

On February 19, 2026, President Trump signed a directive instructing federal agencies to identify and release government records concerning UFOs/UAP, alien or extraterrestrial life, and related matters. Whatever one thinks of the current U.S. administration, the directive represented a meaningful political acknowledgement that the American public deserves access to information that has been withheld for decades.

Then came the implementation.

Whistleblowers — current and former government employees and contractors with direct knowledge of UFO-related programs — were told their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) would be waived. They could speak. But only through designated channels: AARO, ODNI, and PURSUE. Not to Congress directly. Not to the public. Back into the system or the "structure of UFO secrecy".

A UAP whistleblower named Matthew Brown published an article yesterday — July 24, 2026 — that I recommend reading in full. Titled "Catch and Kill," it documents in sobering detail why those three designated channels (mainly AARO and ODNI) are precisely the wrong ones to trust with sensitive whistleblower testimony. Brown's article is one of the most concretely argued pieces on the current UAP transparency effort I have read in some time. 

Hence, his article functions as a credible anchor for what I want to explore in this post. Because reading Brown's account through a particular framework (military deception principles) reveals something that I think should be named directly:

What is currently being presented as a top down UFO/UAP transparency effort resembles the fingerprints of a psychological operation and/or institutional deception.

I am not claiming that everyone officially involved in the current UFO disclosure battle is consciously running a psy-op or reproducing deception. Neither am I claiming that the presidential directive was issued in bad faith. 

What I am claiming is that the institutional structures in place — independent of the intentions behind them — are producing outcomes consistent with well-documented military deception principles and tactics. 

And I am claiming these outcomes are likely not random. It is what happens when institutions (e.g., political, military, intelligence, etc.) protecting decades of mismanagement of the UFO issue are put in charge of revealing, or whitewashing, the ethical and legal transgressions regarding UFO/UAP secrecy.

However, even though the outcomes are likely not accidental, it does not logically follow that the entire mismanagement of the UFO issue is because of deliberate deception, misdirection and/or concealment. 

Therefore, when you read the military deception tools below, keep in mind that the mismanagement of UFO transparency is most likely a complex mixture of incompetence, conformity, ideology, and deliberate (and sometimes rogue) decisions to use any means necessary to hinder disclosure (which from a bureaucratic and technocratic perspective would be catastrophic).

Principles of military deception and why they matter here

The US Army Field Manual FM 90-2, Battlefield Deception (1988), documents principles and tactics of military deception. These tools of military deception were developed from game theory, historical analysis, etc., and they were originally designed for use against foreign adversaries in military contexts. The principles and tactics I will focus on are: Magruder's Principle, Jones' Dilemma, and Cry-Wolf.