UAP: is anybody in charge?
Summary Reports : interview of Historian Richard Dolan on Theories of Everything
During a conversation, Curt Jaimungal interviewed Richard Dolan, renowned historian of the UFO phenomenon.
Responding to rumors surrounding his absence in the UFO arena, Curt explained that he had withdrawn from the debate because he was disappointed and saddened by the lack of progress. Does this mean that the effectiveness of Congressional hearings is being called into question? One wonders whether it is naïve to ask the guardians of secrecy - the Pentagon - to lift the veil, knowing the risk of having to disentangle the truth from disinformation. How many ufologists and enthusiasts have tried this approach over the last 40 decades? The results do not seem to live up to expectations.
The subject of the search for truth, the place of facts and the hermeneutics of suspicion, which consists of examining facts with a critical eye a priori, have been approached from a philosophical point of view with a historical perspective of contemporary materialism: collect what data? Debris? Evidence? This more distanced approach to the UFO phenomenon opens the door to the background of the phenomenon, to questions about reality, the nature of the human being, and God.
Dolan talked about his next book, due out in May 2024, in which he presents 600 UFO cases classified into 15 categories. This work enables him to assert that UFOs, or unidentified underwater objects, are a real security concern for the US Navy, as Admiral Gallaudet has already pointed out.
The disclosure problem
Richard Dolan supports the idea that a public debate on UFOs is necessary. He particularly welcomes the initiative of Congress and the European Parliament. This is a step in the right direction, and further revelations are expected in the coming months. For him, the revelations obtained in recent years are unprecedented and important, because he shares Sean Kirkpatrick's idea that data is necessary to move forward.
But "we have not had good data on the UFO subject", he lamented. Usually this data is physical or electronic: incident reports, videos, even debris of military origin. For Dolan, the focus on information from the Pentagon and other institutions, even when it is declassified, leads to an overly partial view of the phenomenon. The subject of UAP is “ vastly greater profundity, than anything that is really being discussed in the public realm.”
The historian believes that this material data is the tree that hides the forest of testimonies that have been insufficiently taken into account until now. He spoke of "1000s upon 1000s, and more 1000s of eyewitness testimonies of UFOs, over 70, 80 or more years, that just gets dismissed”. He is horrified by the blindness that leads to ignoring "things as dramatic as personal encounters as well as including abductions, or alleged abductions, or alleged contact experiences”. Yet our species, the human species, is particularly gifted at listening, hearing and, in short, observing what surrounds us. How then can we explain this lack of interest?
If these testimonies were to be taken into account, it would have far-reaching consequences for governments. Richard Dolan used the case of cattle mutilations in the 1970s as an example. From 1973 onwards, New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska were hit by a wave of cattle attacks. The FBI, asked by members of parliament to investigate, declined. In the end, an investigation office was funded in New Mexico and concluded that these mutilations were the work of predators and scavengers. Let's imagine that the investigation concluded that strange entities with advanced and unknown technologies were responsible for these acts. The government would have had to explain themselves, which was impossible because they simply didn't understand the phenomenon.
For the guest, the problem is exactly the same today. Admitting "abductions", for example, would force the government to admit that it did not understand who was behind them. It would also have to specify how long it has known about them, what they have done, or any potential agreements they may have made with those entities. These are admittedly awkward questions. If the government agrees to take the testimonies into account, they will have to admit their powerlessness, their lies and, probably, the compromises they made. The aim is to maintain absolute control over the narrative, and Richard Dolan has serious doubts about the possibility of disclosure.
The empire and its factions
Information is harder to control today, the historian noted. The development of the Internet and computer-related technologies encourages curiosity. The number of people searching for information, checking it and disseminating it has grown considerably in recent years. This trend towards access to information is worrying governments, who are beginning to take steps to limit freedom of expression and information.
It's a delicate situation for the government, who is trying to keep their cards close to them in various ways. Richard Dolan believes that we are witnessing the establishment of a “centralized digital control over populations/ a kind of soft version of totalitarianism”. But as we all know, control encourages conspiracy theories. Amused, the guest donned his conspiracy theorist hat and cited a few: JFK, 911, Covid... and UFOs. The UFO conspiracy is the biggest and oldest of these theories. As soon as the government admits the existence of a conspiracy designed to conceal the reality of the UFO phenomenon, the public will be entitled to ask about the other conspiracy theories. Some will object that it has already admitted the existence of UFOs. But our historian points out that, on the one hand, this was admitted behind closed doors, in classified briefings, and that, on the other, a potential Russian or Chinese origin has been proposed. They only admitted "that there are some UAP out there that they haven't been able to explain". They haven't explained the Nimitz encounter, for example, which it would be absurd to attribute to an alien craft. For Richard Dolan, all this is not disclosure.
At this stage, there are two forces at work: the truth-seekers, of whom there are many today, and the government, which is trying to maintain control. One might imagine that the latter is in the process of controlled disclosure, so as not to shock the public. And indeed the guest is convinced that "very slow acculturation is probably a smart approach", because "the reality of what we are talking about, is, undoubtedly, such a profoundly different kind of understanding of life, the universe, everything”. However, the historian does not believe that the government as a whole is attempting controlled disclosure, because it is not a unified entity. Rather, it is a question of attempts by certain factions to inform the public.
For Richard Dolan, when we talk about the USA, we are not dealing with a state but an empire, and the government is the institution that runs it. In this day and age, “It's finding that that power is fracturing and breaking in every direction". He compares it to ancient Rome, which, having created highly effective institutions, was in a way a victim of its own success and failed because of its size and the new populations it integrated. In the same way today :
That global empire is run by collaboration of private money, ton of private money, private corporations contracting through the classified network, within the DoD, within the department of energy, within the US intelligence community, and they run this American Empire.
For these players, disclosure poses a number of problems, particularly legal ones. Hal Puthoff already mentioned this during his lecture at the Sol Foundation. Finally, the historian pointed out that some members of the classified community are willing to share information with the public. This latter faction, often made up of retired people, has always existed. Given this picture, it is easy to understand the cacophony that so often reigns when the subject of disclosure is tackled.
For Richard Dolan, it is really about who has the power and control in the labyrinth that has become the US government. He talked about how Deputy Chief of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Wilson was denied access by private actors to a sub-program on reverse engineering. The existence of an office called the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, SAPCO, does not in fact allow any real control over activities and the allocation of funding. According to the guest, the government has become "a system of legal illegality" in which a lot of money circulates without any oversight.
The historian then raised the question of the President's level of information and therefore control. What is he informed about, and what is it desirable for him to be informed about? Generally speaking, it is the role of the administration to manage day-to-day affairs, not that of the President. He is therefore not informed of all the programs in progress. What's more, events such as the overthrow of President Arbenz in Guatemala prove that the services, the CIA for example, organize secret operations in foreign countries. If the president is not informed, he can present a "plausible deniability" about his country's involvement in these operations.
Language and transition
Richard Dolan has observed a marked increase in UAP sightings over the last two centuries. He links this trend to our entry into what he calls the age of science.
In previous centuries, sightings were few and far between. A common objection is that the cultural conditions of those times made it impossible to record them. But the guest disagrees. He believes that "if we've had anywhere near the density of sightings that we're having today, 200-300 years ago, we would have known, I think people would have noticed" and we would have records in historical documents. Besides, he said, observations from those times are unreliable, because of two conditions: first, the scientific level achieved at the time and the lack of scientific culture among the population favored alien or supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. Second, according to the historian, "it is absolutely crucial when we're looking at these old UFO alleged reports, that we have some understanding of the society out of which they come”. This is a warning he gives about the book Les merveilles du ciel by Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, which he greatly appreciates. He regrets the lack of consideration given to the historical context of the time, which alters the interpretation of the source. The writings follow codes that differ from period to period, and the expression is sometimes highly symbolic, to captivate the audience but also to protect the author from authoritarian political conditions. With this precaution in mind, Richard Dolan remains convinced that certain old UAP sightings are quite serious, which means that we have been observed for a long, long time.
After studying “the history of UFO sightings" and reading “thousands and thousands and thousands of UFO sightings, through the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries”, the guest develops a theory according to which the development of language inevitably leads to the development of science. An intelligent alien civilization could predict this, including how many generations would be needed to achieve complex science after the emergence of language.
If such is true, we have gone from low-level surveillance for around 50,000 years to intense observation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Richard Dolan notes that UAP sightings skyrocketed after the Second World War, the rise of atomic and computer technologies enabling the human race to make a qualitative and quantitative leap in its relationship with the world. According to the historian, many visitors are anxious to see us enter this new world - their world - and are observing, guiding or controlling this process. Thanks to new technologies, our species has entered a transition process. We are moving from a natural human being to an artificial, or even digital human being, entering virtual reality and augmented reality. This transition will have major consequences for human psychology and political organization. This is what aliens would know, because they would have gone through this transition.
Aliens
Richard Dolan is therefore convinced that aliens are among us, on Earth, sometimes on infiltration missions. The existence of aliens is proven by eyewitness accounts. He has interviewed many people, whom he considers credible, who have had contact with human-looking aliens. In particular, he reports on two encounters with "Pleiadians", tall, blond, blue-eyed and extremely beautiful creatures. The first encounter took place in 1965 in Pennsylvania. A young woman was in church when she had a telepathic experience with a couple of 'Pleiadians'. "They were like supermodels", she said, "I could hear them in my mind". The second encounter was reported to Richard Dolan by a former USAF colonel. The colonel, his wife and a medium friend came face to face with a couple of "Pleiadians" in a Las Vegas casino. Once again, there was a telepathic experience, but what makes this case special is an episode of amnesia. The colonel recounted that after the encounter, his psychic friend suggested regressive hypnosis to clarify the memories. But "every time she tries to regress him, he hears - they hear construction noise outside the house, jackhammers and noise", he reported. They gave up, and the colonel contacted his friend again to try hypnosis, but she had no memory of the event. "So somehow, in the subsequent month, her memory had been tampered with by some unknown group", says Richard Dolan.
For the historian, there are many forms of life in the universe. But "planets like our own are quite special and unique (...). We are exploding with all kinds of genetic diversity”, he says, which makes us a very interesting species. For this reason, we are visited by several kinds of aliens, some human-looking, some not. They are probably not spiritual beings, but "They may have the ability to manipulate what we would consider dimensions. And I think that's where the interdimensional aspect probably comes in. (...) The ones who are landing and craft, the ones who are entering oceans or coming out of oceans or coming in from an altitude of 200,000 feet down to land in the ground tracked on radar, I don't think that they're spiritual entities".
Are aliens, physical beings from an advanced world, here to guide us or control our transition? Richard Dolan is concerned about the naïve belief in the New Age thinking that aliens are ethical beings. To reach the level of civilization that allows them to be here today, he warns us, "they, like us, became the apex predators of their world". Like us, "they had to subjugate other species to do their work for them, which is what we do, we subjugate plants, we subjugate animals", he continues, and "they must have gone through a period of extreme violence to do so. Which is what we've done, we've only succeeded because we're violent.” The problem we urgently need to face is this: "they may support our development, but they may have problems with our development".
They are out there. Are they thinking of our interests or their own? Richard Dolan invites us to approach the subject of UFOs from beyond the 'nuts and bolts' aspect, which has already been worked on extensively, to achieve a better understanding of the potential 'threat' posed by our exotic visitors. It's time to take a closer look at the entirety of sightings and encounters that have been accumulated over the decades. We have always treated those with suspicion, if not disdain. Jacques Vallée explains that the stranger the evidence, the less likely it is to be reported, cataloged and studied. Yet it is in the strangeness of the phenomenon that the greatest scientific questions, and consequently future discoveries, lie.
Translation by Guillaume Fournier Airaud
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0