Whistleblowers: extraordinary claims, no evidence
The past few years have been marked by sensational claims by whistleblowers, without any evidence being made available to the public.
When Lue Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's AATIP programme, gave his first public interviews on the subject of secret military programmes on UAP, he claimed that the United States had 'exotic' materials, without going any further.
A piece of debris from the questionable 'Art's Parts' recovered by TTSA, which was the subject of a research contract with the US Army, had its analysis report published the previous year, contradicting earlier analyses by Dr Harold Puthoff of the anomalous signatures of the bismuth-magnesium combination.
However, given the number of factual errors in the historical report published the same year by the Pentagon's UAP study group, the reliability of this counter-analysis is questionable.
In official documents uncovered by researcher Dean Johnson, Lue Elizondo goes one step further.
‘The U.S. Government (or a defense contractor) has in its possession exotic materials of nonhuman origin.’
While the term 'exotic' could be applied, for example, to unconventional zero-gravity steelmaking technologies, the use of the term 'non-human' is a new euphemism in the language used to avoid saying 'extraterrestrial'. It is often used under the guise of opening up the possibility of an interdimensional origin, a hypothesis so outlandish that it sparks scientists’ ire.
Nevertheless, the fact that we now have in an official document the claim that the US government has such materials, and that it comes from one of the figureheads of the disclosure effort in the US Defence Department, is a remarkable advance.
Later in the document, Lue Elizondo suggests one of the possible reasons for the stalling of efforts to reverse-engineer advanced devices, the first public efforts of which date back to 1949.
I was also informed that, immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the U.S. Government significantly reduced its UAP legacy efforts due to the budgetary constraints associated with the Global War on Terror.
In terms of budgetary statistics, the attacks of 11 September 2001 brought to an end a plateau in US military spending reached in 1986 and set in motion a surge that continues to this day.
One wonders, however, just how costly this long-running research effort on UAPs really is. In a speech on 10 September 2001, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that the United States could not account for $2.3 trillion of its then $300 billion annual budget. For a research programme to be affected by additional spending at a time when the annual budget has more than doubled, reaching $600 billion in 2008 and $871 billion in 2022, raises questions about the funding it absorbs and the weakness of its political levers to secure funding. Moreover, the Pentagon has failed its seventh audit in a row.
One of the most striking statements to be found in official US Congressional documents is the following:
I am aware of several incidents where the U.S. military and certain Defense Contract companies recovered craft/vehicles of non-human origin. In some cases, biological specimens were recovered from such crashes.
While Lue Elizondo has always been very cautious about the presence of bodies in exogenous devices, here he does not use the conditional about their recovery.
The mention of bodies is more likely to raise the ire of scientists than the mention of craft, although it is not outrageous to imagine a craft being piloted by... a pilot. However, the reference to beings descending in extraterrestrial spacecraft triggers the ridicule associated with tales of 'little green men'. The whistleblowers who have spoken on the subject use a thousand euphemisms to avoid referring to bodies, especially as they have no proof of their existence, and numerous forgeries have undermined confidence in this aspect of UFO research for decades.
Lue Elizondo adds:
I am unaware, however, if any of these specimens were “alive” at the time of the recovery. Furthermore, I am unaware if these biological specimens were complete specimens or partial, due to the nature of the crashes.
While he presents it as a certainty that ‘biological specimens’ were recovered, he cannot say whether they were alive or dead, or even in one piece. This would tend to indicate that his confidence in this information did not come from beings he had seen himself, either directly or through photographic evidence. This raises the question of the means he used to verify this third-party information, enabling him to assert that bodies had been recovered.
This is reminiscent of the statements made by numerous former US administration officials revealed in the documentary ‘The Age Of Disclosure’, particularly those of Jay Stratton, former head of the Department of Defense's secret UFO study group, who said:
I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft, and non-human beings.
However, here again, it is unclear what evidence will be shown in the documentary, which has not yet been broadcast at the time of writing.
In the Q&A between Lue Elizondo and Representative Burlison, the former adds:
Several key scientists associated with both AAWSAP and AATIP were part of a conversation, sponsored by the White House in approximately 2004, to determine if the U.S. public was prepared for the acknowledgement of UAP by the U.S. Government. After approximately one week of deliberations, the decision was made that the U.S. Government should not disclose any UAP-related information to the public.
While there is no doubt about the secrecy surrounding the subject of UFOs in the US, as any information or document relating to the subject is now automatically classified, it is rare to know exactly when and how decisions were taken to establish secrecy, and the logic behind these decisions.
Lue Elizondo's testimony shows that it was scientists who were able to participate in these deliberations under the aegis of the White House, at the time under the leadership of George W. Bush.
Bush refused to answer questions on the subject in interviews but he added on the subject:
‘It might spin you into orbit’.
Another interesting statement by Lue Elizondo, now written in black and white, is the following:
The CIA opposed the transfer of materials of advanced, non-human origin from Lockheed Martin to Bigelow Aerospace.
While former CIA officers have always been cautious about the direct involvement of the CIA, such as Andrew Bustamente, there is no doubt that every major power on the planet has a foreign technology recovery group.
These actions may be illegal, but they are extremely useful for evaluating the technological developments of rival or allied actors, and for benefiting one's own industry.
Assuming the presence of advanced, wholly or partially non-human devices during landings or crashes, the recovery of these objects would become a national security issue protected by the highest level of secrecy. The success or failure of reverse engineering would not even be a factor, since the primary interest of such an operation would be to prevent the original actor or another interested party from recovering the device.
However, the CIA's direct involvement in this is not necessarily illegal: if the Agency determined that the BAAS/AAWSAP structure represented a potential security breach, given the strategic interest of these items, it is understandable that it would have prevented the transfer of the results of its recovery operations, even if it did not understand the technology.
In a later response, Elizondo added that the Air Force, which had been the first public linchpin in the handling of UFO cases in the United States, had also shown some resistance to sharing information.
These statements are intriguing when juxtaposed with the even stranger claims of whistleblower Jake Barber, who first claimed to have recovered non-human craft himself, without providing any evidence, and then wanted to set up a public-private programme using 'psionic' humans capable of remotely piloting non-human craft to prove his claims.
Some may wonder what prevented Barber from doing this work before he made his statements, so that he would have the evidence to back up his claims.
We also learned this week that whistleblower David Grusch, who mentioned in public Congressional hearings that the US had recovered biological material from non-human spacecraft crashes and offered to provide all the information in classified briefings, has still not been accredited to provide this information more than a year later.
For his part, whistleblower Jason Sands refuses to elaborate on his statements about missions to eliminate alleged non-human beings, after appearing as a witness in James Fox's recent documentary, The Program, and without being able to provide evidence of his close encounters.
The increasingly bold statements made by whistleblowers are now being met with disbelief by much of the scientific and military community, who have never been briefed on the subject, and by the mass of the population, who have only in recent years discovered the existence of the UFO phenomenon.
Recent documents leaked by other whistleblowers have also been accused of presenting objects out of context as UFOs. Other objects presented as anomalous have also been explained by conventional causes.
A further step is therefore required: the discovery of incontrovertible scientific evidence of the presence of objects with extraterrestrial technology. Dr Garry Nolan is leading debris studies at Stanford University with his own funding, while Dr Avi Loeb is setting up multimodal observatories at Harvard University. Prof. Hakan Kayal is conducting studies using satellites and deployable observatories in known high-density areas. Prof Knuth and Dr Szydagis of the University of Albany are conducting multispectral field campaigns. Dr Villarroel of NORDITA is leading several projects to search for anomalous devices in space. Sentinel, in collaboration with the University of Burgundy-Europe, will deploy its first mobile field survey and observation laboratory in 2025.
The solution to decades of doubts about images, debris, and videos may well be in the making, thanks to the collective efforts of scientists and researchers, a summary of which can be found here.
Another hope for the administration to cancel out its own secrecy zeal is the establishment of a task force under Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, even though it lacks declassification authority.