The Politics of Contact
Can UFOs Put Rubio in the White House?
The ambitious GOP politician thinks that UAP will play out in 2024 as a national security threat and wants to own the issue for himself. He’s all in on this huge bet.
What the hell? Doesn’t Senator Marco Rubio know that talking about UFOs will destroy his political career?
Yet there was the Florida Senator on Sunday night, played off at the end of the historic 60 Minutes piece on UAP calling for a mechanism to be set up where data is “catalogued and constantly analyzed until we get some answers.”
Maybe Rubio knows enough about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to bet his chance for higher office on its reality.
Calling for investigations, based on a potential national security threat, and defending the policy concisely in a series of public interviews in the past year, culminating with 60 Minutes, Rubio has set himself center-stage in the large drama that is playing out these days.
He wants to be seen as someone trying to lead us to the truth and keep us safe. He even seems sincere when he talks about it.
“I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question. Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn’t.”
Here’s the entire interview with Rubio on the show.
Oh, my. He may be the man from Florida, but we are not in Kansas anymore.
A Political Calculation
Remember that Rubio wanted to be President in 2016 and still does. That means he’s thinking about a 2024 run right now.
He’s a smart man. He knows he has to think strategically and that boldness is a virtue. He has almost certainly received multiple classified briefings on this issue. Allegedly, according to Washington lawyer/insider Daniel Sheehan, at least one of them involved being told that since they weren’t American, Russian or Chinese made, that the prevailing opinion was that they were “off-world” vehicles.
Whether that turns out to be the case or not, Rubio has bet his political fortune on UAP being the real deal.
News of the 60 Minutes story first broke in Newsweek on Tuesday. Rubio gave the magazine this quote—
“Dozens of men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are telling us about encounters with unidentified aircraft with capabilities we do not fully understand. We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.”
Remember that Rubio is an ambitious politician and he has obviously made a political calculation. While UFOs derailed any chance Dennis Kucinich may have had four election cycles ago, Rubio is putting all his chips in the middle of the table, going all-in on the idea that the UAP issue is going to be big in 2024 and he needs to establish his credibility well in advance.
Think about what a change this could mean. In 1976, President Gerald Ford had called for congressional UFO hearings earlier in his career and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter had seen a UFO himself — but none of this ever came up in any of their debates. In 1980, it wasn’t just Carter who had seen a UFO but his opponent, California Governor Ronald Reagan, had seen one, too. Nobody talked about it, questions were not asked, and it didn’t come up in the debates either.
Now we have a potential candidate who is embracing his UFO-ness.
It could be that Rubio knows something that most Americans haven’t yet figured out. After all, it was the committee that Rubio chaired — the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — that late last year demanded a UAP report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 180 days from the time then-President Trump signed the Omnibus bill in which it was included. Keeping with the ticking clock metaphor, that means the due date is June 25, 2021, five weeks from now. Tick, tick, tick…
Rising Young Star
Senator Rubio is the rising young star of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He started 2020 as just a member of the Republican majority. On May 18, he was made “acting chairman” when the previous chairman, Richard Burr, had to step down while an FBI investigation looks into some ill-timed stock trades.
He almost got the job full-time until the 50–50 split in the Senate threw the committees to the Democrats, making Senator Mark Warner the committee chair. Still, he’s the leading member of the minority, and on the UAP issue, he’s far and away more out there than Warner. And, if the Republicans take the Senate in 2022, he’ll have that chairmanship again.
The Florida Republican was the man-of-the-hour over at the committee for just one month when he dropped a bombshell on his watch.
The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020
In mid-June of 2020, Acting Chairman Rubio submitted to the full Senate a surprising and controversial draft of this bill on behalf of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There is a whole lot in it about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, but not a mention of UFOs. The name change is an upgrade so serious people can talk about this enduring phenomena without being made fun of for doing it.
The new Acting Chairman’s first official act included a call for a deep, urgent investigation to determine what we know about the entire UAP issue, and how we plan to gather further information about it in the future. It asked that the Secretary of Defense, working with our 17 Intelligence organizations, produce a mostly unclassified report for public consumption. The language, seen in the stark words that made it through the vetting process, is quite startling.
“The committee supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval Intelligence to standardise collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to US military assets and installations.
However, the committee remains concerned that there is no unified, comprehensive process within the Federal Government for collecting and analysing intelligence on unidentified aerial phenomena, despite the potential threat.”
Bottom Line: The Senate Intelligence Committee, stuffed to the brim with 15 classified United States Senators, thought we should be doing a better job when it comes to UAP because they’re concerned that the answer might be linked to America’s foreign adversaries.
This was a truly bipartisan issue, it turns out, getting unanimous approval, including a “yes” vote from then-Senator Kamala Harris.
Coming Out
Less than a month after making the committee report public, Senator Marco Rubio engaged in explaining his position in an open forum with a CBS Miami television reporter.
“We have things flying around military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours. So that’s a legitimate question to ask and I’d say frankly if it’s something outside this planet it would actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technology leap on behalf of the Russians, the Chinese or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.
The bottom line is, if there are things flying over military bases and you don’t know what they are, they’re not yours, and they exhibit potential technologies you don’t have at your disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one we should be looking into.
It’s a phenomenon, and it’s unexplained. I just want to know what it is, and if we can’t determine what it is, then that’s a fact point that we need to take into account. I wouldn’t venture to speculate beyond that.”
The takeaway from this straight talk from Rubio is threat analysis. There’s increasing use of the argument that if UAP is, as now admitted by the DoD, a reality, then we need to study it immediately as a matter of national security. Not everyone likes to hear that these days, but it does lay the predicate for necessary investigations.
Rubio made a couple of other key comments in that interview. He said flat-out that other countries have been experiencing these anomalous events, too. He stated that his knowledge over the past decade came most often through Navy events, not from the Air Force. And let’s remember that in a couple of minutes time Rubio said twice that we do not make these things that our Navy’s best pilots using our best aircraft cannot keep up with or explain them.
Just Take the Win
How is this playing in the UFO community? You’d have to say that most don’t care, given how relieved they are to see the issue getting a sober analysis in mainstream media. Among others, however, there is a lot of concern that Rubio might become the political face of their issue, and what that means. Here’s the conspiratorial pushback from @darkjournalist on Twitter:
“The CIA with the help of Neocon Senator Marco Rubio is now going into the overdrive to promote the False UFO Threat narrative. The so-called UAP Task Force report on UFOs to be released in June is set to be more war propaganda!”
Of course, politics makes strange bedfellows and, apparently, the disclosure issue now comes with Rubio whether anyone wants that or not. One essential barometer is UFO historian and researcher Richard Dolan.
“Take a breath to appreciate this moment. This is a prominent U.S. senator talking about the serious nature of airspace violations by unknown objects of extraordinary capabilities over places where they are not supposed to be, and which baffle U.S. military authorities. As I have been trying to explain to a number of folks who just don’t seem to get it, just take the win.”
Staking His Claim
No matter how pure his motives may be or not be, Senator Marco Rubio also knows that by acting now, he has a chance of being the historic figure who ushers in UFO disclosure in a serious way.
He probably doesn’t think that the absolute nature of the cover-up will stay in force until 2024 when he would run, and 2025 when he could take office. Rubio’s latest moves and behavior tell us that he does not think that talking about UFOs will hurt him then, and he may be setting himself up to be the UFO candidate of 2024, only not talking about ending the cover-up but about what to do next.
As the cover-up breaks apart in the next couple of years, Rubio will be able to say that he was among the first national politicians to understand the complexity and challenge of this issue and to act on it.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee gets its unclassified review of these issues, they plan to share that report with the American people. You can bet that Rubio is going to be all over the airwaves when that happens.
Rubio now stakes his claim to being the go-to guy in Washington if you need to talk about UAP. The guy you want to put in charge to handle a tough national security issue like this one.
Senator Marco Rubio wants to be President Marco Rubio and he thinks the UFO/UAP issue will take him there.
That alone shows how far we’ve come and how fast we’ve gotten here.
Trail of the Saucers is edited by Bryce Zabel and currently includes writing from senior contributors Carolyn Brouillard and Mark Hammons and others. The links below take you to related articles.
