The Politics of Disclosure

U.S. Intelligence Leaders Speak Out on UAP

The U.S. government has confirmed that UFOs are real but truly unknown. Will the DNI report explain who makes them?

STATUS: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has demanded an unclassified UAP report by June 25, 2021. It will be a huge test of UFO transparency and openness for the Biden Administration.

The Senate Intelligence Committee called for the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to put together a report on UAP activity within 180 days of the enactment of the Intelligence Authorization Act. Buried inside that massive bill filled with dry legislative language was this:

“The Committee supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval Intelligence to standardize 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.

There are cracks breaking wider day by day in the once monolithic denial of UFO/UAP reality by both the U.S. government and its related intelligence community. Those power centers seem to increasingly be in a mutually beneficial dance with the established media of the country.

On March 20, John Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence under Donald Trump from May 2020 to January 2021, placed a startling set of admissions before the public. Remember that the DNI position is, effectively, the top dog for the entire U.S. intelligence community.

Ratcliffe told Fox News that he’d wanted to get a great deal of UAP material out to the public before the clock ran out on the Trump Administration but simply couldn’t get it organized and declassified in time.

Having fallen short of his goals while on-the-job, Ratcliffe waded right into the subject, on-the-air and on-the-record. His words are truly shocking on a subject that has been shaded in secrecy for the most of its history.

“There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. We are talking about objects that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit further down the road than we realized. It’s not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some intelligence collection. Usually we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is now chaired by Senator Mark Warner, replacing acting chair Senator Marco Rubio.

Both men have taken questions on the UAP subject and been clear that they think answers are due. First, Warner:

“The military and others are taking this issue seriously which I think in previous generations may not have been the case.”

Think about that phrase, “previous generations.” This acknowledges that UAP are part of a lineage going back through UFOs and even flying saucers, all of which were displaying these enhanced flight characteristics and the so-called “five observables.”

• Sudden and instantaneous acceleration
• Hypersonic velocities without signatures
• Low observability
• Trans-medium travel
• Positive lift

Does anyone seriously believe that Russia or China post-World War Two or in the 1950s or 1960s had craft capable of 13,000 miles per hour? Something that could go from 80,000 feet to 100 feet in a few seconds? Hover indefinitely? No visible means of propulsion? Go from space to atmosphere to sea?

Of course not. The finger-pointing at Russia or China is part of a modern threat narrative to make the subject more palatable (at least believable) to the American public. UFO/UAP has been around for 75 years, minimum. Do the math. It’s exotic technology. The suspects are not usual.

We have to get answers. Who are they? What do they want? Are we safe?

Trying asking Senator Marco Rubio, the only politician to get any play in the May 16, 2021 60 Minutes piece. Rubio has been out front on this from the summer of 2020 and he’s been remarkable consistent with the words he’s choosing. Just read this from his first public interview:

“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.”

Let’s also remember that one of the committee members who voted “yes” to demand the UAP report was none other than Senator (now Vice President) Kamala Harris. Unlike the committee chairs, Harris has not spoken publicly on this topic and was not even asked about it during the 2020 campaign.

Many other big names, however, have spoken publicly on this subject and recently. Former Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid has been incredibly outspoken, going so far lately as to say that Lockheed Martin had crash wreckage. We’ve also heard from President Obama’s former Chief of Staff John Podesta, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, plus the gang of government insiders who did a turn with the To The Stars Academy like Christopher Mellon, Luis Elizondo and Steve Justice. Even Barack Obama just said that these are real unknowns.

What many of these people have in common is that they didn’t talk about UAP while on-the-job but do seem ready and willing to opine once they’re out of office. Falling into that category and carrying a resume far more burnished than that of John Ratcliffe is former CIA director John Brennan, who served under Obama for four years.

Brennan was on-the-job when those Pentagon UFO videos surfaced publicly in a New York Times investigative report back in 2017. He recently spoke publicly in an interview conducted for a 2021 podcast produced by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising. Life is defined in many different ways. I think it’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe. I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

So where does this leave us? It’s not as if retired insiders haven’t spoken out before. One of the most famous is a man that Brennan knows a great deal about, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first Director of the CIA, between 1947 and 1950. After a decade out of service, he wrote a letter to congress and it was a stunner:

“It is time for the truth to be brought out. Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”

So, to review, both the first CIA director and Obama’s CIA director have said that UFOs are not nonsense. If the head of the CIA is not in a position to know something on the topic, then who is?

Who’s Putting the Report Together?

The person who has to finish up the report is the new DNI, Avril Haines, the first woman to hold the office. She was a former Obama administration national security legal counsel and deputy adviser. Haines has worked with Biden going back to her tenure as deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2007–2008 while he was its chairman.

She worked at the White House starting in 2010 as a legal adviser to the national security adviser. In 2013, she became deputy director for the CIA and two years later she returned to the White House as principal deputy national security adviser — the first time a woman held either of those roles.

Haines has likely already reached out as instructed to Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to see what his thoughts are on handling this tricky issue and what he himself may already know. Then there is going to be (or has already been) a four-way discussion at minimum that will include Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin and Avril Haines. Two of the people in that conversation will be tough, competent, intelligent women. That’s a first.

What Should We Expect from the Report?

It might be assumed that the newly retired insiders like Ratcliffe and Brennan and the others who have been speaking out are doing their best from the outside to encourage those on the inside today to be as forthcoming as possible.

While some expectations are warranted, there have been reports of rumblings that few resources were dedicated to the effort, and that there was a good chance the report might be delayed. That would be unfortunate, and the DNI should endeavor not to let that happen.

What will Biden, Harris, Austin and Haines ultimately decide to do with this demand for information from the United States Senate, a demand that, in a time of extreme partisanship, was issued in a bipartisan unanimous fashion?

• A Limited, Modified Hangout. Are they going to try to dodge the issue, to muddy the waters, to put the good stuff in the classified addendum and to generally slow the roll on the disclosure of UAP reality?
• An Unambiguous Confirmation of UAP. Or will it be something that could start the process in earnest and change history? Could this report be a chance to make a big leap forward, to start by admitting that UAP is real?

It will be difficult, given the number of high level sources in the Senate itself and in the intel community who have confirmed UAP reality, to issue a report that says, “nothing to see here.” That would put such a report in direct contradiction to what is already publicly known. That is not going to work.

The report is more likely to confirm there are things flying out in the skies of Earth that violate physics as we know it, we don’t make them, we don’t think Russia or China make them, and we don’t know where they come from. The report is not at all likely to go into the vast history of the phenomenon. No mention of any of those classic cases going back to the end of World War II. Not a peep about Roswell or alien abductions. Just a focus on the present.

Many of you reading this already know that there is a deep reality to the UFO/UAP issue. Your minds have been turned on to this issue for many years in most cases. You may not be shocked.

Your friends and family, however, have managed for their entire lives to pretend this issue does not exist. When they see an unclassified government report that says UFO/UAP reality is a real issue, we can safely say that some minds will, indeed, be blown by that state of affairs, particularly when the message is amplified across virtually all media platforms.

This is the other shoe, the government admission. It will drop sometime soon.

People get ready.

Trail of the Saucers is edited by Bryce Zabel, the co-host of Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel. For more information on issues raised in this article, see below: