+2 more
posted on Jan, 26 2017 @ 12:40 PM
Part One:
I’d like to address a few of the issues that have been brought up in this forum concerning the Tom DeLonge project known as Sekret Machines. I
realize that there is a lot of suspicion concerning Tom’s motives and a lot of distrust over the idea of disclosure and how or if Tom’s project
addresses that issue in any kind of positive way. I will probably not be able to dispel all of your doubts – we are talking about the UFO/UAP
Phenomenon here, after all – but I would like to at least give you an idea of where I am coming from in this project and why I have signed onto
it.
In the first place, it is part of our culture to distrust rock stars or movie stars who become activists of any kind. We may appreciate their art,
but when it comes to “real world” concerns we just wish they would shut up and go away. This attitude is unfair, of course. Rock stars are
people, too, and they have just as much to say about current events as anyone else. Our problem with them entering the real world arena is that we
suspect they are using their celebrity status in such a way as to promote a given agenda: an unfair advantage over the rest of us. This might be a
valid objection to raise if someone like Tom was trying to assert some kind of authority or influence over the existing UFO community. This is not
the case, however. His celebrity status is so powerful a tool that it can extend awareness of the UFO Phenomenon far beyond the existing UFO
community to those who might never have thought about it at all.
Further, it is precisely his celebrity status coupled with his very sincere desire to know the truth about the Phenomenon that got us the access we
needed to government and industry insiders. Tom mentioned this access in several places over the past two years but without naming names or otherwise
identifying these individuals. This led to a lot of speculation that Tom was making it all up, exaggerating the extent of his contacts, etc. Fair
enough. He’s just a “rock star”, after all. Then came the Wikileaks dump of John Podesta’s emails and the world suddenly became aware of
some of the names of Tom’s contacts. Through no fault of Tom’s, the proof of what he had been saying all along was there for anyone to see. He
did not exaggerate the extent of his contacts. In fact, if anything, the names that popped up indicated that he was being conservative in how he
described them.
Okay. So Tom wasn’t lying or making # up. Where do we go from there?
The question of Disclosure is a knotty one. We all seem to know what it is without really being able to define it, or think about it very clearly. We
all have different ideas as to what Disclosure actually means. The most prevalent idea about Disclosure, it seems to me, is an official government
statement of some kind that says “Yes, there are UFOs,” or “Yes, there are aliens,” etc. The problem with this scenario is that we have had
precisely this degree of clarity from many of our military leaders, going back to the 1950s and earlier. Generals have often insisted that there were
aliens visiting the planet, or that some of the craft that had been sighted by civilians and military alike were actual craft and not hallucinations,
etc. Yet, the fact that there have been contradictory statements about the Phenomenon has served to muddy the waters and to make it appear as if the
government is hiding something. And, during the Cold War, the government had every reason to be cautious in addressing the UFO issue.
So … if a government spokesperson came out today and said, yes, there are aliens visiting the planet … what would our reaction be? With
confidence in our intelligence services at an all-time low among some demographics, wouldn’t a lot of us have deep suspicions about an official
statement admitting that the Phenomenon is real? We would suspect a hidden agenda, and the websites and forums would be divided between those who
giddily accepted the “disclosure” at face value and those who cynically believed it was all just another disinformation project. And so it
goes.
Part of the problem today rests in the fact that the UFO community is hostile towards the intelligence and military communities. There is an
adversarial relationship – complicated by evidence of “men in black” and disinfo agents such as in the Doty/Bennewitz case – which means that
we do not accept what the intelligence community tells us, which then becomes Catch-22: we want the government to come clean about UFOs, but we
don’t trust anything the government says, and around in circles we go.
We’ve been going around in those circles since at least 1947.
How’s that working out for you?
In addition, we in the United States now have some of the worst-educated high school and college students in the industrialized world, especially when
it comes to STEM subjects. Our people do not have the intellectual tools with which to comprehend the scope of the Phenomenon since they are so
poorly educated in science, math and technology. They don’t have the language or the context necessary to interpret the data. That puts us at a
very pronounced disadvantage when it comes to debating scientists, engineers and government agents on the subject of UAP.
Tom, to his credit, has recognized this vulnerability. He realizes that he has some degree of credibility with young people, and wants to use that
cultural capital to encourage the young to apply themselves energetically to the study of STEM subjects because an understanding of the Phenomenon is
at least partially based on an understanding of science and technology and especially on thinking logically and scientifically. He also recognizes
that the military, the intelligence community, and the government in general are not the enemy when it comes to the Phenomenon. They may be as much
in the dark – but in a different way – as the rest of us. It is only by cooperating with those who have additional information and insight that
we can come to a deeper understanding of the Phenomenon.
Some of you may feel that Tom (and by extension myself) is being used by these very government agents as pawns in some kind of elaborate game. That
might be true if they were feeding us questionable data, making promises of disclosure, etc. as per the Doty case. But they’re not. They are being
cautious themselves, but have been willing to share some of their ideas, beliefs and concerns about the Phenomenon. These are ideas and concerns that
are based on what they know about the Phenomenon, information that for the most part they have been reluctant to share. It is this very reluctance
that lends credence to their observations, in my view. Further, there is no cookie-cutter set of responses coming from these very different
individuals from very different organizations. There is no obvious collusion taking place. People have been talking to us about their experiences and
no two are identical. This is especially significant when we examine their specific concerns about the Phenomenon and how these highly-trained,
highly-educated individuals have struggled to place the Phenomenon within the historical narrative.