Seventy-Year-Old Saucers and a Plan We Can’t Read
Updated
We have now been told that somewhere in the federal government, there is a plan in place for what to do if we humans are not alone. Not a plan to go and find aliens, mind you. But a plan for the day that someone official confirms to the rest of us that they exist. Jennice Vilhauer, a clinical psychologist who sits on a new government UAP advisory council, wrote this month that at an August 31 meeting at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the council was informed that the United States has a preparedness plan in place should the existence of nonhuman intelligence be confirmed. She added that the country is ready to take “an international leadership role” if it happens. According to Vilhauer, the council was given no details. Not what agencies would lead, not what would trigger an announcement, and not what the plan actually says. They were simply told that it exists.
Taken at face value, even the sober version is strange enough. Does a government, including those in power behind the scenes, draft a contingency plan for an event it considers impossible? One only has to consider the preparedness plans that commenced before the pandemic to know the answer. These people don’t rehearse for things that they’re certain will never occur. So, clearly, the current message is not “the aliens are here.” The reality, it appears, is that people with security clearances have decided the odds are high enough, and the consequences large enough, to be worthy of a thorough plan. That idea is either reassuring or unsettling, depending on how much we trust the planners. And, a closer look at the planners sharpens that question. Should we trust them?
Let’s take a look, starting with the council that Vilhauer sits on. By no means is it a group of amateur enthusiasts. Coined the UAP Science Advisory Council, it was established under President Trump’s transparency order on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb serving as the chair. The council gets its direction from the White House, the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), ODNI, and the FBI, with the rest of the intelligence community on board. To the average American, the council is a credentialed, government-approved body. But not so fast. The council reports to a group called the UAP Governance Board, where all of the members are kept secret. Loeb himself confirmed that fact to Scientific American, noting that some of the members are government employees doing classified work who “don’t want to be exposed.” So, the public-facing scientists at the UAP Science Advisory Council advise a governing board that the public is not permitted to see. On top of that, even some of the council members reportedly don’t know who sits on the UAP Governance Board.
The secret UAP Governance Board is certainly thought-provoking, and so are the other names inside this subject. But the secret Governance Board is only half the picture. The other half is the group that has been writing the “get ready for disclosure” documents meant for the public. How many of those people sit on the government council? This is where the picture stops being about spacecraft and starts being about the people.
The other half of the picture, aptly named the Disclosure Foundation, is chaired by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon. The private group has been publishing material that reads like a dress rehearsal for the moment of disclosure. Mellon, who was also a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co-authored its national preparedness framework with Vilhauer. Along with that, the Foundation has also issued a report on the psychological impact of disclosure and urged the administration to create a National Disclosure Preparedness Task Force. Those papers are written to push a position, not just to lay out facts, and are not proof that the government’s unreleased plan is their text.
The distinction on that part matters because the names involved keep repeating themselves. The proverbial revolving door. Loeb chairs the government science council and sits on the Foundation’s advisory board. So does retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, another council member. Vilhauer sits on the council and writes for the Foundation, and Luis Elizondo, who ran a UAP effort for the Pentagon and has spent years pushing for disclosure, moves in the same circle. These are people who spent their careers inside the classified world and now operate nonprofits that lobby the government from the outside, while some of them also advise it from the inside. That overlap is not illegal. But it is a closed loop. Historically, closed loops have a poor record of putting the public interest first and are a part of this story that deserves our attention.
And, to be sure, money is part of the loop, even if the receipts are thin. The Disclosure Foundation operates as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3). Its sister entity, the UAP Disclosure Fund, is a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit, which means it can aggressively lobby in Washington and is not required to disclose who donates money to its cause. No, that is not a crime. But it is a visibility problem.
The public science council costs taxpayers almost nothing on paper. The Pentagon will not price AARO or the readiness plan. The private groups writing the preparedness briefs will not fully show who pays for the advocacy. Former officials are helping steer federal UAP policy through vehicles the public cannot see, toward an outcome—formal disclosure—that would make those same advocates the default authorities on the most consequential announcement in human history. What is wrong with this picture? The question is obvious: who benefits from a permanent condition of almost-disclosure, and of endless anticipation that is never quite resolved?
Which is exactly why a little skepticism is not cynicism. On September 18, Fox’s Peter Doocy rolled out what he reported as never-before-seen footage from the administration’s latest UAP dump. He said it was of a 1952 clip that he said was the “first and only copy,” pulled from the National Archives and newly digitized to 4K. He told viewers that it looked like a drone swarm before drones even existed. But there was one problem. Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse shot that film on a Utah highway 70 years ago, and it has been public ever since. And to make matters worse, it can easily be found on YouTube in a 1956 docudrama. Hmmm. Why was a 70-year-old movie clip revamped and then sold to the public as a never-before-seen government reveal? Adding to the strangeness, when Mediaite asked the Defense Department to stand behind the files it had released, including that one, the agency declined. Instead, the spokeswoman stated the department would offer no assessment, so the American people could make their own determinations. What?
Take it all in. Washington is erecting a massive apparatus to prepare humans for disclosure, and some of the same people make up the staff of the private groups, with unknown donors, lobbying for it. On top of that, they report to a secret board that we are not allowed to see. And, finally, they put out dramatic new “evidence” that is not new at all, and that they will not vouch for. Indeed, something extraordinary may very well be in the sky and even walking amongst us. The mystery is real, and an open mind is the honest and best posture. Nonetheless, the machinery on the ground deserves our scrutiny and raises more questions than it answers.