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[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
Some nice developments this week ahead of the hearings scheduled for November 17th.
Sitting Congressman Matt Gaetz said in a recent interview "The CIA has a program around craft recovery. It's not a question anymore. And so, that's probably where I would start, the craft recovery, and the biologics that have been taken from those craft". In decades past, this probably would have been sufficient enough by itself to be considered disclosure. But unfortunately, we're in a scenario where only certain government officials have become outspoken about their belief in UFOs, while the top brass at the DoD remains reticent. The smoking gun evidence / Big Announcement remains elusive.
A FOIA request has brought to light a heavily redacted briefing on UAPs given to NASA by the DoD's UAP Task Force. The briefing acknowledges that the UAPTF collected multiple reports of UAP sightings and that "over half" of these reports were validated by "multiple sensors", but the items in the list of "Potential Explanations" are redacted, as well as almost all of the included photographs (but for some reason they chose not to redact a photograph of a giant glowing green triangle).
A common criticism of the UAP disclosure movement is that their belief in aliens is fundamentally unfalsifiable and there's no reason for their demands to ever cease. They won't be satisfied that the military's not hiding anything until they've declassified every last document in their position. And I agree that this is a possible failure mode, which is why it's important to focus on concrete, actionable items rather than generalized demands for transparency. There are many classified documents regarding UAPs that we know, for a fact, to exist. Their existence, and the fact that they explicitly deal with UAPs, is not in question - we just don't know their exact contents. This includes the aforementioned NASA briefing, the photograph and other materials that Gaetz was shown at Eglin AFB, the multiple SCIF briefings that Congressmen have been given over the past year on UAPs, etc. Advocating for the full declassification of these materials is a reasonable goal, while also being limited in scope.
Until the alien is shown (in person, in a traveling exhibition, where I can maybe touch it or at least see it being touched), there is no reason to believe and every reason to disbelieve. That even the DoD and/or congress have people autistic/schizo/gullible enough to believe the US government (and NOBODY else) has been secretly keeping little green men on ice for 50 years is unsurprising. That otherwise smart people here might believe it is sad.
Try to set aside the question of aliens for a second and look at it this way.
The Pentagon gave a briefing to NASA on UFOs. This briefing included lots of pictures. They're telling us we're not allowed to see the pictures. So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves? Yes they might just all turn out to be Chinese weather balloons made of swamp gas, certainly. But I still want to see and judge for myself. Why would anyone not want to?
I don't buy the "national security" excuse. The world's not going to implode just because we got pictures of an advanced spy drone. (Not that I get the impression that that's what this briefing was about in the first place. The fact that these photographs were in a briefing entitled "UFOs" instead of something more pedestrian is pretty odd!)
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
The one I linked in the second bullet point in the OP.
They chose to reveal some photos and not others, which leads me to believe that the content of the photos is one of the determining factors.
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
But that just moves the question back a step. Why did those specific images make their way to declassification and not others? No way to know until we actually see all the redacted images.
This isn’t an unfalsifiable “we haven’t seen aliens yet, but it could be that they’re out there and we just haven’t found them, so let’s keep looking”. This is, there’s a box right in front of us labeled “UFOs”, and I want to see what’s in the box.
Sure, I don’t disagree. But that has no effect on the fact that I want to see the rest of the unredacted document.
Well...
It wasn't clear what the "4 videos" was supposed to be referring to. If all the pics in what I linked were leaked before they were declassified then my bad, I was wrong.
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