Donald Trump and his administration are not good at keeping secrets. Gossip leaks constantly. He’s cavalier in handling classified documents. Members of his administration have shared classified information with other countries. He may be able to fend off investigation of his tax returns, but that’s just Republican stonewalling — he’s a transparent liar on the subject. Trump’s favorite secret is the one he can simultaneously affirm and withhold, like his plan to defeat ISIS in 30 days, or the “we are going to attack Mosul in four months” example he used to mock the idea of revealing any military policy whatsoever to the public. He would like it known that he holds the secrets. So how is it that he hasn’t tweeted something like “Don’t believe the main stream media. White House is running VERY WELL. They share all UFO secrets with me. Fake media not happy!”?
Amateur and professional UFO organizations alike have a shared political issue. They call it Disclosure. Disclosure can mean the release of newly declassified documents or testimony from former military officials, but it’s most often meant in a grander sense: the federal government revealing the existence of extraterrestrials on or in contact with Earth and the unveiling of their advanced technologies. It would be more than just validation of the UFO phenomena, but the beginning of a societal revolution, reordered around the advanced alien energy technologies the government currently holds in secret.
The most prominent expression of this united demand was the The Disclosure Project, which began in 1993 by lobbying the Clinton Administration, culminating in 1997 hearings from government and military UFO witnesses meant to push the government into open congressional hearings. None followed.
Since then they’ve re-targeted the bulk of their effort on collection and archiving, recording testimony from “scores of military, government and other witnesses to Unidentified Flying Objects and Extraterrestrial events and projects from around the world.” But hope renews every campaign season. There’s always the possibility that the next president will be the one willing to Disclose.
Though UFO hunters come from across the political spectrum, the Clintons have been major figures in the Disclosure discussion, largely thanks to Bill Clinton Chief of Staff and Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, who has long been the most prominent Disclosure advocate in the country. Though he had failed to get files pertaining to UFOs and Area 51 disclosed during the first Clinton administration, he promised to pry them out of the second. Hillary was even asked about it on the campaign trail.
Trump is much more of an unknown quantity. The consensus on r/UFO seems to be that Disclosure is unlikely, while Disclosure lobbyist Stephen Bassett made a last-ditch effort to push the Justice Department into disclosing during Obama’s lame duck period, before the unpredictable new administration clamped whatever narrow possibility existed.
But now Trump is president and it seems like we hear everything they so much as chat about, from internal clashes between Steve Bannon and Reince Preibus to Trump’s TV fixation. Multiple drafts of every new executive order leak beforehand. It’s hard to imagine Trump learning about aliens without Bannon learning about aliens and using it in his ongoing pee fight with Jared Kushner.
So maybe he doesn’t know. Multiple intelligence community sources have said information is being withheld from Trump out of fear that it could endanger classified sources or leak to Russian intelligence groups. Disclosure could lie in unseen hands.
This is the theory mostly widely accepted in the UFO community generally. Just as with most other demographics and segments of the population, UFO hunters are condemnatory of government generally. We don’t trust it. Mat Baroudi summarizes the position neatly in the CNN segment above:
“I don’t think any presidential candidate is going to come out with the truth. It’s always behind close doors. The other thing too is the people who are running those opps circumnavigate the president. The president is just here to lead the country, or appear to lead the country. But I think that these people who are running this stuff are an entity on to themselves.”
So either Trump has become uncharacteristically good at keeping the best secrets without bragging about them, or the presidency is no longer an office in the loop.
There’s also the possibility most UFO hunters are beyond considering: if there is a genuine extraterrestrial UFO phenomenon, the government is unaware. There are multiple chapters in the FBI’s history akin to X-Files, though most are hidden more from embarrassment and chronic over-classification than because they hide a radically different interplanetary world order. The weight of thousands of sightings, including government documentation, preclude this possibility for most, a view shared with the 12% of Americans who believe in a government cover-up of aliens (a 1997 poll measured it at 37%, but asks a more open question). We might all be in the cosmic dark.
