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Fighting Back

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As you may have noticed, I made no blog postings during calendar year 2022. Like many people, I was awaiting the release of an overdue report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) concerning the Pentagon’s assessments of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Rumors had been circulating that the ODNI was determined to release this report by the end of 2022. When New Year’s Eve came and went with no report, I was reminded of last Thanksgiving, when Micah Hanks wrote this for The Debrief as he wondered when we might see the ODNI report:

Late last month, the second in an ongoing series of reports on the Pentagon’s assessments of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) was expected to arrive. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) mandated that the report be delivered to Congress by October 31, followed by an unclassified version of the briefing made available to the public thereafter.

“Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has until Monday to provide Congress with its first annual unclassified update on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena,” ABC News reported, adding that the forthcoming report was expected to detail “all new UAP incidents over the past year and any previously unreported incidents.”

As Halloween came and went, it was evident that the new report would be late on arrival. With little doubt, the ODNI website received a significant amount of traffic as watchful UAP proponents kept an eye on the site’s Newsroom page where its Reports and Publications appear online. Yet despite copious amounts of page refreshes, the report never arrived.

It is currently January 1, 2023, and we are still waiting for that report.

Here at TheCenterLane, I have refocused these postings to the subject of bipartisanship in Washington, D.C.  —  rather than the subject of “centrism” because that word has become synonymous with corporatism. No single subject had returned bipartisanship to our nation’s capitol until the subject of the UFO phenomenon (now referred to as UAP for “unidentified aerial phenomena”) experienced some serious reconsideration after the December 16, 2017, edition of The New York Times contained an astonishing story about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

When Shane Harris of the Washington Post recently interviewed Leslie Kean for the Chatter podcast, Ms. Kean discussed the facts leading up to the revelation that the Pentagon had been secretly studying unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). At the same time in 2017, Bryan Bender had been preparing his own article for Politico concerning that program because the same sources who had been feeding information to Leslie Kean were making a concerted effort to bring this controversial subject to the public’s attention.

On his Openminds.tv website, Alejandro Rojas explained how Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the administrations of President George W. Bush and Bill Clinton) as well as Luis “Lue” Elizondo, former Director of the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), presented this story to both Leslie Kean and Bryan Bender:

Elizondo and Mellon began to approach journalists with their UFO videos, documents, and data. In an interview on Open Minds UFO Radio, Politico’s Bryan Bender says he was approached in the middle of 2017 and was able to confirm AATIP’s existence with his sources “on the hill.”

In a separate Open Minds UFO Radio interview, (Leslie) Kean says she was invited to a meeting with Elizondo held on October 4, 2017, “arranged by some of Elizondo’s colleagues” who knew her.

“I went down and went to Washington, and we spent three or four hours together,” says Kean. “I was shown the videos that were eventually released with our story. And just given, you know, told all about Harry Reid, was shown documents about Harry Reid’s involvement and just the story was kind of laid out for me at this meeting.”

“I realized at that point that it was a New York Times level story, given the documentation that was available for the program and for the people involved and everything else,” Kean continued. “And so that’s how it all started.”

After the New York Times article was published, a number of UFO bloggers and podcasters found it difficult to restrain their jealousy of Leslie Kean’s ability to establish such a significant milestone, with the publication of this story in one of this nation’s most prominent newspapers. Those individuals began to insist that The New York Times article was “WRONG” because it allegedly confused the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) with the Pentagon’s predecessor program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). As Bryan Bender later explained on Twitter, it seemed as though a decision was made (by Mellon, Elizondo or both) to “shape the story” in order to avoid discussion of AAWSAP’s investigations of the wider variety of paranormal events that had been taking place at Robert Bigelow’s Skinwalker Ranch (where most of those AAWSAP investigations unfolded):

Maybe some context here would help: Elizondo and Mellon purposely buried AAWSAP when they went public in 2017. It was a huge part of the story purposely left out. They made a strategic decision not to bring AAWSAP and Skinwalker into the discussion.

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I have discussed this with them numerous times and their view was that it would muddle their message on UAPs and the successor AATIP program that Elizondo oversaw. Moreover, the AAWSAP players, particularly (James) Lacatski, refused to talk and still won’t beyond written responses.                                                                                         

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On the question of Elizondo and Mellon’s credibility, any informed observer knows they have played a huge role in bringing the debate about UAPs to the fore and are still a major influence in ensuring Congress — and the public — get more answers.

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They shaped the original story — no surprise there — but to my knowledge they have never lied. I still consider them credible sources. In retrospect there is no doubt we all should have asked more questions about the origin of AATIP.

More significant pushback against the efforts of Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo comes from a group of religious fanatics within the Defense Department, informally referred to as “the Collins Elite”. Efforts by this faction to suppress any revelations from the Pentagon concerning the UAP subject have been discussed by Lue Elizondo, retired CIA case officer John Ramirez (at 53:22 in the linked interview by Martin Willis), as well as in Ryan Sprague’s online discussion with Leslie Kean and Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington (at the 21-minute mark of the foregoing link).

A recent effort to push back against the efforts to disclose the Defense Department’s knowledge of the UAP subject appears to have resulted in the publication of articles in several of our nation’s most prominent newspapers, just before Halloween of 2022, when that year’s report from the ODNI was due. Those articles appeared in late October, in an apparent effort to “front run” the ODNI report with a more skeptical look at the entire UAP phenomenon. This front-running tactic was a replay from last year, as I discussed in December of 2021, when people within the Pentagon attempted to “front run” Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act with the creation of the Pentagon’s own Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). Despite a futile attempt to launch AOIMSG, that endeavor failed.

The planted newspaper articles (previously mentioned) served only to motivate Chris Mellon to fight back with the release of this blog posting on December 29, 2022.  

Chris Mellon is just one of many commentators who regularly warn us of the consequences which can result from continued obfuscation and foot-dragging concerning recent findings about this subject.  In the previously discussed interview with Leslie Kean (conducted by Shane Harris) Ms. Kean (at the 71-minute point) noted that it is advisable to gradually acclimate people to what can be safely disclosed about the UAP situation because abrupt revelations of this nature could result in unpleasant reactions – particularly for financial markets. She emphasized that “this is not something that you want to just dump on people’s heads” because this is “a major paradigm shift for our planet”. In his 2017 book, Managing Magic, Grant Cameron discussed a theory that the United States government is gradually releasing the truth about UAPs. When John Ramirez was interviewed by Martin Willis (discussed above) he explained (beginning at the 59-minute point) that the presence of the entities he describes as ETs on Earth is under the control of the ETs themselves and that they are planning to reveal their presence here (perhaps by a mass landing) in 2027. Mr. Ramirez said that he heard 2027 mentioned as the disclosure year while he as acting in an “official capacity” which he could not reveal. He explained that there are people within our government who are aware of this and that is why there is a gradual “ramping up” of the disclosure process.

So here we are . . . five years after the revelations of the December 2017 New York Times article and five years before a significant revelation concerning UAPs. In the meantime, we can likely expect to hear from a number of self-professed “authorities” on this subject who will provide us with a vast amount of amazing information – for a price.