Saturday, March 05, 2011

Disclosure Poll

The results are in and not too surprising. More than half of the voters in this unscientific poll believed that Disclosure wouldn’t happen for years (that is 54 of the respondents or 56%).

The next large bloc of votes (24 and 25%) thought there would be Disclosure, but it wasn’t coming soon. That means that more than three-quarters of the respondents don’t believe in Disclosure anytime soon.

Fewer than ten voters (9 and 9%) thought that Disclosure was at hand. I don’t know why they’d believe this, given the history of this phenomenon. It’s been around, in the public consciousness for more than sixty years and at times it seems we are no closer to a resolution than we were at the very beginning.

And the smallest group ( 8 and 8%) think Disclosure is coming soon. That’s a fairly vague term and is, of course, my fault. I should have defined what I meant by soon... which is sometime in about a year or so.

All this means is that the majority of us have no faith in the government coming clean about UFOs. The majority of us realize that the status quo is going to remain, well, the same...

Unless some outside force acts. By this I mean that the aliens land to tell the world they are here. In the world of secrecy you do not say that which you know to be classified to those not cleared to hear it, even if the secret is out and everyone knows it. You are still required to keep it a secret. This explains why sometimes you hear a government employee denying something that we all know is true. We are not cleared and he is going to obey the law about the disclosure of classified information.

But once the aliens land further confirmation of their presence will not be required. We’ll all know the truth. Until then, we will continue to argue alien visitation. We will cite proof which the debunkers will reject based not so much on evidence as on their belief that aliens couldn’t reach here from there. The distances in space are too vast... and they will reject the proof available because they know there is no alien visitation and if there is no alien visitation there can be no proof.

And yes, this is a little bit more supportive of the ETH than I wanted, but sometimes I just get tired of the arguments. Donald Menzel says that the Lubbock Lights photographs are a hoax because there is no other answer except ETH... Phil Klass rejected McMinnville because it was either alien or a hoax and since there are no aliens, it must be a hoax.

Disclosure is a different matter. There were those, in the 1950s, who believed the government was preparing us for Disclosure with the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Others believed, in 1977, Disclosure was at hand with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the world today, there isn’t that sort of movie tradition, though science fiction films that deal with alien invasion, alien visitation and alien reality do very well at the box office (It’s amazing to me that the Oscars have not recognized how well science fiction does with everyone but the pretentious voters who claim they don’t watch science fiction, but I digress).

This survey says that most don’t believe Disclosure is near and that is my attitude as well. Back in the mid-1990s we came close, with the massing of evidence about the Roswell case and the general interest in UFOs, but the opportunity was lost. The big propaganda machine was able to divert attention and provide explanations for Roswell... It made no difference that those explanations didn’t fit the facts as long as there was an explanation and the news media, who are too sophisticated to believe in alien visitation was right there to promote the message (Don Schmitt and I, at one point in the mid-1990s were at a major Chicago newspaper (No, not the Sun-Times) for a scheduled interview. We were met by an intern who told us that she had the assignment because her editors didn’t believe in UFOs... let’s not check the facts, let’s just make sure that our belief structure is kept intact... but I digress again.)

So, barring some extraordinary event outside the capability of the government to control, there will be no Disclosure. Those on the outside think that throwing rocks at the glass house of UFO secrecy will eventually work. Unfortunately, the glass is bullet proof and the rocks bounce off.

12 comments:

Terry the Censor said...

I was troubled that two obvious options were missing:

There will never be disclosure
There is nothing to disclose

I would have liked too see that breakdown.

starman said...

I don't think UFOlogists were close to disclosure in the mid 1990s or that the "opportunity" was real. Of course government debunkers would do what they had to, when they had to.

Terry: This was a poll for believers. While I concur with the majority that disclosure is far off (perhaps 2050-2100) it couldn't be "never." I assume that, sooner or later, we will be deemed ready to hear the truth, or they will be ready to disclose it, or both. Society is, after all, not static, but advances, and that may fulfill a prerequisite. Maybe by midcentury the government will be able to copy alien gear on a large scale, so that it can finally stand up to ET. Under those conditions they'll be able to disclose without having to admit there's little if anything they can do to protect the public. There would be less risk of panic.

Paul Kimball said...

@ Starman - You presume that the "truth" is that aliens have visited Earth. But what if, as Terry suggests (and as I think is possible, and perhaps even the most likely answer), that they have not, at least to the knowledge of any government? In such a case, there would be, as Terry notes, "nothing to disclose"... and therefore, as the question is postulated, the answer may well be "never".

I think "disclosure" of ET life will come, and perhaps within my lifetime, but it isn't going to come in respect of the UFO phenomenon, by way of a "they've been here for decades, and we knew about it" statement. Rather, it will come from the discovery of a civilization "out there".

As for disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial life, we've already had that - on Mars.

Paul

cda said...

I agree with Paul Kimball.
There will never be any disclosure in respect of UFOs being ET. There will never be any disclosure about either Roswell or abductions.

There is, as he suggests, nothing useful to science to disclose.

However, disclosure of life elsewhere and even ET life 'out there', is always possible, and even probable, say, within the next 100 years.

And Kevin, you never came close to getting disclosure about Roswell at any time when you thought you were hot on the trail. It was a pipedream. You may believe fervently that you did (as did Keyhoe decades earlier), but the truth is plain to see: your evidence was severely lacking, at least to to mainstream science.
And that is how it remains today.

KRandle said...

Terry starman,Paul -

The poll was poorly designed as has been pointed out by nearly everyone here. I'm going to put it up again, but this time with a "Never" answer and "There is Nothing to Disclose" answer. As I was analyzing the results, I realized the error as well.

CDA -

I might have overstated the case, but in the mid-1990s we did get the Air Force to respond to us. They "investigated" and produced two reports on Roswell, neither of which was very good.

But there was so much other, unnecessary nonsense (MJ-12, cattle mutilations, lists of crashes) that the work got lost. Had we concentrated we might have learned something important.

So while you believer there is nothing to disclose, there is also the possibility that you might be wrong.

cda said...

Kevin:
I don't follow your "we might have learned something inportant".

What do you think you might have learned had you gone about it differently?

The distractions of MJ-12, cattle mutilations etc ought not to matter IF there was something really important to learn about Roswell, i.e. something relating to ETs.

Keyhoe was fond of blaming Adamski and the contactees for bringing UFOs into disrepute, thereby forestalling his own agenda (which was to get Congressional hearings which would finally bring the USAF to disclose their hidden evidence and thus the 'truth' into the open).

It seems that you are doing likewise, blaming other frivolities and trivia for your failure to succeed over Roswell. True, you did succeed in part, by getting two USAF investigations and reports, but these reports merely negated your own findings.

If the hard evidence is truly present, then find it. If it is not, then don't pretend that it is, or that some official body has it under wraps.

There are varying grades of conspiracists. The exopolitics crowd are an extreme kind. But there are also the milder kind, of which you (as a Roswell ET believer) are one.

UFOs are a global phenomenon, not a US one. By 'disclosure' you probably meant 'US disclosure'. After all, no other country possesses this great UFO secret, does it? So I am not expecting any disclosures from China, India or Russia. Or for that matter, Libya.

starman said...

cda:

"..no other country possesses this great UFO secret, does it?"

What foreign crash retrieval case is as convincing to as many people as Roswell? None.

Paul Kimball:

"Rather, it will come from discovery of a civilization "out there."

cda:

"However, disclosure of life elsewhere and even ET life 'out there', is always possible, and even probable, say, within the next 100 years."

Oh sure...ET life is always acceptable and probable, as long as it's separated from us by great distances or time. Even decades after we began venturing into space, the idea loses all credibility whenever it refers to them here and now....

cda said...

Starman:

Life has been 'discovered' on Mars several times in my lifetime. The trouble is that it is very likely to be 'undiscovered' soon after. The truth is that just when you think you have discovered life, you start having doubts, then serious doubts, then.....

It will take many years, yes perhaps even a century, for scientists to convince themselves that life has truly been discovered elsewhere, and of course far longer to convincingly discover intelligent life.

As to it being here on earth now, on what grounds do you declare Roswell to be so much more persuasive than crashes in other countries? It is only because in the US far more people get interested in such stories and making money out of them by means of magazines, books and films. A veritable UFO industry indeed. This 'industry' does not exist elsewhere, at least to nothing like the same extent.

100 years is a piffling amount of time really. All right, reduce it to 50 years. I predict that life elsewhere will be verified by science (never mind the official 'cover-up') within 50 years. And no, it will NOT be via the Roswell, or any other, UFO crash. On Mars maybe? On a meteorite? On Titan? Wait and see.

Magonia said...

Kevin, I have put a version of your poll up on my blog with the 'never' and 'nothing to disclose' options. It may be interesting to compare and contrast the results:

http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2011/03/disclosure-poll.html

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a believer I think that the poll needs to clarify the meaning of ‘disclosure’.

For example, disclosure might mean:
a) Yes it’s true, we the military and security agencies of the USA have been aware for many years that UFOs are extra-terrestrial craft and here are the films and crashed saucer parts to prove it…..
or
b) Yes it’s true, we the military and security agencies of the USA have made various undercover deals with extraterrestials in order to obtain advanced technology. In fact we have an actual extraterrestrial in our bunker named John and here he is….. We also have available numerous advanced energy producing devices and here they are…..

In my opinion the military etc have dug themselves too deep into the hole and have already begun to mutate. As the human race eventually develops its own advanced technology, history will be erased and rewritten to remove any suggestion of prior knowledge.

qwadro_Binh said...

I don't think UFOlogists were close to disclosure in the mid 1990s or that the "opportunity" was real. Of course government debunkers would do what they had to, when they had to.
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