The younger generation will embrace the change most enthusiastically. This new reference point will be more relevant to their lives. It can be easily texted and still carry full meaning. Two keystrokes and a number, no spaces. AD1.
First Reactions
The first second After Disclosure—when someone in authority acknowledges that intelligent non-human life is a fact—you will know instantly that the world has changed completely and forever.
The first minute After Disclosure, you will be concerned for the safety of your friends and family, but the reassurances will make you feel better for the moment.
The first hour After Disclosure will be full of cell phone calls, e-mails, and texts to those same people, as we all collectively watch television and surf the Internet, hungry for new information.
The first 24 hours After Disclosure will see the serious questions start. People will wonder how this could have happened, and ask what it really means.
At the very beginning, as the citizens of the world play catch-up to this breaking story, their questions will fall into five main categories:
1. Intelligent Non-Humans. How long have these beings been here? Where do they come from? What do they look like? Do they walk among us now? Is there more than one type?
2. Their Agenda. How much do we know about their activities? Are these beings benign in intent, or malevolent? Have we had meetings with them? Are we in communication with them now?
3. Safety. Has our military been chasing after UFOs, as some have claimed? Have we lost aircraft as a result? Is it true that UFOs have been interested in our nuclear weapons sites? Will we now share technical data with other nations in order to create a military system capable of defending against potentially hostile beings?
4. Secrecy. Why was this information kept from the public for so long? How was that even accomplished? Are we going to learn the full story now, or just some of it?
5. Disclosure. Going forward, how will we even know if what is being said is the truth? Will all classified records be released, or only some? Will amnesty be granted so those involved in the cover-up can speak freely?
Unfortunately, there will not be complete and honest answers to some of these questions for years, if ever.
On the first day, however, everyone in the world will be asking everyone else these questions and more. The jolt from these initial conversations will be unprecedented because it will be an experience shared by billions.
Our curious minds will not be at a loss for words. Thirsting for clarity, we will plug them into search engines in record numbers. When we cannot find the right word or phrase, we will invent new ones.
In Other Words
Because we live in a wired world, there will be a sudden creation of new terms, and fresh definitions of old words and phrases. Along with the embrace of A.D. for After Disclosure, the new nomenclature will gain traction because it conveys a shorthand concept that spreads virally. Here, we propose a start-up glossary of ways that words might change in order to convey new ideas. We will use them in this book to do just that.
Day One
Among the ongoing redefinitions in the new world will be “Day One,” instantly appropriated to refer to this tumultuous first day. This designation is less-hysterical than 9/11, and more forward-looking. “9/11” invokes emergency calls and sudden terror, but Day One solidifies the obvious: no matter what comes next, whatever came before is over. Day One is when the calendars start again in our instantaneous reboot of consciousness.
Disclosure
At the same time, the word disclosure will be changed. As a lower-case word, it will carry all the usual meanings. But there will be a new meaning for Big “D” disclosure. That “Disclosure” will be used, as it is used in this book, to refer to the overall process of acknowledging humanity’s contact with other intelligent beings. It covers all aspects, all the moving pieces, all the complexity, of the event’s impact. You can disclose a fact about UFOs, but Disclosure is the event and the process. It encompasses all that happens when we say, “We are not alone.”
The Others
The biggest re-definition will be how we come to refer to the “intelligent non-humans” that have been in contact with us. It is possible that when Disclosure comes, these beings may be referred to by the name that they call themselves, or it may be a name used by the intelligence groups that have monitored them. For this book, we will call them “The Others.”
The other common terms have too much baggage. Most are too specific, and many could be wrong. Terms such as extraterrestrial, ET, EBE, or Eben (the last two for “extraterrestrial biological entity”) commonly invoke outer space. Calling them visitors sounds like the reptoids from the television series V. Besides, it may turn out that they are not visiting at all. The word aliens has a certain accuracy, in that these beings are probably alien to humanity in key ways. But then again, maybe not. The word is also emotionally charged—it predisposes us to see them as enemies, and even has been politicized by current immigration debates.
What we do know about them is that they are not us. This means, by definition, that they are Others.
The Breakaway Group
In the 1950s, retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe called the secret-keepers the “Silence Group.” If certain documents leaked in the 1980s are to be believed, the group had the name of Majestic-12 or MJ-12. These days there is no direct evidence that name is still in use. “The Breakaway Group” is our name for them. We believe they are still at work today, having become a quasi-private, quasi-public group. To a large extent, these people have their own rules, their own secrecy protocols, their own technology. As the following pages will suggest, they have probably developed their own society, separate from the one that spawned it, yet still interacting with it. The existence of The “Breakaway Group” is nearly as important a secret as that of the non-human intelligences themselves.
Ground Zero
“Ground Zero” once referred to a nuclear blast contact point. Then, following 9/11, it referred to the hole where the World Trade Center once stood. If the cover-up begins to unravel with a mass sighting, the term will be re-defined yet again as the location where the slide toward Disclosure gained traction. For example, let us assume for illustration purposes that a mass sighting occurs in Montreal, Canada. If that is the event that begins the final disintegration of the secret, the city will be referred to as Ground Zero—even though, as pedants will point out, the event never took place on the ground, but in the sky above.
Trigger Event
Something will start the process toward Disclosure. As we already suggested, it could be an undeniable mass sighting of a UFO. But it might also be a compelling revelation from Wikileaks or some other citizen-based group that hacks into classified records. It may be the appearance of physical evidence discovered in the attic of a Roswell witness. Or perhaps a deathbed confession by an ex-president or prominent general who sees a chance for immortality by speaking the truth. It could be a foreign government, such as China, Russia, or Brazil, acting unilaterally. It could also be the Others themselves, although they have apparently declined every previous opportunity throughout the years to announce themselves. But whatever the trigger event is, it will be a tipping point that shifts the momentum from secrecy to openness.
Avalanche
After the trigger event comes the avalanche. They often start slowly, then gather momentum. Finally, they become unstoppable. In the rapid downhill fall of UFO secrecy, one event leads to another, then to another. Finally, their cumulative weight makes the process unstoppable and overwhelming. An avalanche can bury the past, which can be a good thing, but it also has great potential for destruction.
Shock and Awe
“Shock and Awe” will no longer refer to the 2003 aerial bombing blitz of Baghdad. After Disclosure, it will convey the intense emotional impact people feel at first hearing the news. In the first month A.D., among youth, it will be the answer to “How are you?” The answer
is a simple, “Shock and awe, dude, shock and awe.”
Nomenclature aside, it may feel to many that the announcement of the Others came out of nowhere. The truth, however, is that it will have been visible on the horizon for days, weeks, or even months before.
The Gathering Storm
The most gripping and contentious issue in ufology today is this singular issue of Disclosure. Across the Internet, especially on podcasts focusing on the paranormal, perhaps the most common question asked of guests is, “When?” This has many levels and complexities, but there is an answer.
In their wildest dreams, the secret-keepers could never have thought the secret would last this long. Now that it has, however, they do not intend to change the status quo unless they must.
Disclosure waits until it can wait no longer. And then it happens.
After generations of silence and denial, the Breakaway Group will not change course voluntarily. Although a contingency plan of slow gradual revelation may exist (as some speculate in the form of mass media indoctrination), there is no evidence it will be voluntarily deployed. Only something unexpected and overwhelming will force the secret-keepers to make some sort of public acknowledgment. This could be 20 years from now, or it could be tomorrow. Those who believe the secret will last forever, however, will find that human society will be the thing that surprises them. It is our collective selves that will prove to be the great agent of change, the unstoppable force that ultimately ends the secret. As we will argue, it is most likely to happen within the next generation or sooner.
Whatever and whenever the trigger event happens to be, it will be followed by a period of a week to 10 days where calls for answers grow louder from increasingly authoritative voices. The events leading from the trigger event to Day One will not be random. Instead, they will follow an undeniable logic.
Behind the scenes, several key players, probably including the U.S. president and other world leaders, will receive their first authentic, but limited, briefing on the topic. They will be told that, after seven decades of study, UFOs are perceived as a threat, though not necessarily an imminent one. If they represented an imminent physical attack, there would probably have been a more noticeable military mobilization than what has occurred, and of a different type and scale. On the other hand, if there was no threat whatsoever, the system would have had no need to maintain the secrecy apparatus.
This will unleash a tsunami of classified e-mail, encrypted texts, video conferences, secure calls, and ever-growing anticipation. The world media will be hysterical with speculation and will even receive a few tips about UFOs. Yet, media outlets will be too timid and compromised to publish them, even though they will know something big is about to happen. Even in the event of a spectacular mass sighting, there will be those who expect a prosaic explanation, possibly the announcement that we have built our own flying saucers, or that the object seen in the skies was a military-developed hologram. Others will not be so sure this time.
Facing the facts in the air. Previously ignored accounts of unknown craft become key evidence overnight. Vancouver, B.C., October 8th, 1981. Photo courtesy of Hannah McRoberts.
During this shadow period, world capitals will be in a state of excitement and anxiety, as officials consult each other formally and through back-channels. In the United States, preparatory meetings will take place to coordinate across the three branches of government, as well as the military and intelligence communities. All of this will be aimed at synchronizing, containing, and managing. The major agencies and institutions will need guidelines in order to provide a unified message. This will create leaks that will be firmly and categorically denied until they are confirmed and it happens.
The announcement will not come from any sense of patriotism or altruism. The decision to change the world, to let the world change, will simply be a matter of damage control. It is only at the point where the thing that has always seemed impossible—Disclosure—will now become inevitable.
Full (Radical) Disclosure
When the leadership of the Breakaway Group makes a decision to disclose, they must decide what to say. This is a complex secret, full of nuance, with the potential to rend the fabric of the status quo. They will have several options in deciding what to tell, how to tell it, and how truthful—or deceptive—they will be.
The government might disclose as much as it can as fast as it can. Although it would take weeks or months to fill in the full mosaic of contact, the idea is to let it all hang out from the finest moments of joining the brotherhood of the universe to the darkest hours of feeling under threat by malevolent forces.
This is a risky throw of the dice. Some argue for it and even romanticize it, knowing that they will never have to make the decision. All voices on the inside, however, are apt to look at this option with fear and dread.
What they would have to consider is a scenario in which the government immediately dumps massive amounts of evidence, hoping that this one single mea culpa allows its leaders to put the controversy behind them. This involves the release of an avalanche of supporting evidence—DVDs, decrypted files, or secure download sites full of video and photos (including corpses and wreckage)—and would involve the posting of tens of thousands of pages of documents to the Internet. The next edition of the New York Times would perhaps read alarmingly like many previous issues of the National Enquirer.
By releasing it all at once, much like President Nixon did when he released all of the Watergate tape transcripts at the same time, the hope would be that there will be so much to process that the public reaction would initially be enormous, and then die down. Nixon, however, provides his own cautionary tale. Rather than releasing the actual tapes and forcing the reporters and the Supreme Court clerks to sift through them, he released redacted transcripts. People, fed up with his lying, rejected that. Nor will they accept a Disclosure that is stripped of its full content. If the idea coming from the Breakaway Group is to deliver the so-called UFO truth Full Monty style then they will have to do just that.
The technical obstacles alone would be overwhelming. First, simply assembling the films, videos, and photos would increase the likelihood that they would leak prematurely and create a War of the Worlds-type panic. More important, posting everything to the Internet would be impossible without a proper declassification review, unless the government wanted to offer the conspiracy theorists a first opportunity to interpret them.
There is another reason why full Disclosure may be an unattractive option. It may well be that, during the period leading to the great announcement, the president is briefed by intelligence experts who describe truly disturbing elements of the UFO phenomenon. After all, we can presume that the other intelligences here on Earth are very likely to be more advanced than we are. And the fact that they, too, have been rather secretive about their presence may not bode well. Simply because they are demonstrably smart does not mean that their intentions are “good” from the limited point of view of the humans that happen to inhabit Earth.
Partial (Controlled) Disclosure
A partial, or limited, Disclosure confirms the basic fact that “we are not alone,” and tries to manage the tidal wave of questions and accusations on a case-by-case basis. Essentially, this is a stall for time. One motivation for this strategy comes from the top: to conceal crimes that have been committed while preserving the secret. Also, the secret-keepers can reassure themselves that they are giving the public a chance to absorb this new information in a calm manner, preventing a panic and societal implosion.
Even so, simply announcing that “they’re here” will break like a tidal wave over the public’s consciousness. The “go slow” approach would be an attempt by governments to appear forthcoming, but also evaluating the evidence in a deliberate, responsible manner.
This will still be a death by a thousand cuts. Here, the information is dribbled out piecemeal; much of it is protected and released unwillingly. It is not a pleasant strategy, yet it will be the favored o
ne. It is the only way for those erstwhile secret-keepers (now forced to be secret-givers) to try to maintain some semblance of control over the situation. This has been their obsession and a mission for a long time, and will not cease because of a forced announcement. They, and their representatives, will still face a set of difficult questions where “no comment” will not satisfy.
It is not just that all of the information released at once would be unsettling. It is that any part of all of the information will be unsettling and potentially explosive. For instance, how might Disclosure affect the financial markets, given that there will be technologies from UFOs that may be introduced? How might these same technologies affect international relations? What if the Others have substantial underground bases here on Earth—does one come out and just say so? What if some of them look like us—would it be a good idea to mention this? How does one talk about abductions? What if there had been some measure of collaboration between them and certain intelligence groups? How bad might public panic be?
Because of these concerns, even if there is a mass sighting those in charge of maintaining the secret may only confirm the existence of one species, possibly the common “Grays,” providing the information that they are from Zeti-Reticuli, if that is the case (and assuming this information is known), or naming where they do come from, if it is not. This will be a significant bombshell, of course. Yet, it would only be a very limited disclosure if the truth turns out to be that there are dozens of other species observing us from other worlds, dimensions, or times.
This means that the “big picture” spills out first, while the media—asleep at the switch all these years—tries to repair its damaged reputation by leaping on the story. It will usher in a true battle royale over what we “need to know.” Even though the public will eventually answer that question with a definitive everything, that will come later, as the days turn to weeks, then to months, then to years.
False (Deceptive) Disclosure
Nothing is a certainty in the world of trillion-dollar secrets, security classifications that are levels above the president, and lies and deception going back for more than half a century. It is possible to imagine a situation where the true holders of the secret know they have to say something important in order to appease a demanding population. They would then offer up a form of Disclosure that is only a bigger lie.
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact Page 3