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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/quantumcryogenics on 2024-11-12 15:08:41+00:00.
*Sol Foundation paper by Peter Skafish
Executive Summary
Legislative action concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena (or UAP) initiated by the US Congress from 2020 to the present responds to a challenge that may be among the greatest and most complex faced by the United States since its dawning with the Declaration of Independence and through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression, WWII, the civil rights era, and the Vietnam War. There may not be social consensus within government, academia, and the media about whether some UAP are indeed nonanthropogenic vehicles, but evidence from sources as diverse as US government intelligence, allied foreign government assessments, scientific analyses, aviator and ground witness reports, and public record testimony strongly favor that interpretation. Should public certainty about the UAP presence be attained, Congress’s legislative efforts to date will pale in comparison with those that will inevitably follow.
It might therefore seem that continued engagements with UAP by Congress will be sufficient to enable it to reckon in broad fashion with the myriad national security, geopolitical, scientific, economic, and social challenges raised by that presence. Yet recent federal UAP legislation reveals that Congress’s concern is less with UAP vehicles themselves than the prospect that components of the US Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and other executive branch departments and agencies have known since the 1940s or 1950s of the existence of the vehicles and taken it seriously enough to initiate and maintain related classified intelligence and research programs that were almost entirely concealed from Congress—and certainly, in that case, never made known to the American people.
Concern with that possibility runs through federal UAP legislation and is most pronounced in the UAP Disclosure Act, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2024 sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Michael Rounds that seeks to establish an elite panel under the authority of the President to review for potential declassification all extant government records on UAP, any such “technologies of unknown origin” retrieved by the government or its defense contractors, and biological evidence of related “nonhuman intelligences” (NHI). There is very little in the Disclosure Act to indicate that Schumer, Rounds, and their cosponsors Senators Marco Rubio and Kirsten Gillibrand deem such records to be conjectural, and 2022 legislation that established a process by which members of the Intelligence Community can legally disclose information to Congress invokes with similar confidence programs to detect, track, retrieve, and reverse engineer UAP vehicles as well as efforts to conceal them through disinformation. Both these and several other expressions of interest from Congress about such programs strongly indicate that the challenge of UAP for the US government is due not only to the vehicles themselves, but also to the executive branch’s extension of secrecy about UAP and its activities to the legislative branch.
In other words, that legislation concerning that possibility has been passed at all implies that the problem raised for the federal government by UAP is far greater than all but a few of the most informed public commentators have dared to acknowledge. In essence, the likely terrestrial presence of UAP and, at least by proxy, their nonhuman designers and operators, holds almost unfathomable existential implications for Americans and humanity and therefore requires the informed participation of Congress in all pertinent US government decisions and policy. If the texts of the UAP Disclosure Act and related legislation are accurate, however, in their assertions that the executive branch has imposed blanket secrecy—what might be called “hyperclassification”—over apparently decades-old government UAP knowledge and activities, then Congress has been entirely excluded from decision-making and governance of these. As much as some in government might believe that this could be justified due to the potential national and global security threat posed by UAP, it would prevent Congress from carrying out its constitutionally prescribed responsibilities of legislating and exercising oversight over possible defense, intelligence, scientific, and other federal government activities concerning the vehicles. Put in more fulsome terms, the almost exclusive purview that the executive branch seems to enjoy over UAP affairs infringes on the legislative branch to such an extent that it may have rendered the American system of separate powers inoperative with respect to one of the most important issues government has faced and thereby fomented a latent constitutional crisis—conditions that would also hinder the government’s ability to reckon with the very matter that UAP secrecy presumably would have been intended to help address in the first place.
Should this indeed be true, it urgently calls for a forceful response from Congress, a radical public reassertion of its full role in the US government, as well as legislation powerful enough to ballast the executive branch—perhaps the presidency included—and thereby restore balance. The present text (which the author is publishing as a white paper rather than as an academic article for reasons of expediency) lays out a summary case for why it is highly likely that the executive branch indeed harms Congress with UAP secrecy and proposes a suite of remedies.