A Theory On What Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer May Know About UFOs
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
In part one of this two-part series, I looked at UFOs through the lens of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena amendment co-sponsored by Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, which largely failed to pass last year. Senator Rounds confirmed that he and Schumer will pursue its passage again next year, and Senators Martin Heinrich and Kirsten Gillibrand have co-sponsored a bill with this passage in it:
The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.
What the fuck??? What “private persons or entities”? You know what the words “non” and “human” and “biological” and “evidence” mean, right? What is happening!?!?!
I tried to stay a little more buttoned up in part one to summarize what I surmise is Schumer’s intent, but I need to let loose a bit in part two because this is now two consecutive Democratic Senate Majority Leaders, between Schumer and Harry Reid looking everyone dead in the eye and saying there’s something to UFOs, and my brain needs a break from trying to be normal about this.
I am a natural skeptic, but I will admit that I fall into the Fox Mulder “I want to believe” bucket when it comes to UFOs. This was my pandemic activity. Some people made bread. Others learned how to play a new instrument. My twisted brain wanted to know what we really know about UFOs, and so I dove into an ocean of bullshit to try to find something real and came back with a lot more substance than I anticipated, like UFOs and Nukes.
This descent into near-madness reinforced my “I want to believe” instincts, already enhanced because I cover politics for a living and this stupid fucking place cannot possibly be the best that the universe can do. I refuse to accept that. All that beautiful complexity and symmetry all culminating in a species slowly killing itself by setting dead dinosaurs on fire? This is the pinnacle of the evolution of life over the course of billions and billions of years? JD Vance? Really? Come on, man.
After swimming through the Great Bullshit Ocean and finding real substance and genuine scientific inquiry, I have come to four assumptions that underpin my opinion on what this big amorphous blob may be, based in part on the reports I detailed in part one, which you should read before wading towards the deep end with me down here.
Assumption #1: The Government Is Obviously Lying to Us
Let’s begin on July 7th, 1947, the day of the alleged Roswell crash. We call it a “Flying Saucer” because pilot Kenneth Arnold coined the term when he began the UFO craze with his sighting in June 1947, and that’s also what the Roswell Army Air Force said they recovered on “Mac” Brazel’s ranch in New Mexico later that summer. There was a big headline about it in the newspaper and everything.
Photo of Roswell Daily Record via Wikimedia Commons
The next day the Air Force said it was actually a weather balloon, and in 1994, they published a report asserting the debris they collected came from a top-secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.
Bullshit!
So you mean to tell me that the top intelligence agents at one of the few nuclear bases in the entire world looked at a spy balloon and were certain enough that it was a fucking alien spaceship to run and tell the press? And those people still came to work at the nuclear weapons base the next day?
Bullshit!
Now this does not mean that the Air Force recovered a UFO. Both headlines could be lies covering for something the Air Force really really, really did not want getting out; to be honest I lean in that direction. I have no earthly idea what would bring them to try to cover it with “yeah we’ve got a spaceship” but there’s more logic to squeeze out of that notion than that some of the nation’s top intelligence agents forgot what planet they live on.
Everything since then has been soiled with the lie of the original sin, and this came in an era where the government was more open to discussing the notion of UFOs. In 1952, a CIA Study Group “believed that the Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States” and “overload the US air warning system so that it could not distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs.”
Around this same time, the government became a lot less open with the public about the subject, and this is the genesis of a lot of the derision around UFOs — to neutralize this very real non-UFO threat in an age of impending nuclear war.
The Condon Report that followed in the 1960s further hurt the government’s credibility, as it was ruined by the Low memo admitting it was just a fake scientific endeavor to call UFOs a big ‘ol nothingburger. Government studies ranging from earnest efforts to total shams across a near-century since Roswell indicate that there has long been a split in the national security apparatus as to how to handle whatever this is.
The difference between the Navy’s new reporting procedure of “unidentified aircraft” versus the Air Force’s more secretive stance of “fuck you it was a weather spy balloon” adds to these fissures in the government, with some portions of it apparently dedicated to lying to us about it. Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon and all the others going public are just avatars of this longtime fight spilling out into the open, and at least according to Elizondo on his new book tour, those nuclear base intelligence agents weren’t the blithering idiots the Air Force made them out to be.
Another teaser of the upcoming Lue Elizondo interview on News Nation
– 1947 Roswell Crash (2 crashed and 1 flew away)
– Legacy crash retrieval program
– Alien bodies (biologics) pic.twitter.com/GQxMUwd2QA— Mike Colangelo (@MikeColangelo) August 21, 2024
Assumption #2: Something Is Violating Global Airspace at Will
The United States Navy has opened this particular saucer hatch by adjusting their formal reporting processes to accommodate “unidentified aircraft” — something happening perhaps on a “daily basis,” according to people like Lt. Ryan Graves. We don’t have to rely solely on the Pentagon’s documentation of this phenomenon either: there are also cases like Iranian fighter pilots chasing a UFO and reporting instrumentation and communications failure upon coming into range of the object.
Capt. Kenju Terauchi, a veteran pilot with Japan Airlines, reported a mysterious object that dwarfed his cargo plane November 18, 1986, and the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that government radar picked up the object too. I could go on and on — documented examples, from multiple vantage points, on multiple instruments, all around the world, over the last near-century, of an object in the sky we can’t explain. This is where the bulk of genuine (public) UFO evidence lies.
At this point there is so much documentation and testimony by credible witnesses that it requires a vast conspiracy theory to argue that there is not something violating airspaces around the world. But like calling bullshit on Roswell, this does not mean the public’s natural and salacious assumption is true. Something truly unidentified in our sky does not automatically mean aliens. But it also doesn’t mean the Chinese or Russians, given how often UFOs seemingly break the laws of physics — which pretty much narrows the range of options down to the United States or aliens or, well, something truly unidentifiable.
If there are real objects doing whatever they want in our airspace, what are they, where are they from, and who — or what — is flying them? That’s the door to conspiracy theories and the logical conclusion of accepting that something is doing impossible things in the sky, which leads us to…
Assumption #3: This Has Been Around for a While
This obviously evokes the Ancient Aliens weirdos, and a lot of that TV show is a whole different angle with a lot of naïve and colonialist bullshit that you should listen to this excellent Citations Needed podcast deconstruct, but this notion existed long before Giorgio Tsoukalos’ hair became a meme.
Jacques Vallée is a world-famous scientist who co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963 and worked on the early ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. He has a PhD in industrial engineering and computer science plus a security clearance to boot thanks to his beginnings under his mentor J. Allen Hynek, the chair of Northwestern University’s astronomy department, who oversaw the U.S. government’s UFO study from 1952 to 1969, Project Blue Book. Vallée was the inspiration for the character Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and as far as the public knows, is probably the scientist who has subjected this subject to the most scientific rigor.
Aside from his immense scientific credentials and decades of applying the scientific method to UFOs, what makes me value Vallée’s opinion the most is that he jokes he is the only UFOlogist who does not know what UFOs are.
The way he looks at UFOs, and the paranormal, and the spiritual realm, is as one broader part of the human experience that has been documented for centuries. To him, he would be “disappointed” if UFOs were just “interstellar SUVs” taking beings from one planet to the next, and he believes the truth to be far more complex. He accepts that common vision of UFOs as technology we can manufacture could be part of it, but it is likely not all of it.
Vallée assembled a vast database of all these experiences throughout history where humans seem to go to a different world and analyzed the patterns that emerged. There were a lot of them, like modern alien abductions resembling abductions of Irish Aos sí lore (AKA: fairies) and other similar legends in cultures around the world. He has written about what he has found across many books, detailing these common themes that span across all of recorded time and into today’s governments.
He believes the best explanation for UFOs is that they are part of some kind of “control system” for humanity that has existed throughout millennia, as he wrote in his 1975 book, Invisible College.
I know, the Ancient Aliens folks might be sounding better right now. I get it, but this is what a lifetime of dogged scientific work on profoundly strange stuff produced, and besides, the easy explanation runs through a minefield of disinformation, as I will detail in my last assumption.
I like this notion because it encompasses the entirety of the unexplained, while also answering one of the best retorts to the UFO narrative of how they could possibly travel distances that would take millions or billions of years: they’re not! It’s a nod to string theory, a notion that different dimensions exist essentially on top of each other, an idea the scientist Michio Kaku helped popularize.
Through Vallée’s lifetime of work, he suspects that this phenomenon is wrapped up in the broader mystery of consciousness whose literal weirdness we are just beginning to really test out. It’s an elegant theory rooted in the cutting edge of modern science and does not require entirely separate explanations for the near-universal tales throughout time of “non-human intelligence” interacting with humans, tic-tacs doing hairpin turns at the speed of sound then diving underwater, and paranormal activity reported for centuries on a haunted Utah ranch studied by the government with $22 million allocated to its mission by the Senate Majority Leader. It’s all part of something beyond our comprehension that can still be subjected to scientific study.
Assumption #4: Intelligence Agencies Have Poisoned the UFO Well with Bullshit
Despite his wild theory of UFOs, Vallée is extremely skeptical of a lot of the claims made around supposed government involvement in UFOs. Roswell is one of many UFO legends he has investigated, and it is one of many whose legend he has questions about. His books walking through the weirdness of his research get all the attention, but he has also published investigations debunking many UFO tales.
In Revelations, Vallée writes about a supposed alien civilization referred to as UMMO allegedly contacting earth with a series of letters and phone calls made to various Spanish UFO researchers in 1965. After diving into it, Vallee noted that “the story was too good, the product was too much of a marketing dream, not to find a niche on the New Age shelf,” as it caught on with a wave of adherents in Spain and still exists in bits and pieces today.
This story of aliens supposedly making contact with humans appears time and time again throughout the 20th century, and at least for UMMO, Vallée noted that “a disquieting possibility, under serious investigation by some French authorities, is that UMMO is linked to an Eastern bloc intelligence agency specialized in scientific espionage.” As a French specialist told Vallée:
“Setting up such a group could have the effect of channeling a lot of grassroot UFO information, some of it very private, toward the leaders of the group. But more importantly, it could help them acquire valuable, confidential insight into current scientific research in Western laboratories.”
That “Eastern bloc country” which surely must be the one we’re all thinking about is certainly monitoring other countries’ intelligence operations and seeing what information makes it through to the back-end. So if they feed a bunch of bullshit in the front-end, they can infer various assumptions based on how that nonsense flows through it. But it’s not just foreign intelligence that’s the problem here, as domestic operations are seriously implicated too. Vallée even name-checks MKUltra and Cointelpro in the book when speaking about his fears.
He tells the story of Franck Fontaine, who disappeared for a week in France in 1979. It had some hallmarks of a classic alien abduction, with Franck recalling a strange abduction experience, then being staged in some sort of examination room he has spotty recollection of during the week that no one could find him. Franck’s friend eventually admitted it was a hoax, but Vallée did not believe him because he was convinced the facts of the situation did not support that conclusion, and he kept digging after the French authorities got the explanation they came for.
Vallée writes that Fontaine and his friends were “petty criminals” going to sell wares of dubious provenance the day he disappeared, and his friends called the police in a panic when they said they saw a white cloud of smoke envelop his car and Fontaine vanish from their view.
Why would a few guys on the police’s radar en route to sell items they may not want the cops to know about call the cops to stage a UFO abduction hoax? This was not the only contradiction in the theory, as the case was quickly handed off to higher French authorities whose investigation ignored much of the facts in favor of trying to force a confession out of the crew they did not trust, but the first police officer on the scene confirmed there was a gaseous cloud around the car when he arrived.
Vallée’s investigation led him to a man he will only call “Mr. D” on the staff of STET (Service Technique des Engines Tactiques) at the French Ministry of Defense, as he is “bound to secrecy about some of the important steps in the investigation.” Vallée quotes an entire conversation he had with Mr. D, where Vallée pressed him on what happened to Franck Fontaine, and Mr. D said, “we refer to the Cergy operation as an Exercise of General Synthesis.” Vallée wrote that Mr D. “mentioned the name of a cabinet member with vast connections in the world of high technology,” and quoted Mr. D as saying that the operation involved “no more than ten to fifteen [government officials], all at a high enough level to establish what sort of manipulation was justified under the state secrets rule.”
Vallée asked him what the objective of this was, and Mr. D replied “the operation was structured around military, scientific, and political goals. It was purely national and had no impact beyond our borders.” Fontaine’s memory of his abduction was seemingly confirmed too, as Mr. D told Vallée that he had supposedly been “put to sleep and he was kept under an altered state of high suggestibility.” After querying whether the French police were involved in this operation, Mr. D replied “their behavior was one of the things we wanted to observe.” Naturally, Vallée wondered why Mr. D told him all this, who responded, “I have my own reasons” and “anything you publish will be denied.”
Feeding people bad intel and seeing where it travels and how they investigate it can uncover a world of additional information. It is a classic strategy employed by intelligence agencies across the world, and it is an especially favored tactic by one Eastern bloc country in particular. The government secrecy surrounding UFOs provides a perfect opportunity for intelligence operations to poke and prod each part of a country’s national intelligence apparatus for weaknesses, and there is no doubt in my mind that a significant chunk of the Great Bullshit Ocean is simply the invention of multiple intelligence agencies around the world. If this is how the French conduct themselves, I can’t imagine what the United States and Russia’s informational warfare looks like.
Conclusion
After publishing part one, a member of the government who has worked on UAP investigations reached out to me. I am confident they are who they say they are, and we spoke on background. They did not confirm anything because doing so would violate their security clearances, so the information I gleaned is my personal interpretation of what little they could tell me. I threw a lot of Jacques Vallée’s non-“control system” theories at them, highlighting some of Vallée’s skeptical interactions with people in positions of power telling him stories of government control around UFOs that, to me, sound similar to those being told by Luis Elizondo and many others today. I didn’t receive much pushback, but I did get the indication that there is something real to dig into here.
There are countless urban legends at this point about shadowy government entities like Majestic-12 with power over the UFO subject, and Vallée has dug into as many of them as he can and come up empty in a lot of situations (but not all). He believes the MJ-12 documents are very likely a forgery and he is far from the only one. There are other stories in Revelations about seemingly planted documents in specific spaces to achieve unknown ends, providing a physical trail of evidence for earthly UFO explanations.
Vallée convinced me through his books that something truly unexplained has been happening since long before mankind invented the three-letter-agency. UFOs aren’t a dubious subject because of the crazier UFO fandom that exists on the internet (although it certainly doesn’t help), but because of the KGB and CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world. It is entirely possible that Graves and Elizondo and others are telling lies they truly believe based on evidence planted to push them to that point, and they told those lies to Schumer and he is investigating them. And even if this were true, it wouldn’t automatically mean that everything they’re saying is a forgery. This is the fog of war.
Maybe it is aliens. Or maybe Schumer is applying pressure to an opaque subject that he, like many others including Jacques Vallée, has been unable to wrap his head around, hoping that whatever springs from that pressure will provide more clarity on this situation and create additional leads to follow. There are a lot of wild stories flying around these days. I don’t think most of them are true, but seeing repeated patterns over time, like the incursions at nuclear bases in both the Soviet Union and the United States and Vallée’s database of lore, makes me think there’s clearly meat on this bone. UFOs are real, but probably not all that we have been led to believe.