Some time ago, UFO enthusiasts were thrilled when news broke that Trump was ordering a massive declassification of government UFO files. Even those who weren’t necessarily aligned with the MAGA movement got their hopes high, thinking Trump’s brazen approach was the thing that might finally break the alleged cover-up of incontrovertible UFO film evidence—and perhaps even material evidence, in the form of craft wreckage and recovered alien bodies.
We’re on the fourth ‘tranche’ of released UFO files at the war.gov website by now, and whatever sliver of optimism remained in the UFO community that Trump was going to be the ‘Disclosure President’ is quickly evaporating. The release of thousands of scanned PDF pages and dozens of ambiguous black-and-white videos are now barely making the news in mainstream media. And the few things that scarcely stand out from the pile of bland data turn out to be known hoaxes which were debunked years ago; like the CARET drone story, which we covered here in this page at the time—yet another reason why places like The Daily Grail deserve your continuous support: because we maintain a vast portion of accumulated knowledge which would be lost, if we didn’t have the capacity to keep going.
Last month, an excellent essay was posted on the Substack The Bulwark, titled ‘Why the Trump Administration Is Telling Us So Much About UFOs’, which explained the Trump’s administration modus operandi using the term ‘Transparency Maximalism‘:
THE CASE FOR TRANSPARENCY MAXIMALISM relies on a critical assumption: that the public can and will process complex, incomplete, and often highly technical information responsibly. Few assumptions are as naïve as this one.
The first two tranches of the UAP release alone contain over two hundred files—including videos from infrared military sensors, seventy-year-old field reports, and documents from various government agencies—all released in raw form, without interpretive manuals, scientific guides, or any mechanism to help the average citizen make real sense of what they’re looking at. In some cases, that’s because there is little to offer along these lines. By the government’s own admission, many of the videos are unresolved. The files have been released precisely because the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a DoD body charged with investigating these phenomena, could not positively identify what they captured. If the experts cannot figure it out, the Trump administration seems to think, why not let the masses have a crack at it? Here’s some footage we cannot explain. You figure it out.
We urge you to read the rest of the essay, but I hope my cartoon helps you get the gist of it: By inundating the public with unresolved, hard-to-analyze raw data, rather than bringing light into the UFO phenomenon the Trump administration is obscuring it further.
The tactic is IMO no different than when a legal firm representing a multinational company in a lawsuit, is mandated to send information that could potentially incriminate their client; so rather than ignoring the judge’s order, they do the opposite: they send dozens of boxes of documents, hoping the lawyers representing the claimants will not have enough time or resources to find the hypothetical needle in the haystack.
In fact, this is exactly the same tactic the Trump administration tried to use in order to obfuscate the Epstein scandal, by releasing millions of pages of email transcripts and other documents related to the case, while at the same time trying to doctor and whitewash those documents that would directly implicate Donald Trump.
And with the case of the UFO phenomenon, there’s not even the motivation among the large majority of the public to spend hours of your free time going through those documents (people within the UFO community often forget how small our subculture really is). People nowadays are more worried about other pressing matters, like the rising cost of daily life, or the worrisome proliferation of datacenters. Weird blobs zipping around IR videos ranks very low among their priorities.
And even among those stubborn, highly motivated UFO buffs willing to ‘take one for the team’ and check those documents, almost most of them don’t even have the necessary scientific and/or historical expertise to properly analyze the data. They will end up coming to their own conclusions based on their preconceptions, and that’s probably what the Trump administration expects—hence why I have said in the past that Trump is paving the way for UFOs to become a new State-sanctioned pseudo-religion.
Does the government possess better evidence? Frankly, at this point in time I couldn’t even pretend to answer that question. Despite what alleged whistleblowers keep telling us, there’s not been any hard evidence pointing to that assumption. Perhaps now that Trump is ‘freeing’ whistleblowers from their NDA obligations that could change; but I have learned to keep my hopes low when it comes to ‘trickle-down’ promises for change.
