The Day the Secret Ends

Dolan and Zabel seat Truman at the start of the compartment. In their telling he knew, and he probably formed the group the papers call Majestic. Eisenhower probably took a briefing on the way in. The 1961 farewell, the military-industrial complex, is a warning they read as large enough to cover a UFO secrecy that had already begun to slip the presidency. Kennedy is in the chapter as rumor: Marilyn Monroe, and the claim that an intention toward disclosure is part of why he died. Johnson is remembered as uninterested, the file passed to Humphrey. Nixon is remembered as a man who knew, with the story that in February 1973 he drove Jackie Gleason to Homestead to see bodies. They mark the rumors as rumors. The pattern does not need every rumor to be clean.

Gerald Ford, still a congressman, had a district full of sightings in 1966 and asked for a real investigation. The public, he said, deserved a better explanation than the Air Force had given, and the country owed people credibility on the subject. What the request produced was the Condon Report, which they call the Air Force’s masterful manipulation. In retirement Ford answered a researcher in the voice of a man who had been processed. He had asked, as congressman, as vice president, and as president. The official authorities always denied the allegations. He had nothing that would help.

Carter saw one as governor and, as a candidate, promised every piece of information the country had. He spent a year trying to get NASA to take reports, and gave up. That much is public. The briefing is the part they were told by an intelligence official. June 1977. The president seen in his office, sobbing, head in his hands. The Alien Agendas later dates that day to the fourteenth. MacLaine’s report of what he would say in private is crafts, and occupants. He did not mention it again. A promise from a candidate is not a key to a proprietary program.

Reagan saw one as governor and had his pilot chase it, told reporters, and then backed off when the story started costing him. As president he kept returning to the same scene. At the United Nations on 21 September 1987 he said how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. There is an alleged line to Steven Spielberg at the White House screening of E.T. You know, there aren’t six people in this room who know how true this really is. The public sentence is already enough. He could describe the threat. He did not open the file.

George H. W. Bush, who had run the CIA for a year under Ford, was cornered in the 1988 campaign by Charles Huffer and said he knew some, he knew a fair amount. As president he was tight-lipped. Their sources allege a serious discussion of disclosure in 1990, cancelled after the attempted coup in the Soviet Union that summer. A window. Then a coup. Then the window gone. Clinton, early, told Webster Hubbell to find out two things. Who killed JFK. Are UFOs real. Hubbell’s tenure was short and, by their estimate, the search was not diligent. Late in the 1990s a national-security man in their confidence got a moment alone with Clinton at a party and raised it. Clinton’s answer was that there’s a lot there, and he wished he could do something about it.

George W. Bush may never have been fully briefed. That is what a senior intelligence official told them, without a name. Cheney is the one they think had the clearance. On Diane Rehm’s program Grant Cameron got through as the first caller and asked whether the vice president had ever been briefed. Cheney’s answer is the non-denial of a man who understands classification better than he intends to inform. If he had been, it was probably classified, and he couldn’t talk about it. Obama, in 2008, with Kucinich freshly mocked for a sighting of his own, laughed the question off the stage. There is life here on Earth, and we are not attending to it. On 4 November 2011 the White House answered Bassett’s petition, the one that cleared the signature bar, and a low-level functionary drafted the reply. No credible evidence. No cover-up. Unverified sources told the authors he had been briefed on the basics and had no authority over the program. The predictions that he would be the disclosure president came from inside sources that lived in fantasy. The functionary is the historical document.

The conclusion of the chapter is the sociology, not the psychology of any one man. Presidents are transitory. Lifelong program managers are not. Knowing the details of a black budget has become a liability. From the managers’ side, a president cannot be trusted with the issue during the term, or after it. Some of them were shown enough to go quiet. One of them was shown enough to cry. None of them was the owner.

C. Wright Mills, in the 1950s, described a power elite of corporate, military, and government elements. Dolan and Zabel put the UFO secret inside that sociology and then update it. The durable institution is no longer the triangle of Mills’s decade. It is the transnational corporation. NAFTA, the Fund, the WTO, the Bank, a legal structure built to move labor and to privatize what used to be a public resource. Occupy, in 2011, was the first time in a long while that the question of who is in charge reached a sidewalk. The same private interests, they argue, took the UFO secret as well, using the government and the military as the auspice. The money was already there.

The NSA scientist is their exhibit of how far the classified world had already moved, and it is the same man as in the lecture. Mid-1960s. A machine near 650 megahertz. Thirty-five years before a consumer computer. In 1965 there were no personal computers. They put Apollo 13 beside it, specialists on slide rules, and the scientist’s shrug: those capabilities were too important to share with NASA. A head start on materials from a 1947 recovery makes a later eureka likely. Better circuits, fibers, lasers, fiber optics, leaked downward as products because products pay. Propulsion that negates gravity, or a longevity the public is not supposed to have, does not leak. The existence is the sensitivity.

The F-117 is the lesson in an aircraft you can actually name. Operational by 1983. Left out of the 1986 strike on Libya, which went with F-111s and failed to kill Gaddafi. Used once the classification could bear it, in Panama at the end of 1989. Keeping the stealth fighter secret was judged more important than using it on the mission it might have won. Apply that logic to a reverse-engineered craft and the conclusion is the one they call obvious. You do not spend it on a regional war. You reserve it for the Others. The beings the program was built to deal with outrank Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, however much those wars cost. A cynic says the wars continue because some people profit from wars that do not end. They grant the cynic, and they add the classification. Both can be true. The best machine stays home.

What they believe exists, six decades on, is a group with technology far past the mainstream world, the ability to go where we cannot, encounters with the Others, a scientific picture the public does not have, and a built-off-the-grid infrastructure, partly underground. They name the leadership and the people who answer to it the Breakaway Group. Keyhoe’s word in the 1950s was the Silence Group. The newer name is theirs. The group has gained independence from the political and military authorities it still draws on. It answers less to the president than to private, internationally based principals. That is the leak both authors say they have been getting for years.

They refuse the next step, which would be to call the formal government a painted backdrop and stop. The breakaway exists partly because it draws on those institutions. Most of the people inside them have no idea they are being used. In a world after the speech, those institutions still have constituencies, still get blamed, and still sometimes act without a phone call from the group. Accountability does not vanish because capture is real. It gets harder, which is a different statement. For now there is no way to know whether the people dealing with the Others are doing it in a way that answers to humanity, and no way to make them.

They mean the paradox literally, and the lecture means it the same way. Disclosure is impossible because the keepers have no incentive. The transformative power of the secret threatens the interests that hold it, and decades of silence have taught the public to feel powerless. Disclosure is inevitable because a fact this large is harder to stop than a wave. Berlin fell in a season. The morning of 11 September 2001 was an ordinary morning. A truth this obvious, this absent from the discourse, does not stay absent on the keepers’ schedule. It stays absent until a trigger, a mass sighting with instruments, a leak that can be checked, a statement by someone whose words can be verified, stacks into an avalanche.

The decision, in their scene, is not made on Capitol Hill and not in the West Wing. The Breakaway Group meets. It may not call itself Majestic. It reviews the event that pushed the subject off the late-night radio and onto the front page. Someone says they have weathered this before. The Phoenix Lights in 1997 came close. Stephenville in 2008 put them near a panic. Someone else notes that they have been near the edge since Roswell. They take a straw poll. Six to disclose, six to stonewall. Every previous time, the idea had lost badly. The deadlock is the drama they stage, and the point of staging it is that even a tied vote inside the group is not the public’s vote. The public is not in the room.

Donald Keyhoe wrote in 1950, in The Flying Saucers Are Real, that the official explanation might be imminent. It has been imminent ever since. The mid-1960s, when Congress briefly wondered. The late 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act looked like a lever, before the lever was weakened. The periodic faith in a sympathetic insider. The faith, which Keyhoe himself held, that a slow acclimation through culture would make the day painless. If we were fully prepared, he wrote, it might come off without trouble. Dolan and Zabel do not think the day is painless. They think the secret, once defended as the thing that saved the world, has taken a toll, and that saving the world now means dragging it into the light. Ready or not.

They stage, as a document from after that day, a petition dated 1 July 2023. Veterans asking a president to give Captain Thomas Mantell a Medal of Honor. Mantell died on 7 January 1948 over Kentucky, chasing an object that Godman Army Airfield, the state police, and people on the ground had already seen. He climbed past 22,000 feet, left the other two fighters, and went in. The Air Force said Venus, in the afternoon, with the sun still up. Three years later the Navy offered a Skyhook balloon. In 1985, as their petition prints it, the transcript came off the classification. It appears to be a metallic object. Tremendous in size. Directly ahead and slightly above. I am trying to close for a better look. Hynek, who had helped stretch the Venus line, later said that sometimes he stretched too far. The petition is their device. The death is not. It is the embargo in its first shape. A pilot, an object, and a public story that had to be wrong so the compartment could be right.

A speech does not return the technology. It announces that the technology exists, which is the moment the owners reprice it. Energy is the prize every institution will lunge for, and the prize the breakaway has the most practice at not sharing. Exopolitics, in the sense they give the word, is the foreign policy that begins when the other party is not a nation. There may already be sketches of arrangements. There is certainly a population that will have to live with having been managed, and a group, hidden for the length of the embargo, that will be exposed and become infamous under whatever name it has actually been using. Members will want cover. They will want to look lawful rather than renegade. The immunity the insider demanded in the lecture is the same demand, seen from the day after.

The handlers’ goals do not retire because a president has spoken. The transnational legal structure, the intellectual-property lock on anything like a free energy, the surveillance, the web made back into a television, the class-sorted transhumanism. Marrs called the product of the older machinery a zombie nation. Dolan and Zabel describe the political condition after the speech as a world in which the secret has ended and the ownership has not. One future they are willing to write down is a later president who does not fight the Others at all. He fights the Breakaway Group, and he does it by trying to take constitutional authority back in the name of the public. They do not promise he wins. They say primal forces get loose, and that other capitals, Paris and London and Moscow among them, may discover they were duped by the same organization.

The day the secret ends is not the day the breakaway joins the rest of us. It is the day the rest of us are allowed to know the breakaway is there. Those are different days. The books are about the distance between them. Bassett’s measure of the embargo was that it could be broken by honesty. Dolan and Zabel’s measure is sterner. Honesty about the objects, without honesty about who has been sitting on the energy, is a new costume for the same club.