I’m really chewing on the banality part, and the collective shrug of the genuinely shocking rewrite of the rules of the world we live in. As Eliot quipped “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” The epistemic shock is too horrifying.
Or, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents—one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
Dec 8, 2023·edited Dec 8, 2023Liked by Steve Skojec
"And what he [Danny Sheehan] said is he [Republican chairman Mike Turner] opposed the provision that would have empowered the Board of Review that was provided for in the Schumer bill with the power to exercise eminent domain on behalf of the American government to retake possession of any technology that had been put into the hands of any aerospace industry by whatever the deep state element is that has been in charge of this super above top secret seizure of UFO technology from the crashed saucers."
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Having worked for a defense contractor, I find this to be unbelievable.
Why?
Because the US government NEVER gives up ownership of anything to defense contractors. If there is any deep state transfer of alien technology to a defense contractor, you can bet there is a contract in a deep state filing cabinet that specifies that the alien technology is ALREADY government intellectual property, specifies that any derivative technology developed by the contractor will become government intellectual property, and specifies the amount of dollars to be paid to the contractor in exchange for the development (said dollars to be buried in $10,000 toilet seats and the like).
In short, this eminent domain clause would be duplicative of any reasonable developmental contract.
I can think of only 2 reasons for the eminent domain clause:
1) If such contracts exist the proper oversight committees have not been told about them, and so the Board of Review would now try to find them in the contractors' filing cabinets. Contractors offices are, of course, easier to find than government offices.
2) This is a fishing expedition to find non-UAP/UFO technology that was not funded by the government; this is something the contractors would fear and try to stifle for legitimate reasons.
I definitely think that #2 is part of what the defense industry fears.
I also think they've got concerns about materials they've retrieved without government help. Ross Coulthart spoke about this on the latest Need to Know:
But I do suspect, if there was some clandestine arrangement between the government and the defense industry, that it may have been the kind of thing that they didn't want to have a paper trail. The level of secrecy around this is, by all accounts, incredibly draconian.
While I’m open to the use of eminent domain in this arena, my sympathies naturally lie with the assertion of private property rights. What I don’t understand is why anyone in the UFO community trusts a government that has obfuscated & misled the public for 80 years on this topic to seize technology from private aerospace and do the right thing with it.
By the way, your comment reminded me of something I heard Lue Elizondo say in the first podcast I watched on the UFO topic, back in 2021. I went back and looked it up. He said:
"Let me give you a case in point. Let's say there were some people who were doing their job by running a UFO program in the past. But because certain things happened, presidents were no longer briefed, and people in Congress who should have been briefed were not. Now they're running an operation that's considered rogue, but it's still an important mission. Turns out, if the cat's out of the bag, what's going to happen to those people when the government realizes they were running operations, for better or worse, without any oversight, without any legal oversight? Who's going to be held accountable for the fact that they did not brief legally like they were supposed to certain members of Congress and committees and oversight committees and the chain of command? That's potentially criminal action.
Let's say, hypothetically, you have two competing companies, aerospace company A and aerospace company B. Aerospace company A, for whatever reason, gets a favor and some sort of really exotic, game-changing material is provided to that company for analysis. Meanwhile, Company B, competing fairly, doesn't get that material. Company A starts getting a lot of contracts, defense contracts, and becomes a multi-billion dollar company, while Company B, who never had the advantage of having that material, goes into bankruptcy, hundreds of people lose their jobs, and stockholders lose their investment. Both companies are supposed to be treated fairly and have fair competition when it comes to US government contracts. Now what? Where's the liability? And by the way, these companies are doing good things for the United States, but they got there because they had an unfair competitive advantage. Where's the liability there? You're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of liability. Who made those decisions? Who's going to be held culpable for that? The Security Exchange Commission would not be very happy to know that two publicly traded companies competing for a contract had one with an unfair advantage while the other went bankrupt. That's a problem. That's a real problem. You're talking about big money interests, things that go into that gray world that go beyond just government interest. You're talking about banking, some of the biggest names on the planet that have a lot to lose or a lot to gain in hindsight.
Governments have always had interesting ties to certain interests, and that's true of all governments, not just the US. We need to be mindful of that because you could be putting some people in a very uncomfortable position."
My uncle was a CIA agent. I was surprised when he told me, because he was a USAF warrant officer. I asked what he did. He told me that whenever he travelled abroad he would fill out a form describing who he met and what they talked about. Nothing more.
Anyway, the important thing is I met a bunch of these guys at his funeral. One was the handler of Gerald Bull (the Canadian artillery engineer) during a South African covert operation. Bull went rogue after Congress ordered the op shut down, and this handler produced the paper trail after he was issued a subpoena by Federal prosecutors who were after Bull. This guy made it obvious to me that there is ALWAYS a paper trail, and your list of questions that speculate as to what could go wrong is precisely why there is always a paper trail. Most of these guys really believe there is a "by the book" and "above board" way to do this, even if the book and board are classified (BTW, this guy expressed to me his disgust at Gen. Secord's and Col. Ollie North's actions during Iran Contra). They really believe in the rule of law. We may not know where the paper trail is, but "the truth is out there."
Also, think about it this way: without a paper trail the government is not going to know what precisely it is being promised by its contractors, what the deliverables are. Simple winks and handshakes are intolerable to government agents in such matters, since memories are fallible.
Then there is the issue of people dying or retiring: their work MUST be documented. I saw firsthand how a couple of projects got stalled after the principal engineers died and had to be replaced. in principle this would happen with alien technology transfers too.
Really good substack Steve. If even half of this is true (and it seems likely it is) the US is no longer a representative democracy. Rather it seems like an echo of the late stage Roman Republic, and is controlled by a military industrial complex (exactly what Ike warned about) and security apparatus concerned about power and profit, and answerable to no one. Increasingly "left wing" in culture, it's "right wing" in high level governance. Whatever the American Republic has become makes the old labels obsolete and gives reason for us all to mourn.
Phenomenologically, the whole “C-SPAN” angle is bizarre. I find reading Whitley Strieber, with all his talk of kobolds and living garden gnomes, to be less jarring than that wonky chatter about policy which you excerpted, gray newspaper text blithely turning phildickian in spots.
I get how it brings it home that the whole business is ineluctably real, when congressional types expend that much hot air, when the rich and powerful defend their interests in turning UFOs into bombs. That’s realer than Eden.
Nonetheless, I am finding Whitley more cogent than my mention of garden gnomes might suggest. I deeply respect the way he lives the questions that are opened by his experiences, so much wishing he could understand (and pining for his alien lover—I say this not to mock him, but because it speaks to how much these experiences involve his person, heart and soul), while acknowledging that this is far too bewildering to reconcile neatly. There is a profound imaginal quality to many of his encounters with the visitors, a visionary, semi-dreamlike consciousness of them, and yet they leave physical traces that can be perceived by multiple witnesses employing the ordinary public daylight mode of perception.
I really find it too bad that those jokers have left flying saucers behind to be turned into missiles! What John Travolta created this broken arrow, and why didn’t they clean it up? I’d really prefer they stuck to being fey, hilarious tricksters and not a little dangerous, ready to pisky-lead the big folk who get too big for their britches.
If the government (banal af) puts out a very special episode of C-SPAN to inform the public about the reality of aliens before I have drunk the kool aid and eaten the E.L. Fudge in fairyland, never fully to return to this topside world, I am going to be very disappointed in how the story turns out. Let's just have another Cold War and listen to some more windbags on national TV rather than open to the wilder reality we've been living in all along!
I’m really chewing on the banality part, and the collective shrug of the genuinely shocking rewrite of the rules of the world we live in. As Eliot quipped “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” The epistemic shock is too horrifying.
Or, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents—one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
It's the strangest thing, and one I never saw coming.
"And what he [Danny Sheehan] said is he [Republican chairman Mike Turner] opposed the provision that would have empowered the Board of Review that was provided for in the Schumer bill with the power to exercise eminent domain on behalf of the American government to retake possession of any technology that had been put into the hands of any aerospace industry by whatever the deep state element is that has been in charge of this super above top secret seizure of UFO technology from the crashed saucers."
-
Having worked for a defense contractor, I find this to be unbelievable.
Why?
Because the US government NEVER gives up ownership of anything to defense contractors. If there is any deep state transfer of alien technology to a defense contractor, you can bet there is a contract in a deep state filing cabinet that specifies that the alien technology is ALREADY government intellectual property, specifies that any derivative technology developed by the contractor will become government intellectual property, and specifies the amount of dollars to be paid to the contractor in exchange for the development (said dollars to be buried in $10,000 toilet seats and the like).
In short, this eminent domain clause would be duplicative of any reasonable developmental contract.
I can think of only 2 reasons for the eminent domain clause:
1) If such contracts exist the proper oversight committees have not been told about them, and so the Board of Review would now try to find them in the contractors' filing cabinets. Contractors offices are, of course, easier to find than government offices.
2) This is a fishing expedition to find non-UAP/UFO technology that was not funded by the government; this is something the contractors would fear and try to stifle for legitimate reasons.
My bet is on #2
I definitely think that #2 is part of what the defense industry fears.
I also think they've got concerns about materials they've retrieved without government help. Ross Coulthart spoke about this on the latest Need to Know:
https://x.com/MikeColangelo/status/1733130094342787469?s=20
But I do suspect, if there was some clandestine arrangement between the government and the defense industry, that it may have been the kind of thing that they didn't want to have a paper trail. The level of secrecy around this is, by all accounts, incredibly draconian.
While I’m open to the use of eminent domain in this arena, my sympathies naturally lie with the assertion of private property rights. What I don’t understand is why anyone in the UFO community trusts a government that has obfuscated & misled the public for 80 years on this topic to seize technology from private aerospace and do the right thing with it.
By the way, your comment reminded me of something I heard Lue Elizondo say in the first podcast I watched on the UFO topic, back in 2021. I went back and looked it up. He said:
"Let me give you a case in point. Let's say there were some people who were doing their job by running a UFO program in the past. But because certain things happened, presidents were no longer briefed, and people in Congress who should have been briefed were not. Now they're running an operation that's considered rogue, but it's still an important mission. Turns out, if the cat's out of the bag, what's going to happen to those people when the government realizes they were running operations, for better or worse, without any oversight, without any legal oversight? Who's going to be held accountable for the fact that they did not brief legally like they were supposed to certain members of Congress and committees and oversight committees and the chain of command? That's potentially criminal action.
Let's say, hypothetically, you have two competing companies, aerospace company A and aerospace company B. Aerospace company A, for whatever reason, gets a favor and some sort of really exotic, game-changing material is provided to that company for analysis. Meanwhile, Company B, competing fairly, doesn't get that material. Company A starts getting a lot of contracts, defense contracts, and becomes a multi-billion dollar company, while Company B, who never had the advantage of having that material, goes into bankruptcy, hundreds of people lose their jobs, and stockholders lose their investment. Both companies are supposed to be treated fairly and have fair competition when it comes to US government contracts. Now what? Where's the liability? And by the way, these companies are doing good things for the United States, but they got there because they had an unfair competitive advantage. Where's the liability there? You're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of liability. Who made those decisions? Who's going to be held culpable for that? The Security Exchange Commission would not be very happy to know that two publicly traded companies competing for a contract had one with an unfair advantage while the other went bankrupt. That's a problem. That's a real problem. You're talking about big money interests, things that go into that gray world that go beyond just government interest. You're talking about banking, some of the biggest names on the planet that have a lot to lose or a lot to gain in hindsight.
Governments have always had interesting ties to certain interests, and that's true of all governments, not just the US. We need to be mindful of that because you could be putting some people in a very uncomfortable position."
You can catch that discussion (I cued the timestamp in the link) right here: https://youtu.be/wULw64ZL1Bg?si=SnispMoT5TMBwV2j&t=1613
BTW, what drives the fear in #2 is simple short term competitive edge. In the long term they will sell it all to the government anyway.
"Because the US government NEVER gives up ownership of anything to defense contractors."
Actually there is an exception: when the government wants something junked.
My uncle was a CIA agent. I was surprised when he told me, because he was a USAF warrant officer. I asked what he did. He told me that whenever he travelled abroad he would fill out a form describing who he met and what they talked about. Nothing more.
Anyway, the important thing is I met a bunch of these guys at his funeral. One was the handler of Gerald Bull (the Canadian artillery engineer) during a South African covert operation. Bull went rogue after Congress ordered the op shut down, and this handler produced the paper trail after he was issued a subpoena by Federal prosecutors who were after Bull. This guy made it obvious to me that there is ALWAYS a paper trail, and your list of questions that speculate as to what could go wrong is precisely why there is always a paper trail. Most of these guys really believe there is a "by the book" and "above board" way to do this, even if the book and board are classified (BTW, this guy expressed to me his disgust at Gen. Secord's and Col. Ollie North's actions during Iran Contra). They really believe in the rule of law. We may not know where the paper trail is, but "the truth is out there."
Also, think about it this way: without a paper trail the government is not going to know what precisely it is being promised by its contractors, what the deliverables are. Simple winks and handshakes are intolerable to government agents in such matters, since memories are fallible.
Then there is the issue of people dying or retiring: their work MUST be documented. I saw firsthand how a couple of projects got stalled after the principal engineers died and had to be replaced. in principle this would happen with alien technology transfers too.
Really good substack Steve. If even half of this is true (and it seems likely it is) the US is no longer a representative democracy. Rather it seems like an echo of the late stage Roman Republic, and is controlled by a military industrial complex (exactly what Ike warned about) and security apparatus concerned about power and profit, and answerable to no one. Increasingly "left wing" in culture, it's "right wing" in high level governance. Whatever the American Republic has become makes the old labels obsolete and gives reason for us all to mourn.
Phenomenologically, the whole “C-SPAN” angle is bizarre. I find reading Whitley Strieber, with all his talk of kobolds and living garden gnomes, to be less jarring than that wonky chatter about policy which you excerpted, gray newspaper text blithely turning phildickian in spots.
I get how it brings it home that the whole business is ineluctably real, when congressional types expend that much hot air, when the rich and powerful defend their interests in turning UFOs into bombs. That’s realer than Eden.
Nonetheless, I am finding Whitley more cogent than my mention of garden gnomes might suggest. I deeply respect the way he lives the questions that are opened by his experiences, so much wishing he could understand (and pining for his alien lover—I say this not to mock him, but because it speaks to how much these experiences involve his person, heart and soul), while acknowledging that this is far too bewildering to reconcile neatly. There is a profound imaginal quality to many of his encounters with the visitors, a visionary, semi-dreamlike consciousness of them, and yet they leave physical traces that can be perceived by multiple witnesses employing the ordinary public daylight mode of perception.
I really find it too bad that those jokers have left flying saucers behind to be turned into missiles! What John Travolta created this broken arrow, and why didn’t they clean it up? I’d really prefer they stuck to being fey, hilarious tricksters and not a little dangerous, ready to pisky-lead the big folk who get too big for their britches.
If the government (banal af) puts out a very special episode of C-SPAN to inform the public about the reality of aliens before I have drunk the kool aid and eaten the E.L. Fudge in fairyland, never fully to return to this topside world, I am going to be very disappointed in how the story turns out. Let's just have another Cold War and listen to some more windbags on national TV rather than open to the wilder reality we've been living in all along!
As always, great comments!
That’s a sobering assessment.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TCckEQJEGi8
I'm sitting here chuckling.
Love Jordan the Stallion. And he has a point!