Whoops, "Disclosure" Happened and It Turns Out There Was Nothing to Disclose

Since Sean Kirkpatrick published his Scientific American op-ed in mid-January revealing that the government's UFO office found no evidence of aliens, ufologists have been on a tear, arguing that Kirkpatrick was deluded, intentionally lying, or had never done the research to reach that conclusion. Now, in a new podcast interview with Scientific American host Daniel Vergano, Kirkpatrick explains clearly what the upcoming official report on the history of government UFO investigations will show: There is no ET coverup, no secret crashed saucer programs, and the so-called whistleblowers who claim otherwise have mistakenly applied their own sci-fi fantasies to known and documented classified programs that they did not understand. 

The relevant section of the interview:

Kirkpatrick: We would investigate what they would have to say, going back as far back as those archives go, to identify, “Hey, if you came in and named a program, whose program was it? What was it? How did that relate to what the person was describing?” and document all that—which we did, and that was the last report that I signed out when I retired.

So in it, there is a bunch of programs that were named. Those are all classified. We found what all of those programs are and reported those back up to Congress. Congress’s concern is that there was a program that they did not have insight into, and that is not the case.

What we’ve found is that everything that’s been named or identified has a legitimate oversight committee. It’s been reported out. It may be state-of-the-art capabilities that if somebody were to see [and] didn’t understand, but that’s the scope of the investigation."

Vergano: It’s fair to say that you had access to all the classified world that people have pointed to before as hiding some sort of program like this in the past, and you looked there, and you found no evidence of this story that the government has somehow been sitting on aliens for the last 60-plus years.

Kirkpatrick: That’s right. So everything that people have pointed to, we went and investigated and found no evidence to support that. Again, a lot of these things are real R&D or real state-of-the-art programs, not extraterrestrial, but it is completely understandable why someone who did not know all of that would draw that conclusion.

The bottom line is that UFOs as alien spaceships is a science fiction mythology born of pulp magazines in the 1940s (just as the FBI found when it looked into it in 1947) and perpetuated by believers in government who are close enough to glimpse research they don't understand but far enough removed that they interpret their own ignorance through nearly a century of science fiction mythology they have mistaken for fact. The sad truth is that the ideology of aliens is so widespread and so widely perpetuated by corporate media that it is not just likely but certain that many people within the U.S. government have come of age believing in paperback book and cable T.V. UFO conspiracy theories and have brought those ideas with them into the Pentagon. 

The same goes for Congress and other policymakers. I cannot stress how disturbing it is to hear Kirkpatrick say that many legislators are irrational and possessed by UFO conspiracy theories: "So now you’re faced with laying out as much evidence as you can, but you find that the policy makers have this belief that is completely unfounded and irrational....  I’ve had senior leaders sit in my office and accuse me of being part of the cover-up for the last 40 years. I’m not that old. So, you know, this is just not rational."  How do you advocate for truth when so many have a deep, emotional investment in mythology?