Some Thoughts on Keeping It Secret

"The U.S. government secretly hired hundreds of private companies during the 1940s and '50s to process huge volumes of nuclear weapons material, leaving a legacy of poisoned workers and contaminated communities that lingers to this day. From mom-and-pop machine shops to big-name chemical firms, private manufacturing facilities across the nation were quietly converted to the risky business of handling tons of uranium, thorium, polonium, beryllium and other radioactive and toxic substances. Few of the contractors were prepared for the hazards of their government-sponsored missions. Thousands of workers were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, often hundreds of times stronger than the limits of the time. Dozens of communities were contaminated, their air, ground and water fouled by toxic and radioactive waste. The risks were kept hidden. In some cases, they have remained so."
So began a lengthy expose revealing a major government secret that involved thousands of individuals. It was published in USA Today on September 6, 2000. The truth had been successfully kept secret for 50 years. If the reality of the UFO phenomenon were known within one or more deep black special access programs, why might it too be kept a secret from the public? This question was posed to a well placed, highly educated, former intelligence officer who at several points in his long career with one of the agencies had been briefed and asked to assist in evaluation of certain UFO material. I obtained his reply through an intermediary.
"The elite involved in the black programs are among the smartest people on the planet, but even so remain deeply puzzled by much of what they've learned. They tend to regard the public with disdain, like undisciplined and unruly children incapable of handling information of extraordinary complexity. While officially supporting democracy, the black program elite in reality espouse a kind of benevolent dictatorship or enlightened oligarchy by those, such as themselves, who have earned the right to know and to make decisions in the best interest of civilization, to which the ordinary person, being lazy and easily distracted, is not motivated or qualified to contribute anyway. The average American cares more about the Super Bowl than about life elsewhere in the Universe. The intellectual mentors of those with clout and power are Plato and Machiavelli, not Aristotle and Jefferson. Over the past 50 years, the highest courts have accepted and upheld the precedence of national security over the First and Fourth Amendments. So even if the public wanted to know, that would not constitute a legal need or right to know. The elite are doing their patriotic duty by trying to control the situation within the established rules of national security."

My impression is that, if the above is true, there may be more involved than simply the knowledge that intelligent beings exist on other planets, and that some are able to come here to observe us. I think that at this point in our development, most of the world's cultures could accept such information without catastrophic societal consequences. I conjecture that what is at stake has to do with the possibility that reality may be far more complex than our modern scientific notions of space and time and matter. Mystics might be quite happy with other levels of reality, but for civilization built around commerce and technology entirely grounded in physical reality, news of other realms that intelligences beyond our own may be adept at manipulating could be quite disruptive. Too great a shock to our collective reality could lead to chaos, and this justifiable fear could be a rationale for decades-long secrecy. On the other hand, the facts, whatever they prove to be, will have to come out sooner or later, and the global problems facing humanity and the ecology of our planet argue -- in my view -- for access to whatever new knowledge there might be for us to use. Perhaps "disclosure" did once pose an unacceptable risk, but there are good reasons to think that the opposite is true today. Moreover the current administration would appear to offer an especially friendly environment for any disclosure coming from the military and/or intelligence agencies.

While some of the individuals read in on deep black programs may be among the smartest on the planet, so are many scientists. (I do have a bit of a prejudice here.) If deep puzzles exist, why are the vast capabilities and talents of the mainstream scientific community not brought to bear on them? The problem, I believe, is that the view of reality of modern science is extraordinarily blinkered. In my 12-year tenure as editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I was often dismayed at the unwillingness, sometimes amazingly hostile unwillingness, of mainstream scientists to consider what seemed to me credible observations of psychic functioning, or the ability of mind to control matter under certain circumstances, or evidence that we are beings of transcendent consciousness incarnating into physical bodies, not merely short-lived products of biochemistry. I have the impression that we may be confronting intelligent consciousnesses with vastly more developed abilites to control and shape physical reality. Modern science has painted itself into such a materialist reductionist corner that it could not, at present, deal with that. Having set itself in such opposition to what it disparagingly labels "the supernatural" it would have a very hard time coming to grips with a reality in which the natural and the supernatural are just the red and the violet ends of a vastly rich spectrum of creative potential for consciousness to use.

In conclusion though, I must add the disclaimer that perhaps I am overextrapolating from the things I have heard, or that seem plausible to me. I am accurately reporting what I know, but I cannot guarantee that I have not been misled -- accidentally or deliberately -- or perhaps have fooled myself.