Luis Elizondo for Medium: A career's worth of intelligence work for the U.S. government taught me one key lesson: national security is a lot like a game of chess. You have to anticipate your opponent's every move to stay one step ahead of him.
Revealing your strategy will be used against you. But if you see some opportunities, you can win the game.
When I led the government's highly sensitive Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), I worked with a team to assess whether a particular chess piece – in this case in the form of unknown aerospace technology – posed a threat to our chess side of the board.
If this was the case, we needed to know how to counteract it.
Because the government views unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) as a potential threat to national security, they are necessarily classified. They do not want to reveal any information to a potential enemy.
However, keeping such information secret carries risks.
Suppose the person who first learned how to tame fire never shared it with the next generation, or the person who invented the telescope threw it away when he finished using it. What if the creator of the wheel decided it was too much work for others to build and decided to “Forget About It”?
As a species, we are designed to evolve. We needed this progress to get to where we are today. Reports of strange crafts with seemingly inexplicable properties have been circulating within the U.S. government for at least 70 years, suggesting that the phenomenon is not going away. “There's something there.”
Declassifying some information about UAP and making it available to the public could lead to novel technological discoveries, novel forms of medical research and a broader view of how humanity understands reality.
Here's why: the government must assume that anything is a threat until proven otherwise.
When determining whether an unknown entity is friend or foe, the U.S. government considers factors such as capabilities, intent, vulnerabilities, and exploitability. A close look at these factors shows how poorly UAP is understood.
Advances in understanding physics at the quantum level have helped shed dim delicate on the potential science behind UAP. But these advances have also shown us that UAPs also have excellent technical knowledge.
If these capabilities fell into the hands of a foreign adversary, it would be a decisive game changer.
Likewise, the intentions of the UAP have not been made clear to us at this point. There could be many reasons for their presence, ranging from tranquil curiosity to a probe to prepare the battlefield. There are many possibilities.
However, UAP vulnerabilities remain a complete mystery. Some have hypothesized that there is a correlation between UAP and our nuclear capabilities, while others have suggested that the electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear power represent a potential weakness.
Regardless, we still don't know what vulnerabilities UAPs might have, beyond speculation. At this point, this can only be guessed at.
From a national security standpoint, exploitation is the holy grail of effort. It is critical to determine whether UAP technology can be reverse engineered and used to our advantage, but we cannot leverage such technology unless we first understand it.
When it comes to the UAP, the United States knows less than it should, and perhaps much less than our adversaries.
The potential benefits outweigh the risks
Informing the public about national security issues always carries risks. But that's subjective. The significance of this risk depends on who you ask.
For example, if you ask a military commander, he will say that government secrecy regarding advanced aeronautical and space phenomena is crucial because you want to avoid revealing your capabilities and intentions to a potential enemy.
A politician would look at UAP completely differently. They may ask, “Is this something potential voters should know, or will hiding it cause my voters to lose faith in me? How does this discussion impact voters and my ability to represent them?”
On the other hand, a religious person would likely be more concerned about the religious and philosophical implications that UAPs may have on his or her faith.
Throughout history, there are countless examples of individuals challenging dominant systems of power with radical scientific ideas.
For example, when Galileo told the church hundreds of years ago that the Earth was not the center of the solar system, they almost killed him for it.
As someone with no political or religious views, I can confidently say that the benefits outweigh the risks in this situation. For example, in December 2017, our team at To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science helped publish US military footage featuring the UAP. No government has fallen, no religion has crumbled.
Like Galileo, our mission is elementary. Collect and spread the truth about the unknown. As long as the risks do not threaten national security, the benefits can benefit everyone.
Scientific truths facilitate move society forward
At this point there is no doubt whether UAPs exist – they do. People can either continue to live with their heads in the sand or take a proactive approach to this phenomenon.
Centuries ago, when humanity first stood on the beach and contemplated sailing beyond the horizon, the chorus shouted, “You're crazy! You will fall off the Earth! There are sea monsters!”
But now, in the 21st century, people travel across oceans every day. What our ancestors thought of as sea monsters were great white sharks, blue whales and giant squid. It turns out that they are just another element of our natural environment.
When people committed themselves to discovering the truth for themselves, it was no longer mystical, but simply nature.
However, because government processes require secrecy for classified information, false knowledge about UAPs spreads rapidly. Secrecy enables snake oil salesmen and YouTubers to profit from spreading their science-based UFO narratives. Soon people begin to believe that Elvis is alive on the mothership – just as they once believed that it was possible to fall off the edge of the Earth.
The more knowledge people have, the better they will be able to control their own fate and will not be held hostage by the monsters of their imagination.
Author: Luis Elizondo, former US Army counterintelligence special agent, source Mediocre
Image Source: Pixabay.com
