ET Still Works for the CIA

J.B. Shurk | May 17, 2026

The Trump administration continues to release tranches of previously classified documents on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the preferred term that includes traditional sightings of UFOs.  “Traditional sightings” is a strange admission, don’t you think?  Aliens and UFOs have been part of our national conversation for eighty years, long enough to constitute a “tradition,” even though the public has few answers for the questions this “tradition” brings.

Whether the U.S. government will ever provide real answers to unexplained events that have perplexed Americans for generations seems a secondary issue at this point.  The more pressing question is this: If our government has been in possession of critical information about the nature of our reality, why should it be empowered to decide what we know?  Or asked differently: Why should the government be permitted to keep secrets from us — especially when we are permitted to keep so few secrets from our government?

For decades, the U.S. military, FBI, and CIA dismissed reports of mysterious lights in the sky as hoaxes, misidentifications, or routine weather events.  Discussion of the 1947 Roswell incident was regarded as a “conspiracy theory.”  First-person encounters with non-human technology or even non-human, sentient beings were ridiculed as delusions. 

Over the last fifteen years, though, a steady stream of former government employees — who describe themselves as “whistleblowers” — have testified both in public and under oath that they witnessed fantastic things that cannot be explained by existing technologies or accepted understandings of reality.  Although some of these people do have verifiable credentials, records, and careers that suggest they were in positions to have witnessed the extraordinary things that they describe, nobody can know for sure whether they are telling the truth.  Or said another way, nobody knows whether they are genuine “witnesses” to the existence of non-human intelligence or whether they are intentionally or unintentionally misleading the public.  If what they say is false, they are either active agents of disinformation or manipulated pawns being........

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