Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 34: The Disclosure Field Guide [Pt 2]: Black Budgets & The Secret Space Program

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Today we are going to be continuing our Disclosure Field Guide series. As the disclosure narrative continues to unfold, this series seeks to offer a roadmap for those trying to make sense of just what exactly is going on in this strange and confounding moment in our human history. In the first episode, we talked about how to deal with the ontological shock of recognizing that the world that we live in is not what we were told, and how to get reoriented within that new paradigm. In part two, we’re going to go a step further by diving into the history and structure of the institutionalized secrecy that has kept the reality of the UFO phenomenon hidden in plain sight for decades. This episode was guest written by Mark Burchick. To find out more about Mark, click on the episode brief below. Follow Mark on Twitter.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowEPISODE BRIEFBECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast, I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we're going to be continuing our Disclosure Field Guide series. As the disclosure narrative continues to unfold, this series seeks to offer a roadmap for those trying to make sense of just what exactly is going on in this strange and confounding moment in our human history. In the first episode, we talked about how to deal with the ontological shock of recognizing that the world that we live in is not what we were told, and how to get reoriented within that new paradigm. In part two, we're going to take a step further by diving

into the history and structure of the institutionalized secrecy that has kept the reality of the UFO phenomenon hidden in plain sight for decades. Before we begin, I'm excited to share that this episode was written by our first guest writer, filmmaker and multimedia artist Mark Berchick. I first met Mark in one of Diana Posulka's classes, and we quickly hit it off. In Mark, I found a kindred spirit, someone who shares my approach to studying the phenomenon and who sees the greater potential of this field of study as a catalyst for genuine transformation at both the individual and the cultural level. You can find out more about Mark and explore more of his other work in the episode brief. And I also just want to personally thank Mark for his hard work and deep

research on this episode. I'm thrilled to be able to share it with the world. Since whistleblower David Grush stepped forward in the summer of 2023 with allegations that the United States has, for decades, been running secret crash retrieval programs that are in possession of non-human technology and biologics, more people than ever are asking questions about what the government really knows about the UFO phenomenon. But even among those who are truly open-minded to the possibility that what Grush is alleging is true, there are a few questions that naturally arise, especially among those who are new to the subject. Specifically, why can't whistleblowers like Lou Elizando and David Grush just say what they know? Why aren't more whistleblowers

coming forward, and how is it even possible that a secret of this scale has been kept not just from the public, but seemingly even high-ranking members of Congress whose job it is to allocate and oversee the spending of taxpayer dollars? These questions are both rational and reasonable. With claims this big, these are exactly the kinds of questions that people should be asking. And in this episode, we're going to start peeling back the layers of secrecy in an attempt to both answer these questions and to provide a framework for how to approach understanding the decades of secrecy and obfuscation that has kept the startling reality of the presence of non-human intelligences on this planet hidden from us. The first layer of this secrecy, which we've

discussed in previous episodes that I'll link up in the episode brief, involves the classification system. In short, special access programs like the ones that Grush alleges to be at possession of non-human tech, are highly classified. And at present, there is no way for classified information to be shared directly with the public, or even with members of Congress who don't have a, quote, need to know. The way that Gresh managed to get around that, to share the information that he made public last summer and testified to under oath in front of Congress, was as the result of an ingenious bit of strategic maneuvering. The way Gresh managed this was that he got his statements cleared through the Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Review, commonly referred to as DAPSR.

The point of the DAPSR process is to ensure that information that is being released by people working within the Department of Defense doesn't contain any classified information. However, what this approval process doesn't consider is whether or not the statements are actually factually accurate. So by approving statements for release, the DOD isn't saying that the information is true, only that it isn't classified. This distinction is important because by submitting his statements to Dobser,

Grush put the DoD in an uncomfortable position. They could either deny approval of his statements on the basis that the things that he was alleging were classified and in doing so tacitly admit that there was some merit to what he was saying, or they could approve the statements and take the gamble that they would be able to contain the fallout from what he alleged. And as we'll see in this episode,

the DoD had every single. reason to believe that they'd be able to do exactly that. To understand what's going on with the current disclosure movement and why the progress seems to be so slow despite congressional hearings and briefings and the fact that over 40 whistleblowers with firsthand knowledge of these secret crash retrieval programs have come forward to share what they know with the Senate Intelligence Committee, we need to take a step back and understand how the culture of secrecy and black budget programs came to be in the first place. In Diana Walsh-Beselka's new book Encounters, experiences with non-human intelligences, she has a chapter called The Children of the Invisibles.

The invisibles to which she's referring here are members of the Classified Space Program. Little is known about what this classified program actually does due to a ball of secrecy that has been intentionally built up around the program over time. But given the scale of the program, it's very likely that an entire alternative history to the world, the 20th century exists behind this wall of secrecy. Because these programs are so highly classified, it may be left to future historians to make sense of it, if and when these programs are eventually declassified. But how is it possible for a program this large and this consequential to be hidden from the public? One of the ways that this is accomplished is by keeping the knowledge within certain highly controlled communities. People within these programs often have to recruit new members into this

world from within their own families. This allows the secret keepers within these programs to pass down their knowledge as a kind of oral tradition. In this way, they are not unlike ancient mystery schools or secret societies which rely upon initiation rituals. After all, if you want to keep something secret, it's impossible to file a FOIA request for the spoken word. But there may be more to the generational nature of these programs than meets the eye. The nature of the work involved in this secret program, calls for particular skill sets and predispositions. In encounters, Diana writes again about Tyler D, the pseudonymous enigmatic NASA and Space Force mission controller she first introduced in American Cosmic. The nature of Tyler's work requires him to lead a kind of

aesthetic lifestyle. He believes that he receives downloads from non-human intelligence, which helps him to patent bleeding edge biomedical and space technologies. To receive these downloads, Tyler relies on a set of protocols related to sleep and diet and practices such as spending time in the sun, limited media consumption, and yoga. While Diana was working with Tyler, she said that Tyler was actively searching for a protege who would follow in his footsteps after he retired, and that this person would have to be almost made in Tyler's image. It's important to recognize that many of the people within these programs are not ordinary. They do not live and operate in the same ways that we normies do.

And these differences might be more profound than just a commitment to deep secrecy and particular lifestyle choices. Diana says that when Tyler would speak to her college students before he went completely underground after the publication of American Cosmic, he would relate his belief in a hierarchy of beings, with God at the top, then angels and off-planet intelligences, and next were certain factions of the intelligence community followed then by regular human beings and animals. When Diana asked Tyler about the fact that he listed certain members of the intelligence community as being above normal humans, he simply told her to, quote, connect the dots. Whatever it is that makes certain factions of the intelligence community so different from the rest of us is a deeply hidden secret. Although penetrating this secrecy is as difficult as it is dangerous, it is possible to understand some of the mechanisms of how this secrecy works. And for people who are born into this world, the impact on their lives can be profound.

In encounters, Diana details some of the ways that people in the orbit of the invisibles are affected by this wall of secrecy. Family and friends can be swept up in ways that may appear bizarre to outsiders. Diana relates the story of discovering that one of her own colleagues at her university was a child of what she calls the Secret Space Program. During a spring family outing to a pick-your-own strawberry field, Diana and her colleague's children posed for a picture. Diana's colleague commented that she wished she had more photos of her own childhood,

which confused Diana. Her colleague explained that because of her father's secret clearances as a NASA contractor, certain aspects of a normal childhood were not permitted to her. Her parents spent an inordinate amount of time, making sure that she was monitored. She wasn't allowed to speak on the phone. Friendships were curated and unmonitored sleepovers and playdates were off limits. It was only in her teenage years when she explained this to older friends that she began to realize how out of the ordinary this all was. She commented about how photographs from her childhood would go missing and that to this day she knows almost nothing about her own parents' personal

lives and histories. In her own words, it was as if our lives were being erased even as we lived them. In elementary school, she was signed up for an accelerated learning program, skipping numerous grades in exchange for specialized classes in STEM topics, foreign languages, and interestingly, media critique courses dissecting Soviet propaganda. By the time she was in college, Diana's colleague was being recruited by the National Security Agency, seemingly because she was raised to become part of the intelligence community. However, she expressed frustration with the NSA's inability to do real-time investigations and to allow open communication about their work,

saying that she grew impatient with secret organizations who demanded knowledge without any understanding of how knowledge is acquired. But what exactly is the secret space program? A great deal of mythology exists within the UFO community about secret space programs. Popular media led Gaia TV's Cosmic Disclosure series and UFO lore involving an alleged secret exchange program from the 1960s, where United States astronauts traveled to alien planets,

have left some with the impression that humans already have a breakaway civilization living in the stars. While these examples have proven to be hoaxes and manufactured stories, multiple accounts have emerged in recent years, which have shown us that, underneath the layers of disinformation and secrecy, there is a there there. A secret space program does exist, as represented by people, like Tyler D. and the scientists of the Invisible College. The rising tide of journalists, historians, academics, and informed laypeople interested in this topic have brought some of

this information to light. For example, recent reporting on crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs alleges entire government agencies and contractors that are dedicated to the study of UFOs. Friend of the show, Christopher Sharp, alongside journalists Josh Boswell and Matt Ford, released an article last December in the Daily Mail, alleging that the CIA has a subsidiary office within its Science and Technology Directorate called the Office of Global Affairs. Three anonymous sources briefed on the activities of the OGA

alleged that it was founded in 2003 with a specialized mission of retrieving adversarial technologies in foreign nations by military special operations groups. Although their primary role had been to extract more conventional technology, such as down satellites or drones. This office has allegedly recovered at least nine non-human spacecraft, which were then brought back to the United States and ceded into private industry.

The involvement of private industry in these matters is another layer of secrecy and protection for these programs. The private aerospace contractors that receive this non-human technology are exempt from the same kinds of record and archiving obligations that the CIA would be held to, allowing them to operate more covertly and ensuring that the existence of these technologies are not revealed during mandatory audits. Although this information comes from sources speaking anonymously to avoid reprisals, it's worth noting these allegations align with the evidence obtained from David Gresh's testimony. These stories provide a roadmap for others to begin their own investigations,

and although the existence of the programs is impossible to prove with the information currently available, as soon as you begin to dig beneath the surface, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of smoke, pointing to the reality of a secret U.S. history for there to not be some kind of a fire. But as we have discussed in previous episodes, misinformation and deliberate disinformation on behalf of bad actors have permeated the UFO community for decades,

leaving researchers with a seemingly insurmountable task. How do we even begin to know what is true and what isn't? It is currently estimated that 4 million people in the United States have security clearances to work within the Black world, the off-the-books research, operations, and infrastructure that comprise our military and security apparatuses. By comparison, only 1.8 million people are employed by the federal government in the white world or the open public sector. I just want to say that one more time, because it bears repeating. There are literally more than twice as many people working within the highly classified black world, as there are working within the federal government itself.

We're talking about 4 million people with security clearances versus 1.8 million working in the public sector. A useful analogy for understanding how this black world operates is by comparing it to dark matter. Dark matter makes up 85% of our universe, and yet we can't observe it. We can only surmise the existence of dark matter because of how it dictates the interaction. and behavior of other observable matter. While we can develop theories about what dark matter is and how it operates, we have to rely upon the absence of information to tell us something about the larger picture. To understand the black world, we have to work like an artist.

We have to first define the edges, tracing the outlines to give shape and structure to the unseen object. And as we find these boundaries prodding up against the impenetrable walls, we can then step back and see what it is that we've drawn. Is it possible to see the invisibles by their outlines? Can we begin to make sense of them by the shadows that they cast? This methodology, the meticulous plotting of edges and boundaries, in the hopes of mapping the black world, is the life's work of artist and experimental geographer, Trevor Paglin.

If you're like me, you probably haven't thought about the actual academic practice of geography since high school or college. Geography as a field of study is notoriously broad, crossing over into categories like sociology, cartography, anthropology, and geology. This wide definition of all the geography seeks to encompass has given the field some trouble. Most notably, Harvard shut down their geography program in 1948, citing the inability of the field to determine their boundaries within other disciplines. This set a precedent for other institutions to follow suit.

However, it is exactly this lack of boundaries that makes geography such a powerful tool. Geography needs to be an all-encompassing field because it seeks to explore the relationship between humanity and nature. Humans are a part of the natural world, and we affect it through our actions, our institutions, and our industries. Let's think of a canal as an example. The digging of a canal to create a more efficient means of transporting goods from one body of water to another shapes the physical landscape. The presence of this canal then affects global land, air, and sea shipping lanes. International, political, and military alliances are formed to protect and ensure that goods can flow through the canal. You may recall in 2021 when the ever-given, one of the largest container ships in the

world, got stuck in the Suez Canal for a week, causing catastrophe for the global supply chain and costing upwards of $60 billion. My point is that nothing exists in a vacuum. humans are an essential part of the geographical equation. A feedback loop is naturally generated. Humans create material spaces, which in turn affects how we interact with the natural world. Let's think of another example, a university. On a map, a university appears as no more than a collection of buildings with very little to differentiate it from an office park. A university is not a space until students arrive to take classes and faculty and staff work together

to facilitate education and scholarship. Together, the human activity on a college campus produces the space that we call a university, and in turn, a university shapes human activity. This is the crux of what Trevor Paglin calls experimental geography, where not only do we study spaces, but active participation in the space

helps to produce the thing itself. Using this methodology, Paglin has made a life's work of studying classified military sites, mass surveillance UFOs, and what he calls the blank spots on the map that make up the black world of government secrecy. Trevor Paglin is an artist and geographer from Silver Spring, Maryland. The son of an Air Force ophthalmologist, Paglin says the family's constant movement around the United States,

eventually settling in Germany, gave him a wildly different perspective on what constituted the United States of America. The United States is more than just a physical landscape. Military bases scattered throughout foreign countries, Navy ships stationed in international waters, and spy satellites orbiting the Earth reveal a sphere of influence that touches every domain.

And that's just the infrastructure that makes up the material space of the United States. The intricacies of geopolitics, international diplomacy, influence campaigns, and yes, even SIOPs, revealed that the United States is also an immaterial concept, entangled with every other country's sense of self. This broader definition of the United States had a profound effect on Paglin's educational interests as he grew up. His academic background is eclectic and speaks

to the wide range of influences that make up his current body of work. He earned a bachelor's in philosophy and religious studies at Berkeley, a master's of fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from Berkeley. It was during his graduate work at Berkeley, the Paglin stumbled into a discovery that would inform the future of his academic scholarship. Geographers spent a lot of time in archives looking at maps, especially state-sponsored maps like those created by the United States Geological Survey. During the 1980s in the War on Drugs, prison construction exploded across the nation,

and Paglin was researching how and why. some of those prisons were being built in the deserts of the American Southwest, as opposed to closer to urban centers. In the course of his research, Paglin discovered something unusual. Aerial images from the USGS were coming back with large swathes of black shrouding the desert landscapes, with white stenciled letters stating frames edited from original negative. If you've been interested in the UFO topic for any length of time, none of this will surprise you. As Paglin puts it in his book, Blank Spots on the Map, the Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. It's hard to believe that in the 21st century, unmapped spaces exist.

Google Earth can show you scalable imagery of almost every inch of the planet. We have real-time weather radar available via our smartphones. Not only do we have maps of the deepest trenches of the oceans of our planet, but we have reliable 3D models of celestial bodies in our solar system. The James Webb Telescope allows us to see into the furthest reaches of space, while the human genome project has sequenced all of the genes that make up the human body, effectively mapping what it means to be human. To believe that portions of our planet haven't been mapped is almost absurd.

It's not that the deserts of the American Southwest haven't been mapped. It is that people in the shadowy back rooms of the government have determined that these maps are of paramount importance to the secret interests of the nation. This region of the country is dotted with these blank spots on the map, which trace their history back decades. And just like the modern-day UFO phenomenon, the infrastructure of secrecy really began to come into its own just before World War II. We should feel fortunate that the movie Oppenheimer came out last year and has garnered so much award season buzz, as it has drawn a lot of attention to the mechanics of how the wall of secrecy became engineered and has paralleled conversation, within the UFO topic.

In 1939, Leo Sillard and Enrico Fermi stumbled into a discovery. Uranium was the candidate most capable of a massive nuclear fission chain reaction, holding potential for the construction of an unprecedented weapon. Gathering together a group of like-minded researchers at Columbia University, Silard recommended two immediate steps the scientific community must agree upon. This information had to be brought to the president and the United States. United States military, and researchers must stop all publicity about advancements in nuclear fission. The reason for the secrecy was clear, the Germans must not be made aware of the potential for a

nuclear bomb. Acclaimed Danish scientist Niels Bohr, one of the physicists in attendance, vehemently argued against this. Although Boer was an adamant objector to the horrors of the Nazi regime, having assisted in getting fellow physicists like Enrico Fermi out of Germany prior to the war, Bohr believed firmly in the founding principles of science, that it must be done openly and in a community that shares these values. To deny this core tenant was a betrayal of both reason and democracy. Ultimately, the voices in favor of secrecy prevailed. And although Boer was upset, he commented that it may not even matter,

as the bomb could never be made unless, quote, you turned the United States into one big factory. In just a few short years, that is exactly what happened. President Roosevelt commissioned an advisory committee to begin studying the feasibility of making nuclear weapons, and by the time their work was showing operational capabilities, the U.S. had entered the war. In 1942, the Manhattan Project was officially begun under the purview of Brigadier General Leslie Greta. Spanning across the United States with major sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, plutonium and enriched uranium were brought to the deserts of Los Alamos, New Mexico to construct the bomb. At its peak, the Manhattan Project was made up of over 130,000 people in multiple sites across North America,

a population equal to the entire modern American auto industry. As Pagland notes, the Manhattan Project had its own bureaucracies, its own air force, its own pilots, its own bombing ranges, its own factories, its own industrial workers, its own laws and police, and even its own quasi-university. The project was much more than a secret weapon. It was a secret geography. And to further ensure confidentiality, each aspect of the program was compartmentalized so that no one laboratory or manufacturing plan knew what any other unit was doing. These puzzle pieces were only fully understood by a select few who had a need to know in order to oversee the necessary operations of the project.

Although the funding for the Manhattan Project was secretly commissioned by Roosevelt in 1941, billions of dollars were disappearing into budget line items like Engineer Service for Army and Expedited Production, which had to appear before Congress for approval, This caught the attention of then-Senor Harry Truman. Truman brought his findings to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, in 1944,

and was told that these projects had been billed most top secret by direct order of the president. As a senator, he did not have a need to know and would not be read into the program. It was only after Truman assumed the presidency in 1945 that he was made aware of the full extent of the Manhattan Project. What's remarkable through this entire history is that while aspects of the project had leaked to our foreign adversaries, especially the Soviet Union, it remained secret from the public and from the vast majority of Congress. For most people, the reveal came with the announcement from President Truman that atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project may have appeared under extraordinary circumstances and within the context of the war, it established the framework for institutional and industrialized secrecy. It created a precedent where Congress's constitutionally mandated oversight of the

government's spending was set to the side with the expectation that the newly constructed black world had America's best interests at heart, especially now that we were in an arms race with the Soviets. For context, the Manhattan Project cost $2.3 billion through its five-year development, which is $26.8 billion if we were to go by today's accounting. By comparison, the United States' annual black budget is estimated to be over $50 billion a year. Think about that for a second. Every single year, we spend the equivalent of two five-year-long Manhattan projects. UFO historically, Richard Dolan tells a story in his monumental two-volume book UFOs and the National Security State about how Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.3 trillion of

spending has never been adequately accounted for. He gave this statement at a press conference on September 10, 2001. The news was buried in the aftermath of the following day. Although that report is now over 20 years old, nothing is changed. A popular refrain of the congressional representatives serving in the House UAP caucus is that the Pentagon can't account for 60% of its material assets and that it has failed its last six audits. One of the most common objections we hear from UFO skeptics is that it would be impossible for a secret of this magnitude to stay silent for so long,

considering how many people would have to be in the know. The Manhattan Project proved how this is possible. The money and the materials exist behind. and a wall of secrecy, that very few in our U.S. government seem to be able to penetrate. As Paglin began to explore the blank spots on the map and the history of the national security state, which brought us to this point, he made another shocking discovery. The problem was that there weren't just blank spots on the map. There were blank spots in the literature on government secrecy. Paduan says that the secrecy is merely a band-aid. When you make something secret,

let's say by removing imagery from the official records of the United States Geological Survey, you're practically announcing to the world that you're hiding something. You've sketched an outline that others can detect and begin to work to fill in through various means. Therefore, you have to work to hide the outline. Like a nesting doll, the secrets begin to collapse inside one another, each layer having to respond to some new threat. Each of these vulnerabilities poses opportunities for seekers to find answer, so the only solution is to hide something in plain sight. And to do that, you need to

play dirty. The field of counterintelligence arose out of the need to distract from those things which are impossible to hide. We spoke about the field of counterintelligence back in episode 13 within the context of how it was weaponized against individuals in the UFO community. The question now was how were the secret keepers going to shake off entire institutions from wanting to look into government secrets. What Paglin found was that as the Cold War developed, UFO belief became a godsend to the intelligence community. Here was a topic so loaded with folklore and mythology that you could practically throw anything at it and it would stick. What better way to cover up your undercover military bases and classified spy planes than through narratives about deep underground bases

housing alien bodies and back-engineered crafts operating in space? Counterintelligence agents wouldn't have to do an incredible amount of work to engineer stories that played in their favor because the community of UFO believers would assist in the process. The wonderful thing about academia is that you can make a life's work studying almost anything, from the folklore surrounding vampires and zombies to the data science behind baseball statistics. But until very recently, UFO study within academia and the sciences was considered incredibly taboo. The UFO topic became synonymous with wild conspiracy theories because of deliberate manufacturing from within the intelligence community. Academics found it nearly impossible to justify this research to tenure committees or

grant foundations, and when your job is dependent on your ability to be published and be taken seriously within public discourse, there is no room to stick your toe out of line. As a result, the types of research we've seen within mainstream academic discourse regarding the UFO topic have always been couched with a kind of skepticism. The language is framed in ways that downplays legitimate study and defends the official government stance that there is nothing to see here. One extremely common example found in academic study is that the entire UFO phenomenon is a psychological response to Cold War anxiety and nuclear threat narratives, which ignores the fact that the phenomenon has been with us through time and memorial. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast.

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Price line. Scholars call this type of power relationship political economy, which was most famously elaborated on within Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's book, Manufacturing Consent, the Political Economy of the Mass Media. Official government narratives are picked up by mass media and education system, and then a mix of market forces and self-censorship creates a culture whereby the public can sense to a value system that most serves those in power. As a result, our beliefs and assumptions are only considered valid when they align with those in power, and any evidence to the contrary will be discarded or ignored because it challenges the status quo. The political economy system is self-regulating because those

who are caught up in it are indoctrinated to serve the interests of those in power. To do otherwise would induce the state of cognitive dissonance, so we protect ourselves by inadvertently reinforcing the walls that enclose us. If this reminds you of Plato's allegory of the cave, it's because this theme has been universal throughout human history. In recent years, between the 2017 New York Times article and official government recognition of the UFO topic, we've begun to see this stigmatization erode, and more and more academics begin to approach the topic. In the next few years, we may begin to see some watershed momentum as a result of institutions like the Soul Foundation based out of Stanford University and the Archives of the Impossible at Rice

University, welcoming new academic interest into the topic. The problem here is that we're being outpaced. A 2004 Harvard study by Peter Gallison researched the disparity between how many documents were classified versus declassified in any given year. In 2001, he thought found that around 330 million pages of documents were classified as compared to only 80 million being declassified, leading to a net gain of 250 million classified documents per year. This is the astounding part, and I'm going to read straight from Gallison's study here. Quote, about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe

that are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet. As Paddleyn puts it, our own history has become a state secret. Outside of his interests as a geographer of America's blank spots on the map, Trevor Paglin is a multidisciplinary artist. His primary practice is as a photographer. Paglin came to fame for his photographic documentation and journalism surrounding illegal CIA black sites during the war on terror, and he played a subsidiary role in the Edward Snowden Leaks when documentarian Laura Poitris, the filmmaker behind the Oscar award-winning documentary Citizen 4,

invited Paglin to collaborate with her. Armed with documents that revealed the extent of the NSA's mass surveillance infrastructure, Pagland taught himself how to scuba dive so that he could photograph the massive undersea cables that connect the global internet. Turning his eye to the blank spots on the map back home in America, Padlin recognized just how much of the American Southwest has been mythologized, from the vast photographic landscapes of Ansel Adams to the detailed paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. Artists have sought to capture the indescribable beauty of the desert landscapes. Located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a geographic area the size of Switzerland is the Nevada

test site. During the early days of World War II, the region was used for munitions testing, and as the Army Air Corps justified at the time, quote, you could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference. Today and throughout its history, the Nevada test site has served as host some of the nation's most secretive projects. From nuclear energy and weapons development following the success of the Manhattan Project to recreating the moon's surface for training astronauts on how to drive the lunar rover, the region is pockmarked with air force bases, army engineering projects, nuclear facilities, and private aerospace and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. While not all of these projects are blank spots on the map, it was those

original redacted maps discovered in the archives at Berkeley that caught Trevor Pagland's attention and sent him into the desert to photograph them. As a geographer, Paglin operates under the assumption that nothing can truly remain secret. There is a material culture of secrecy that reveals its existence in the tangible things built and used by humans. The black world must have the same infrastructure that is shopping mall night, transportation, a central receiving for shipments, communication networks, maybe a private security force. And as we've discussed earlier, in the episode, the Black World is made up people who go about their lives doing extremely unique jobs under extremely peculiar circumstances.

Perhaps the most famous and mythologized blank spot on the map, whose existence we know about because of this material culture of secrecy is the secret Air Force base known as Area 51. Area 51 came into the popular consciousness because of Las Vegas-based journalist George Knapps reporting in 1989. During a last-minute interview with a pseudonymous silhouetted character named Dennis, a story emerged about a secret facility within Area 51 called S-4, made up of hangers built into the mountainside adjacent to Pappooze Lake. Here, the U.S. Air Force had come into possession of nine recovered flying saucers, of which it was Dennis's job to study the propulsion system. This silhouetted figure was later revealed to be Bob Lazar. And his allegations were as monumental a

disclosure to 1990s euphology, as the 2017 New York Times article and David Gresh's whistleblower allegations were to the modern day. We can't even scratch the surface of Bob Lazar's story today. It's just too dense and wild a story to do justice to. And as a side note, if you want to hear a little bit more about the complexities of the Lazar case, Jay Christopher King and I had a conversation about that in episode 32 that you can refer back to. What's important for today's episode is that George Knapp's exhaustive reporting is the reason that Area 51 is as synonymous with the UFO topic as it is today. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, Lazare's allegations and NAPS reporting didn't cause the Air Force to budge on acknowledging the existence of the facility. If the Manhattan

project showed us how to build a wall of secrecy, then Area 51 showed us how to build a fortress of secrecy. Area 51 is gone by many names throughout its history, including Paradise Ranch, Watertown, Detachment 3 of the Air Force Flight Test Center, and the mysterious and vaguely threatening, quote, operating location near Groom Lake. The story of how the base came to be is straight out of the Manhattan Project's playbook, beginning with how to secure secret funding. Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Annie Jacobson details this story in her incredible book, Area 51, an uncensored history of America's top secret military base. Having interviewed over 70 former employees of the base,

as well as uncovering never-before-seen documents, she tells perhaps the most comprehensive history of the base. In 1948, a man named Richard Bissell was appointed the executor of finance for the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led effort to rebuild Europe after World War II. He was approached by a representative of the Office of Policy Coordination, a division of the newly developed Central Intelligence Agency to peel off some money from the Marshall Plan.

The intent was to use this money for a small set of covert operations targeting the Soviet Union. This CIA agent explained that James Forrestal, the nation's first Secretary of Defense, had given the go-ahead to sign off on the clandestine budget. With the switch of a pen, the funds for what would become Area 51 were secretly skimmed out of the budget used to restore Europe. The base came to be built under a CIA contract in the 1950s by Lockheed

Martin. The goal was to test and train pilots for the U-2 spy plane, and it was Richard Bissell who found himself as head of the project just a few years later. Positioned near a dry lake bed that serves as a natural runway called Groom Lake, the base is now home to perhaps the most secretive and state-of-the-art flight test center on the face of the planet. In 1958, President Eisenhower used an executive order to seize almost 40,000 acres of public land surrounding Groom Lake. The Atomic Energy Commission had divided these public tracts of land into smaller sections called areas during their nuclear weapons testing, and the new parcel that was selected happened to be Area 51. Almost immediately, the presence of never-before-seen technologies associated

the kinds of planes being flown out of Area 51, led to speculation that these were extraterrestrial craft. For example, while most commercial flights of the era flew at around 20,000 feet, the U2 was capable of flying at 70,000 feet. Not only that, but the plane's peculiar shape, with a wingspan almost twice as long as the fuselage, made it appear like a massive shining cross when it caught the sunlight. Public reports of UFOs matching this description began to appear across California, Nevada, and Utah, and so the aircraft designers responded by painting the craft and that black finish.

It is undeniable that the secret flight testing in this region has played a significant role in the UFO sightings prevalent in the American Southwest. But as UFO historian Richard Dolan notes, some of the sightings stretch credulity for any type of aircraft, from fleets of disks and boomerangs flying in formation, sometimes upward of 15 to 20 at a time, to basketball-sized glowing orbs, to massive, completely silent perforated ice cream cones,

the conventional explanations that these were new U.S. technology does not always pass muster. Although embracing the UFO narrative became a powerful way for the Air Force to cover for their secret flight testing, the amount of UFO reports was causing concern among the CIA that the public's hysterical behavior could be weaponized by the Soviets. This period of our history is marked by this seemingly controversial, and contradictory government stance. While the Air Force was running public propaganda campaigns denying the existence of UFOs under operations like Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, they were simultaneously studying reports, integrating themselves into civilian UFO groups, and feeding disinformation to muddy

the waters. And while Bob Lazars' story later solidified the connection between UFOs in Area 51, causing a media firestorm and unprecedented public attention, it was instead a wrongful death lawsuit that almost forced a declassification of the secret military base. In the 1980s, Walter Kaza was a union sheet metal worker, assigned to work on a military base in the desert so secret that he had to fly in via an unmarked plane out of Las Vegas. Upon arrival to work each day, a group of soldiers would direct them to a job site, telling the workers to look straight ahead at all time. Working from scaffolding on the construction of new buildings, occasionally a roar would be heard,

and the workers would be directed by armed guards to look at the ground until the object had passed overhead. During this time, the Air Force Flight Test Center was testing all manner of stealth craft well beyond the publicly known F-117A and SR71. We had even captured and back-engineered Soviet MIGs, which were stored at the facility, flown by a unit called the Red Hatts. Walter Kaza and his fellow sheet metal workers toiled away in the hot desert sun while these new spy planes tore through the sky overhead. Meanwhile, great plumes of black smoke would billow across the job site periodically, washing over the workers and blocking out the sky. It turns out that, like any industrial project, secret military bases produce trash, huge amounts of it.

But this isn't just left over lunch from the base's mess halls. We're talking about crashed airplanes from failed tests and leftover exotic and hazardous materials. You know, secret trash that you couldn't just dispose of in a public landfill. Air Force officials, tasked with finding a way to hide these materials, settled on digging burn pits the size of football stadiums, throwing the trash in, drenching it with jet fuel, and letting the pits burn day and night. These burn pits came to service not only the debris accumulated from Area 51, but also other Air Force bases operating out of the southwestern region. Walter Kaza were construction at Area 51 for seven years, during which time a chronic cough and mysterious skin rashes began to settle in. Doctors were left dumbfounded by the symptoms, which came to include cracked bleeding skin so aggravated that it resembled fish scales.

workers from the site began dying of mysterious cancers and organ failure so often that eventually surviving members of the union and their families organized and filed a class action lawsuit. A Georgetown law professor agreed to take the case, outlining a few simple goals. The workers wanted the Air Force to reveal the nature of the toxins that they had been exposed to so that they could receive appropriate medical care, and they wanted a formal apology. The Air Force responded to the lawsuit with a bewilder. statement. The lawsuit can't move forward because there is no such base as Area 51. A few short years after Bob Lazar made his accusations of a reverse engineering program housed

at Area 51, some of the most damning documents arguing for its existence came out of wrongful death lawsuits filed by sheet metal workers. The attorney representing the workers was able to scrounge together employee pay stubs, Air Force documents, and even a security manual labeling the site as Area 51. In response, the Air Force was forced to admit that they had what became its unofficial title for years to come, an operating location near Groom Lake. Raising the state's secret privilege, the judge overseeing the case concluded that because any evidence of wrongdoing would publicly reveal the existence of Area 51, the workers would not be allowed to bring forward their lawsuit. Padlin's words here are so evocative that I want to quote him directly, quote,

Because it was impossible to have a lawsuit without any evidence, the lawsuit, like the base and the mysterious aircraft tested there, could not exist. In 1998, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal and Walter Kaza passed away from his complications before justice could be served. How is this possible? And what is the state's secret privilege? Which just allows the executive and judiciary branches to sweep the evidence off the table and call it a day. This leads to the legal precedent was established in 1953 during a Supreme Court case called United States v. Reynolds. During a classified Air Force test of what was hoped to become an unmanned aerial vehicle, a catastrophic failure caused the plane to crash, killing nine of the members on board, a few of

whom were civilian contractors. Some of the widows got together to sue the Air Force, demanding the accident investigation report. During the early legal proceedings, the Air Force denied the request, stating that they had state secret privilege, where any disclosure of materials related to the test flight would damage national security. The widow's lawyer responded by stating that, in such cases, the precedent would be for the Air Force to allow the judge access to the file, for redactions to be made, and for the case to continue. Still, the Air Force refused to share the files, and so the judge rolled in favor of the widows. The Air Force proceeded to appeal to the Third Circuit Court, where the six, the same thing,

same ruling was upheld. The Air Force's argument at this point was that they believed the executive branch to be the sole power over national security issues. They wanted to eliminate the judiciary branch's ability to allow judges to view classified documents and make determinations as to what disclosure would be allowed to happen within the courts. Ast astonishingly, a 6-3 decision at the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's argument, removing their ability to put a check on the executive of branch's power. There seems to be no good reason as to why the judicial branch would do this, even citing that such privileges would lead to, quote, intolerable abuses in their own majority ruling. The logic that the justices relied upon to defend the Air Force's argument was that

too much judicial inquiry into the claim of privilege would force disclosure of the thing that the privilege was meant to protect. The justices deputized the fox in the henhouse, who proceeded to clear himself of any wrongdoing. Walter Kaza's lawsuit shows how this ruling panned out and how the executive branch was able to wiggle its way out of traditional disclosure methods. The fallout from the Kazza family's lawsuit reached the desks of both President's Clinton and George W. Bush during their administrations, and both had signed orders stating that the Air Force base operating out of Groom Lake would be made exempt from public disclosure.

In a 2003 memo to the EPA administrator, Bush wrote that the classified information regarding Groom Lake was of, quote, paramount interest to the United States. It wasn't until 2013, the Barack Obama became the first president to publicly recognize Area 51 by name, cracking a joke during a speech at the 36th annual Kennedy Center Honors, recognizing the actress Shirley McLean. Obama commented, quote, Now, when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, what's really going on in Area 51?

When I wanted to know, I'd call Shirley MacLean. McLean is a well-known UFO believer, having been a witness to the 1952 sightings of UFOs over the White House and Capitol at the age of 18. Obama then went on to say, I think I just became the first president to ever publicly mention Area 51. As it turns out, it's because he was finally able to. Earlier that year, the CIA had declassified documents that officially named Area 51 as the secret military site for the testing of the U2 and other Cold War aerosby planes. I tell you this story to highlight just how capable the U.S. secret keeping mechanisms are. Even within the adjustments to the recent Schumer-Rounds Amendment, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to withhold the disclosure of publicly known sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena that would reveal sources, method,

or otherwise compromise the national security of the United States. As we've seen, the executive branch has stretched the definition of national security to fit its needs, and no one, not even the other branches of government, can do much to stop them. There's no reason to believe that the release of UFO secrets would be any different. When we talk about the material culture of secret geographies, there's more to the black world than it's off-the-logs flights, redacted budget line items, and covert bases. As an Air Force brat, studying the Black world, Paglin found it quite easy to meld into the corporate retreats and dive bars that were regular haunts of both current and retired military

and intelligence community members. Through years of reporting on and befriending those who worked within Black programs, Pagland found that members of these communities had massive collections of keepsakes that offered a sneak peek behind the wall of secrecy. Key among these keepsakes are patches. The history of military patches stretches back to the Civil War, when unique insignias were designed to better differentiate brigades from one another. The practice quickly took off as they became a point of morale and pride. Each unit would develop its own backstory and imagery to go with its patch. Nowadays, patches are used for almost everything, to memorialize special events, to distinguish different units or to suggest a rank, role, or origin of a specific program.

For example, the appearance of a skunk on a classified program's patch would reference the Lockheed Skunk Works mascot, revealing its origins. There are even what are called Friday patches, which is the military's equivalent of casual Fridays, where enlisted members are allowed to dress down with more colorful or flashy patches. Unsurprisingly, a culture arose of creating patches for units and activities that are part of black programs. What fascinated Paglin is how these patches symbolically represent something that is supposed to be invisible. He connects this tradition to the history of religious art. Throughout human history, artists have struggled with the idea of how to depict the ineffable, the unique and describable experience of direct contact with God

or the sensation of divine ecstasy. This is how we arrived at imagery like pillars of light and fire. and metaphors like animals or celestial bodies like the sun and moon to represent that which couldn't be put into words. You might ask, why would you create a patch, depending something which is supposed to be secret? Wouldn't the black world want to operate as discreetly as possible? But this goes back to the idea of the Band-Aid we were discussing earlier. If it's truly impossible to hide something, then we need to instead create a culture of self-awareness that protects the secrecy. In Padlin's words, quote, by wearing a patch, it's wearer advertises to those around them that there are certain things that he or she cannot speak about. Their membership

in the secret society is contingent upon keeping those secrets. We might imagine that wearing a patch that speaks to secrets might be extra incentive for the person wearing the patch to keep silent. Think of the satisfaction you might feel in your work wearing a patch that had some variation of the phrase, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. Through the years of working in this community, Pagland has not only acquired and photographed a large amount of these patches, but has picked apart the symbolism found within them. Now, this is mostly speculation, because, as we've noted,

asking black program members for any confirmation merely leads to a knowing smile and a wink. However, there are some common symbols he has found, many of which are directly tied to UFO folklore. Hitting within the many black program patches is celestial imagery, especially groupings of stars. When you look closer at the number and arrangements of stars, you'll notice a pattern, groups of five, and an additional star just to the side. This is often accompanied by another group of three. It is believed that these stars represent Area 51 and its other official name Detachment 3 of the Air Force Flight Test Center.

There exists a patch for the rapid capabilities often. an obscure Air Force unit whose job it is to liaison between Air Force leadership, the offices of the Secretary of Defense and the White House about classified activities. The patch depicts a massive star and an eagle superimposed over a blacked-out image of the earth, suggesting the black world of secrecy. However, it's the Latin written at the bottom of the patch that stands out. The phrase translates to doing God's work with other people's money. A completely black patch with a question mark crescent moon and the words, don't ask,

was allegedly worn by the 22nd military airlift squadron whose job it was to transport brand new black aircraft from aerospace companies in Southern California to the Nevada test site. These operations would take place at night and were undoubtedly the origin of many UFO sightings. The crescent moon on the patch suggests the night operations undergone by this unit. Many of these patches entered the realm of conspiracy theory because they featured some pretty provocative imagery, including dragons, robed figures with glowing eyes, wizards, and even gray aliens. While we don't have clear answers on what all these symbols mean or reference,

Padlin has some pretty interesting speculation. A gray alien grips the sides of a triangular-shaped craft with the words, to serve man, and the number 509. As it turns out, the triangular-shaped craft, is the silhouette of the B-2 stealth bomber. The 509th bomber, and although they are currently based in Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the unit actually has its origins in Roswell, New Mexico, hence the Great Alien. Finally, the to serve man title is a reference to a classic Twilight Zone episode,

and spoiler alert here for a 60-year-old episode, it is revealed that benevolent appearing aliens are eating humans. On the other hand, a patch that features a gray alien with a chain around its neck, and the words alien technology exploitation division, would appear to tell you everything you need to know. Paglin was able to shake loose this story from Robert Fabian, the Patch's inventor, who was stationed at Air Force Space Command in a classified unit. The unit worked exclusively inside of a skiff or secure compartmentalized information facility,

and other workers who passed by would question if that's where the dead alien body, were hidden. Fabian joked that, quote, no, we need live ones to explain how their technology works. And hence, the patch was born. The unit wore the patch for a few months before the higher-ups noticed, and instead of getting reprimanded, they asked how they could get one themselves. Paglin never did find out what the unit actually does, but Fabian described the creation of briefing slides that never seemed to go anywhere as a testament to the benign nature of his work. Some of the most interesting and controversial patches come from an agency within the Department of Defense called the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Earlier, we discussed the evidence for a secret space program,

and the NRO seems to fit the bill for much of what is attributed to this shadowy space agency. Founded only three years after NASA in 1961, the NRO's existence was not publicly revealed until 1992, and that is despite its having the largest budget of any intelligence agency. Whereas NASA is the public face of the U.S. space program, the NRO is the Black World equivalent. Although they report official staff numbers that hover around 3,000 members, a bipartisan commission report found that its actual workforce is somewhere in the tens of thousands, composed almost entirely of classified defense contractors. David Grush happened to be one of these personnel.

From 2016 to 2021, Grush worked as a senior intelligence officer for the NRO, going so far as to lead the production of the NRO director's daily briefing, and then, beginning in 2019, Grush served as the NRO's representative to the UAP Task Force. The NRO's primary mission is to develop and deploy the space-based intelligence arm of our national security. They primarily operate satellites, but we don't necessarily know all of what it is that they do, because almost everything about the agency remains classified. In the 1950s, the U.S. government began a public service campaign, teaching its citizens to track and report satellites.

Masked as a new science initiative and a fun hobby to share with the family, the Smithsonian-backed Project Moonwatch was assisting the intelligence community to locate and gather data on Soviet satellites. The legacy of this program is groups of hobbyists who work to find and track actual UFOs in our skies, including NRO and foreign nation satellites that are not publicly recognized or declassified. Documenting both these UFOs and the amateur astronomers who track them has been an ongoing project for Paglin. The NRO often piggybacks their satellites onto different types of space shuttle launches, and not only are patches created for these missions, but logos are painted on the craft themselves.

In the course of Diana Fusalka's work with Tyler, she was exposed to many of these patches and noted that they feature a large amount of ancient Roman religious symbolism, such as depictions of gods and goddesses from the Roman pantheon. Furthermore, the phrases on the patches are in Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. When Diana asked, why would you put a logo on the side of a secret?

satellite, who's going to see them? Tyler responded that there is an audience up there, and we want to honor our sponsors. Like many of the mysterious things that Tyler said, she knew it was up to her to connect the dots. Although she was hesitant to ask for clarity on this statement, she took it to mean that our sponsors were the non-human intelligences that Tyler believes he is in contact with. NRO patches and logos can be controversial because not only are they mysterious, they are overtly threatening. A patch for the NRL-39 satellite features an octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the earth with the phrase, nothing is beyond our reach. One NRO patch featuring a gray alien over a set of aircraft wings features a Latin phrase

that translates to, let them hate so long as they fear. For all these patches do, to support morale and reinforce the culture of secrecy, there are those who object to the black world's all-consuming nature. Many of Paglin's informants were former black program members, who no longer wish to be a part of that world. As Paglin found in the course of his research, the culture of silence, invasiveness, and paranoia associated with this work can be daunting.

And as we've noted, it doesn't stop at 5 o'clock. People bring this culture home, and it dramatically affects not only their lives, but the lives of their families. It takes a special kind of person to live this lifestyle. As one of Paglin's interviewees put it, those patches are gang colors. In recent years, Trevor Paglin has turned his eye

toward artificial intelligence and state surveillance. If the black world's archiving of a secret history shows us what we know of our past is not the full story, these new research interests show that our future may not be able to be trusted either. In his study of artificial intelligence and large language models like chat GPT, he projects a future in which AI models will be custom designed for every individual on the internet, specializing in catering to our personalized internet data and preferences. He calls this future state, sci-op capitalism, taking influence from the disinformation campaigns waged by U.S. counterintelligence agencies and specifically the notorious Richard Doty. We covered some of Richard Doty's disinformation campaigns back in episode 13, but briefly,

Doty was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who used the UFO phenomenon as a SIOP against private citizens and journalists. In the course of a SIOP's research, Paglin interviewed Richard Doty for an hour-long documentary project, and he concluded that Doty is a kind of living chat GPT. Doty would fabricate data used in conversations about classified air. Air Force projects, UFO mythology, and authentic UFO information to craft disinformation that poisoned the well of legitimate UFO research. Padlin compares this disinformation to the hallucinations that Chat GBT is prone to. If you can't trace the sources yourself, then the entire system is

not to be trusted. Paglin says that we are quickly approaching a future where the intermingling of AI and the internet will be like living inside of Richard Doty's mind. Just a constant storm of competing narratives and disinformation of a virtually unknowable provenance. He says that if you haven't already gotten that impression from the internet already, just do wait. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.

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what the hell, Kelly, this all seems so hopeless. And first, I agree with you. This is a bleak episode. But I don't share this with you because I believe that all hope is lost. I actually don't believe that at all. When Padlin was exposed to the reality of the black world in its many different iterations, including secret weapons and reconnaissance projects, state surveillance and illegal torture prisons, he used his academic training to gather together the material aspects of these worlds. His objective was to peel off the

band-aid and show how official government policy mixed with illegal activities shaped our world into being. But Padlin didn't stop there. While his scholarship and collected writings are an important contribution to the blank spots in the literature we've been discussing, this research is what has informed his practice as an artist. Although he works primarily as a photographer, Padlin is not interested in documenting these sites in the way that a photojournalist might. For example, his series of images documenting the secret Air Force bases of the Nevada test site are photographed for miles and miles away on the public land surrounding the test site. He uses lenses designed for astrophotography, meaning that the extremely long distances are collapsed and made flat in the image.

The heat of the desert landscape and just the amount of atmosphere you have to shoot through completely abstract the image into hazy, wavering color forms. If you squint, you may be able to make out the opening of a hanger or the reflection of a satellite dish. In doing this, Paglin adds a layer of commentary. The public tax dollars buried behind black budgets that fund these programs mean nothing behind the wall of secrecy, creating an inaccessibility that Paglin attempts to resolve. These obfuscated images are the result. The closest one may get to seeing these bases for themselves is embodied in the abstraction that his images display. We will never know their true stories.

We only get to see the mirage. From his official biography, Paglin says that his chief concern is learning how to see the historical moment we live in and to develop the means to imagine alternative futures. This is what makes his experimental geography so powerful and applicable to uphology. The goal of experimental geography is to actively take part in the thing that is being studied so that we can create new ways of being in the world. For Trevor Paglin, the unveiling of this hidden history of the 20th century, the mapping of the walls of secrecy

is a means of enabling people to assert their sovereignty in the face of ever coalescing power. Outside of his photographic practice, he has also worked as a sculptor. One of his most ambitious projects from back in 2018 was the launching of a massive,

mirrored satellite into low-Earth orbit. Carried into space aboard a Space X-Falcon-9 rocket, this artwork called Orbitter Reflector had one purpose, which was to reflect sunlight back to Earth and reveal itself for a few short months before eventually burning up in Earth's atmosphere. By not serving any other purpose than to be looked at,

Paglin asks us to question the role of our human presence in space. Who owns space? And for what purposes? Are we really going to let our military intelligence and communication industries dictate what is permissible for the final frontier? The project encourages us to look up and dream, imagining what futures may exist for us out there. Paglin calls the UFO topic a hyper meme. The phenomenon is so deeply entrenched in the American consciousness because of years of media depictions, news stories, and government messaging. We immediately conjure up images in our heads whenever the UFO topic is mentioned.

Whether this imagery is accurate or not, the UFO topic is, to use Paglin's words, a kind of a prompt for the imaginal. UFOs are synonymous with this. Little Green Men, Saucer-shaped craft, Area 51, and the X-Files theme song. And this is all the result of the material culture that we created in which those in power have permitted and perpetuated. As we've discussed, gray aliens have become a mascot of classified and black-ops programs because they visualize the hypermeam, a nebulous void of meaning where whatever you throw out

it sticks, the perfect vessel for disinformation. So if the goal of Pagland's experience, experimental geography is to create new ways of being in the world, let's collaborate on creating a new uphology. Part of our responsibility coming to uphology as experimental geographers is to shape perceptions around what uphology is and can be. It's important to understand and address the history of the black world, the secrecy it creates, and the disinformation it perpetuates so that we can understand what we're up against. But this is a both and situation. Yes, uphology is a history of disinformation deeply entrenched in the military industrial complex, but it's also a history of anomalous experiences that have dramatically shaped human development and culture.

Maybe this should go without saying, but it's worth reiterating here. The black world of government secrecy is not the same thing as the phenomenon. If we think of the phenomenon as a blank spot on the map, The government's involvement is just one hazy pencil-sketched outline that has been drawn and erased multiple times. That convoluted history tells us that focusing only on the military and intelligence community narratives and an official government-approved disclosure will almost certainly never get us to the truth. It's an unsolvable riddle whose primary function is to distract and deceive. The labyrinth was designed intentionally to consume those who got to.

lost in it. The easiest thing for us to do is just not step into the labyrinth. Now, don't get me wrong. There are people who are doing incredibly important work, both from within and outside of the military and intelligence communities, to move the ball forward in terms of greater transparency. And we wouldn't have gotten to this point if that wasn't true. And I thank and applaud those who risk their careers and their lives to do this work. We do genuinely have exciting momentum in Congress right now, thanks in part to the work of whistleblowers, mainstream media and citizen journalists,

and informed representatives and senators. And we should work to keep up this momentum. But that isn't the end-all be-all. And what uphology needs right now is to be saved from being consumed by the government disclosure narrative, which is inevitably and perhaps inextricably entwined with the wall of secrecy and the black world that we've been discussing.

That requires people outside the military industrial complex to commit their time and talents to studying the phenomenon itself. We have the opportunity now to create the uphology of the future, but that can only happen if we do it together. One thing we can do as a community right now is to redefine what it is that uphology is actually studying. We can change the perception. that media depictions, government disinformation, and quote-unquote official narratives have created to start this singular pervasive idea that UFOs are flying saucers piloted by aliens from other planets. This is why we focus so much on Trevor Pagland's methodology today. Ask yourself, what other blank spots in the literature can I fill in? Physics, aeronautics, consciousness

research, sci-phenomena, experienceer narratives, religious history, art, history, anthropology, esotericism, and the occult. Comparative folklore and mythology, psychedelics, and more are all on the table. As we've discussed in previous episodes, each of these fields cross over into uphology in interesting and unusual ways, and provide opportunities for a new generation of eophologists to make significant contributions to our understanding of the phenomenon. You also don't have to make anything. Your contribution to the field can come from normalizing conversations around these topics. Be informed, be tactful, and always read the room, but don't be afraid to share your interests in anomalous studies with

friends and family if they indicate that they're interested. Another strategy is to look for the thing that no one else has done. Is there a huge gap in the field that hasn't been addressed, or maybe a super niche topic that needs to be expanded upon? There is a lot of noise in the field, especially people covering the same topics over and over and over again. We don't need another UFO documentary covering the release of the Tick-Tac, gimbal, and GoFast videos. There is incredible content out there covering those stories to death. Focus on where you want to be in the field and start from there.

Get involved in the community and share your work once you feel that you have something to contribute. Don't be afraid to ask for help with your research. You'd be shocked by how many insanely smart, wildly diverse people are secretly involved with this study. But keep in mind that everyone has day jobs and lives and, frankly, more important things to attend to. If you don't hear back from people, don't take it personally. In my experience, the most fruitful collaborations tend to come when you least expect it and come together in naturally synergistic ways. And if you'll allow me to go full Fred Rogers here for a second, please be kind, humble, and helpful.

There are way too many egos and trolls who contribute to the noise, and I promise you that this simple grade school reminder will open up doors for you. Spend more time building up the people and projects that you like, as opposed to tearing down other people's work. If you don't agree with something, hey, guess what? You can choose to ignore it. At the end of the day, I can't tell you how you can contribute to the field because no one has done what you are capable of doing yet. And I can't wait to see what you do. Let's get to work on building a new uphology. Until next time. Last night, I was standing across the street from a bar, smoking a cigarette,

and these kids were leaving the bar, some young people, four of them. And this little tiny Chevy Sedaya next to me beeped because someone unlocked it. And I took a step back and I looked at this tiny little foredoor. And these kids were walking towards it. And as they got closer, one of them goes, Oh my God. The car got bigger since we were inside. And then another one goes,

Oh, holy crap, it's an SUV now. And so I took another look at the car. And I had to sort of take their word for it because I was looking at a tiny little car and I thought I think that thought creates reality because to these kids

the car was really big and I'm not going to argue with them mostly because they were so excited about it