Obama, Trump, & Aliens - What Does This REALLY Mean?

Transcript

Hi everyone. Well, this is a weird and interesting story that I avoided for a little while uh because honestly I just thought it was not newsworthy at all. Uh then however it became something genuinely interesting. This is this is the Obama said aliens are real story which then morphed into Trump said Obama revealed classified information story which then morphed into Trump's post on Truth Social about releasing UFO files and he did say UFO along with UAP. So now we're just saying wait what? So uh it it is actually it this is interesting and uh we we really should talk about a little bit here.

So, uh, I I watched the Obama clip. I watched how it spread. My immediate reaction is that this should never have become a story. I I actually I'm going to play the clip here. I thought his remarks were actually quite benal, very conventional, and really just generally unsurprising.

Uh, so the reaction itself to what you're about to hear is the first real data point. But let's just wa listen to this. Are aliens real? Uh they're real, but I haven't seen them. And and and uh they're not being kept in uh what is it? Area 51. >> Area 51.

There's no underground uh facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they they hid it from the president of the United States. >> What was the first question you wanted answered when you became president? >> Um where are the aliens? >> Where are the aliens? And this is his uh um statement that followed up that said I wasn't really saying that aliens are actually here and real on Earth. Uh and he just went on with that. So if a statement like that by Obama can trigger a frenzy, I just have to say something deeper is already very unstable in our whole information environment, our whole information ecosystem. The context of his statement, this was as it was it was stated a kind of casual end of the interview lightning round.

Okay, so this was not a at least apparently not a prepared address, not policy, not testimony. Uh you can see the tone was relaxed. It was even joking. So he's I'm they're real, but I haven't seen them and they're not being kept in Area 51. So what does this statement now? There could be every possibility that Obama was lying flat out and that he may know much more than what he's saying.

But my point here is that he never at any point went beyond any statement that he'd ever made in the past. Uh what he said is that there's no claim of visitation. There's no claim of contact, no claim of recovery or classified knowledge or anything like this. So what why this is fundamentally uninteresting because it's a view that already aligns with mainstream astrophysics and probabilities as they understand it didn't require any insider access any kind of privileged information. Um it tells us nothing new about UFOs or UAP or secrecy or anything like that.

Uh, and what you really saw after the clip particularly was that you have the media and the UAP or UFO community frequently treating his status as former president as basically a proxy for genuine content. And you see this type of substitution happening repeatedly in this subject. Uh it's a it's a lot of basically and hype being poured into a story by the community itself as well as the mainstream media. They piled on with this as well. And then his uh clarification or backpedaling to collapse the whole hype.

He's basically saying I saw no evidence you know during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Okay. So that's a standard very uh bland debunking statement that he has done numerous times. This is not the first time. But in terms of any public discussion here, that really would explicitly close the door on the whole Obama confirmed contact narrative, which did at least partially um develop out of that original statement of his.

So anyway, by itself, I would say his his uh follow-up statement tweet really should have ended the matter, but it didn't. It didn't because something else entered the story, and that's something else is Donald Trump. So, uh we'll look at Trump's clip here in a second, but he is questioned uh aboard Air Force One. He's right at the right at the door about to go in and he is asked directly about Obama's remarks. So, let's listen.

Something that got a lot of attention this week. Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of nonhuman visitors to Earth? >> Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that, you know. >> So, aliens are real.

>> Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. He made He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.

No, I don't I don't have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. >> Do you believe it, Peter? >> Well, if the president can declassify anything that he wants to, so I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.

>> We know illegal aliens are real. >> Yeah. Illegal. Only illegals. >> All right.

So, there's that. I mean, this is a whole cluster of, you know, what 30 seconds, 50 seconds, and he just throws in all of these real little uh quotable gems, if you want to call them that. He gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. I don't know if they're real or not.

I may get him out of trouble by declassifying. Like, wow. So, this is actually quite interesting, right? Um, it is easy to see that or at least it's it's understandable that we might interpret this as some level of confirmation because like he's in Trump is instinctively framing this topic as classified or at least classified adjacent. Uh he didn't dismiss it as nonsense, right? uh instead he implied that Obama crossed the boundary and then as he often has done with this subject he hedges. So he's like well I don't know I don't know.

So he's kind of uh preserving the insinuation without committing to it. Uh so he he left himself kind of an out here. So what I guess I would say here is that no this does not confirm aliens are here uh you know in the words of Donald Trump but it does suggest that Trump assumed Obama was referencing something real and something sensitive. Now that's an assumption that's not any factual uh disclosure that he's made but it does it is what makes this moment kind of interesting. Absolutely.

Uh Trump though whether you love the guy or hate the guy and there's many people listening to this right now who fall into one of those categories. I have no doubt. Uh but Trump is definitely impulsive. We know this. He is often very unscripted.

He is inconsistent. And the thing is there are people who who uh like him for that and there are people who don't like him for that. So but but that's I think very descriptive of him. So for for this reason though, the fact that he is impulsive, um his his instinctive framing of the whole Obama statement can reveal certain background assumptions. So the key here, it seems to me, is it's not really what does Trump know, but what he is presuming here.

and he does seem to be presuming that there's something significant about UFOs or UAP and that that significance is within the classified world. So we have to just say that is interesting that is interesting if nothing else. Now there's uh more to this as well is his directive we'll call it that to release files. So what is what do we actually this is his um he released this statement on truth socially. is just based on the tremendous interest shown.

I will be directing the Secretary of War and other relevant departments and agencies to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life. Uh identified uh unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP, and unidentified flying objects, UFOs. Puts that in there. and um any and all other information connected to these highly complex but extremely interesting and important matters. God bless America as Donald Trump's truth socials post just from yesterday, February 19th as I'm as I'm doing this program today, just yesterday.

So, so what did Trump actually say here? So according to this, he directed the Pentagon and other agencies to identify and release files related to UAP, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life. Okay. Now, what is what is not yet known? Well, a lot is not yet known. No formal executive order text has been published, so we're just left hanging on that. There's no complete list of agencies that will be affected here.

Maybe this means all of the agencies. Maybe this will include the the CIA and the Department of Energy who are both I think very deeply in involved in this matter as well. Uh as well as any other federal agent, but there's no list of that. There's no timeline or deadlines about this. Uh there's no classification standards that have been specified here as well.

So I guess my response to that is to assume that identify and release does not equal declassify everything. Like I just we have to assume that uh we can assume that federal agencies can comply procedurally at the same time while releasing very little of any consequence because we've we've seen this movie before. Now there are you know structural problems here or let's just say we have two limbs of of the same system. Uh the the public often I think assumes the government is some single vault of knowledge. And I think this is a misconception.

In reality, uh, at least when we're getting to UFOs or UAP, I think it's fair to say that UAP related information is distributed across a an enormous or at least a substantial federal and private uh system. All right. So, limb one, we'll just say the federal system. Even within that we can see that there's fragmented custody of information uh and pro perhaps and probably fragmented custody of actual materials anything that's relevant we've got the DoD we've got the intelligence community we've got the department of energy we have all different federal labs and program offices all which hold pieces of the puzzle it's not clear to anybody who has looked at the federal system that there is a unified um repository of information pertaining to this subject at all that there's I guess there's no single authority with full visibility that anyone has been able to identify on this. So there's that.

Then you have the whole issue of compartmentation and need to know. So you think of uh special access programs which limit access even to senior officials. We all remember the Davis Wilson uh notes which I don't think anyone uh disputes or even has a right to dispute any longer. It's absolutely been proven to be legitimate notes. And in that we have uh Admiral Thomas Wilson who at the time was assistant uh director of intelligence for the joint chiefs of staff.

he was in a very responsible position and he was denied access to a sensitive special access program uh relating to this subject. We can just move on from there. But you know we we see this kind of uh difficulty of access to special access programs and the thing is you know presidents rotate right compartments persist. Uh and then you have the the uh the reality that certain types of secrecy regimes are in a sense born secret. Uh anything that is connected to uh nuclear related energy for example through the atomic energy acts of 1946 and 1954 if they are nuclear related they are legally secret by default.

uh we we have seen many we've had many reasons to believe that UFO UAP related information is part of that secrecy regime as well. So such secrecy regimes are very resistant to routine declassification pressures I guess we can just put it that way. So that's just a little bit about the federal part of it and there's much more here. Uh we can just say that, you know, we've had um a numerous or several accounts of United States presidents being unable to crack the the federal code of secrecy on UFOs. Uh we we had that statement that Obama had just made that apparently alien secrecy was the first thing he looked into.

Whether that is true or not, we could investigate that. But we do know that with Bill Clinton, this uh this is a statement that he made and he didn't seem to get anywhere with that. And in fact, I will just say that I had a conversation with one individual who did speak directly with Bill Clinton on this matter who explicitly said to me uh that in the late 1990s Clinton had told him yes, he had tried to get information on UFOs, but there just wasn't anything he could do about it or words to that effect. So I think we can accept that presidents in the past have been shut down when it comes to this matter. So anyway, that's the federal side of it.

But then you have the other limb as it were, which is the whole private contractor environment. And this is a significant part of UAP or UFO secrecy. A, you've got long-term continuity with these guys. Contractors do not rotate every four years. programs uh can migrate even between companies but still remain entirely intact.

And then you have the whole issue of custody versus oversight. So for example, agencies, federal agencies may fund and oversee programs without holding physical custody of materials or even data. So when they say we don't have it, that can be literally true uh inside government and you've got a array of legal and proprietary barriers here. There's invention secrecy and proprietary uh uh data related to that. You have classified corporate intellectual property.

So disclosure is not simply an executive decision that is automatically necessarily going to be able to affect private corporations. So the combined effect of that you have federal institutions and contractors forming a kind of mutually reinforcing structure where each can defer each can redirect or dilute disclosure pressure as they need to. And there there can be a conspiratorial aspect to this, but it's not necessarily even strictly speaking a conspiracy. You're really talking about a system that is optimized for just persistence really. So for me, the key takeaway from Trump's statement on Truth Social, like even a sincere presidential order, if that's what this turns out to be, is going to primarily target federal records.

Those records may they may represent only a subset of the total UAP information footprint. In fact, they probably only do represent a certain subset. How large or small that subset is, we can discuss, but it may not be large compared with what exists beyond that. So again, you know, I mentioned that presidents have historically shown certain frustration to uh accessing UFO information. Um, and you know, I mentioned Davis Wilson memo as as as another example of that.

So I think things like that matter because they suggest that one's position alone doesn't guarantee access. And I I think examples like that can at least help us to contextualize a little bit why expectations around Trump's directive should be modest at this point. You think about what has happened with the EUAP disclosure act now three years going. So you had a situation, this is Congress, not the executive branch. I understand there's differences here, but still you have Congress mandating UAP records identification and transfer, right? Uh and each time this happened, you had all the stronger mechanisms in involved in that those that bill repeatedly being narrowed or or just removed altogether.

So what this has indicated to me is that some disclosure can be tolerated, structural intrusions are going to be resisted and that there appears at least right now to be a ceiling beyond which reform is not likely to pass intact. That's what it looks like to me. And that that pattern really seems to match what we have seen or appear to see in executive branch efforts where pressure is absorbed instead of being actually confronted. So for me, the bottom line assessment is I think it's uncertain and probably unlikely that Trump's directive is going to force any meaningful disclosure, at least without formal instruments like a formal executive order, if if he's even done that, or without named agencies, without deadlines, and and without any kind of genuine reach into contractor custody, I think the outcome is likely going to be very limited. if anything whatsoever.

Now, what would change my view? If there's an explicit inclusion of the Department of Energy or the CIA or other intelligence elements into this, that would be interesting. Not necessarily confirming of anything, but it would be interesting. Uh, I would also uh be very impressed if there were language addressing special access programs and any contractor held material, kind of what we saw in versions of the UAP Disclosure Act. Uh if we saw any evidence of enforcement rather than just signaling, I would be impressed by that as well, you know. So that would be interesting to see.

I not expecting that we will, but it would be something to look for. The final irony of all of this to me, this whole episode began as a non-story, right? I I just find this whole story to be very strange. It was built onium and built on hype often from people who should have known better. But it became a genuine story when thrown to America's great variable or even America's great systemic stress test. That's Donald Trump.

And it it is his response that's made this into an actual story. It seems to me uh and it's it's become a test. You could say, I don't really think a test of alien reality, frankly, but it is a test of whether the US secrecy system yields anything at all when it is pressed from the top. So, I would say moving forward, we should watch what gets named, what gets exempted, and whether this actually becomes policy or just really more paperwork. For me, I'm not expecting this to become a breakthrough.

I know people love to hype up disclosure. It's any day, any minute. Uh, well, you know, one day, I'm sure I will be surprised. So, but I'm just not thinking it's going to be anytime this year. I just see too many other variables intruding on it, but we shall see.

Uh, it's a fascinating subject. We're in fascinating times, and I guess we will all be here to see how this story develops. Thanks for sitting here with me. I'll catch you again real soon. Bye for now.

Let's keep fighting the good fight.