Is This Really an Age of Disclosure?

Hollywood producer Dan Farah's recent documentary The Age of Disclosure takes its name from the view held by some of those who believe governments have been concealing the reality behind reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The "ufologist" as some call them generally assumes this to be hard evidence of visitations of the Earth by extraterrestrials in vehicles capable of interstellar flight, with all that implies about the advanced character of this other civilization; that the "UFO cover-up" thus conceals a great deal about the history of humanity, the technologies that may actually be available to us, and possibly much, much else; and that the time when those long-held, profound secrets will be secrets no longer may be close at hand, perhaps "changing everything" for the better. However, in spite of recent public hearings about the subject of government knowledge of these matters in the United States Congress, among other such developments, I cannot help but think of how the broader direction of government conduct seems to be headed in the extreme opposite direction of what would expect in an age of openness. The twenty-first century has seen the governments of even those states that Westerners identify most with liberal freedoms, government accountability, democracy conduct worldwide programs of rendition, torture and assassination--all as it seems the public, encouraged by the brass check takers of our news media, take the situation in stride. Indeed, governments are becoming secretive about matters that most would consider to be far more banal than extrajudicial killings, refusing to release data they formerly made public as a matter of course, and even removing previously published data from their sites. (That U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity I cited in a post on this very blog a while back? The government has officially announced that there won't be any update on that, the report gone.) And indeed, it seems that many an informed observer even the most narrow-minded centrist would hesitate to dismiss as an ufologist-style "conspiracy theorist" openly discusses what report the government does put out regarding such matters as prices, economic growth and employment with unprecedented suspicion, charging increasing manipulation of the numbers to brighten the dismal picture.

All of this, of course, has gone hand in hand with an era of open contempt on the part of elites in and out of government toward the public at large, whether one thinks of the increasingly unhinged character of their dismissal of working people as "takers" parasitic upon their supposed betters (now we hear that they are "scavengers," and even "unhumans"), or their indifference to the prospect of their mass death as already seen in a viral pandemic; or as they now contemplate in the event of environmental collapse, and even the nuclear war that, displaying a Barry Goldwater-like incomprehension of what such a conflict would mean.

Looking at all of that I imagine that if governments really are sitting on a mountain of world-changing information of this kind (about which proposition I must account myself skeptical), any "Age of Disclosure" remains far off, with the chatter we have heard so much serving other purposes, not least a distraction from more pressing matters that we all know to be only too real, with the choice of distraction itself significant. As Tom Engelhardt remarked in his very worthwhile book The End of Victory Culture, ufologists were "almost the only group . . . to take on the national security state directly" in the Cold War period, while in spite of that being case this was "the only oppositional group in those years that no one bothered to accuse of communism." That Authority treated the ufologists so lightly even amid the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War as to not even bother Red-baiting them in that way to which they so reflexively and nastily resorted would seem far from testifying that they were ever onto anything--all as, where the public's perhaps inevitable skepticism of government truthfulness is concerned, there has been no safer outlet than this one. Accordingly one may reasonably see the interest here as a sublimation of other discontents, and at the same time, an interest that those desirous of deflecting public attention from the hard facts of polycrisis have every interest in cultivating.