Overall
Well, first of all massive props to the man for making the talk show rounds in about as mainstream a way as one could have possibly hoped for at this stage. An interview on CNN? The Daily Show? Unheard of. So whatever else follows, that’s my primary take. (Remember, I’m an engineer by training, so I’m programmed to emphasize finding problems in things rather than sing the fully merited praises).
Genesis of AATIP
Understanding the genesis of AATIP was for me the most valuable part of the book. It put ‘meat on the bone’, that AATIP and its findings didn’t just come out of nowhere. Especially that the videos provided to NYTimes in 2017 didn’t come from out of the blue either - that there was internal clearance required to release them and that there were higher resolution videos that did not get released because, well, they were higher resolution. If the book had described AATIP’s provenance and nothing else, I would have already been satisfied. Yet there was more.
Fresh nuggets
‣ We learned of a probe removed from an alleged experiencer at the V.A.. We got a report of the probe moving under its own motor function underneath the microscope. And that a researcher didn’t want to study it further because she found it disturbing. We later got a picture of the offending probe on one of the video pieces Elizondo interviewed for. Very cool (given the high provenance)
‣ Green orbs: This was a little concerning for me. On Curt Jaimungal’s post-Imminent podcast interview with Elizondo, Lue describes how the green orb intrusions into his house were a frequent occurrence, and he didn’t feel compelled to record video of it. As the podcast’s YT commenters also expressed, this lack of motivation beggars belief if taken in prosaic terms. However, experiencers’ reflexive fight-or-flight reactions being conditioned by The Phenomenon is not unheard of in UAP case literature. Unfortunately I have to resort to that to explain Lue’s lack of motivation to record the green orbs.
‣ This is a nitpick, but I know how fellow engineers will respond negatively to it and by extension the whole book. In one passage of Chapter 16 ‘The Aha Moment’, Elizondo refers to energy required to sustain a UAP’s warp bubble, quantified in units of ‘Terahertz’ (“somewhere in the 3.2 or 5.6 Terahertz range’). Aside from the lack of explanation how energy in any range could create a warp bubble, much less a very specific range of some quantity, the units provided are apples-and-oranges different from any units of energy in common use. Either the units mistake was intentional and is intended to communicate something important, knowing that DOPSR doesn’t care about things that are formally incorrect, or it’s an error that deserves some critique, empathy, or both. Taking the empathy route, I can suggest that maybe Elizondo is referring to the energy that photos in the THz spectrum represent by way of applying Planck’s constant as the conversion from photon frequency to the energy that the photon carries. I’m very sympathetic to the fact that is was probably difficult for Elizondo to garner a technical editor review pre-DOPSR, because it could entail unauthorized disclosures - and once DOPSR was done with their review, the text, warts and all, was effectively frozen from further edits, even technical accuracy ones.
The Epistemic Elephant in the Room: Remote Viewing
Now comes the part of the book I am most conflicted about. The issue is about Remote Viewing (RV), and the extent to which Elizondo was allowed to describe *how* he knew Roswell was real. He says he learned about it from Hal Puthoff, the fellow of Stargate / RV fame. There’s a bit of a rabbit-hole here, I’ll do my best to keep it brief.
‣ Vast majority of technical academia - those placed to have any power to decide or sound-off on whether the UAP topic is worth airing out in forums that de-facto gate our collective official response to The Phenomenon - is not on board with even considering whether Remote Viewing could be an operable concept in reality. This is the case whether or not Remote Viewing actually works.
◦ I have to disclose that I am also personally extremely skeptical. about the concept of Remote Viewing. It takes all of my empathy with the fellow UAP transparency community, and the limits of my speculative effort, to even consider whether RV could work.
‣ In Imminent, Elizondo says that he learned Roswell was real from Hal Puthoff. I should say that the centrality of Hal of Stargate/RV fame to the current wave of Disclosure in general is very concerning. However, I suspect my reaction is an intended one on the part of the Keepers of the Secrets - i.e. my (and many others’) reaction was conditioned in advance long before I ever experienced it. Reason is that Elizondo may very well know ‘nine ways to Sunday’ that the popular conception of Roswell in fact happened. I strongly suspect he does know with credible provenance independent of any pathway through Puthoff.. However the only provenance he is being allowed to articulate is that coming from Hal-the-remote-viewer-Puthoff. Recall my statement from an earlier post:
Ufology is a topic where essentially anything that can plausibly be said about the phenomenon, correctly or incorrectly, has been said … So the valuable part of this patchwork of information actually comes from identifying the provenance of any piece of information, rather than the piece of information itself
Any academic that wants to challenge Elizondo’s book’s premise at a fundamental level need only ask, even in epistemic bad-faith, whether the only reason Hal Puthoff believes Roswell is real is due to a ‘result’ from a Remote Viewing exercise of his. They will do so without giving mention to the fact that David Fravor / Dietrich, or Ryan Graves’ cohort saw the UAP with their own eyes (and decidedly not through a Remote Viewing experience). But by that point the damage will have been done. The academic will have levied their cheap shot in incredulous tones, and the damage to pursuing the subject in their professional social circle or sphere of influence will have been done. I anticipate such a debunking assail will be levied by someone of status from the academic community within 1-2 months time assuming Elizondo’s messaging continues to pick up traction in progressively more mainstream circles.
‣ To Elizondo’s credit, on one post-Imminent interview he (I don’t recall which now, there were so many, please don’t bite my head off for not citing for once) floated that there is much that we are learning about quantum physics that could serve as a backdrop framework for enabling countenancing RV as a possible real-world capability. More on that line in a moment.
‣ Let’s decision-tree this one. Either:
◦ Case 1: RV doesn’t work. Whatever results are reported in good-faith are the result of poorly practiced tests that did not meet the best practices of double-blind randomized controlled trial criteria. This is similar to a thousand fund managers throwing darts over years at the stock market, where necessarily a distribution results, and the ones that happened to be on the happy side of the distribution are annointed with reputations for being able to beat the stock market. We conclude it turns out throwing darts is an effective way to outperform the stock market, and the relevant fund managers become cult heroes.
In this telling, the people who control DOPSR (for purposes of argument I am going to equate them with the infamous Keepers of the Secrets, whether or not that is in fact accurate) are weaponizing a discredited RV concept to put ‘epistemic guardrails’ on the current stage of Disclosure. They will allow some UAP content to get out, but not across all-of-society — it will only wash over those that already subscribe to the esoteric - think the Gaia / Cosmic Disclosure crowd. (If you don’t know what I just referred to, that’s okay. And if you’re a member of this crowd, know that I am not disparaging you, I find many of their videos interesting & compelling).
◦ Case 2: RV works. (The fact that it works still doesn’t change the fact that mainstream technical academia doesn’t accept it, with similar implications for limited Disclosure awareness-spreading). Maybe RVs efficacy has just been kept under wraps too effectively by the intelligence community, or maybe its enabling underpinnings lie beyond known science. To this latter point I would urge my fellow left-brained folks to consider these potential upsets to our popularly conception of reality: Mainstream academia operates on the fundamental assumption of a materialistic universe. This has also long been my own implicit assumption, but it is that — an assumption. Mainstream academia also highly references to itself in a social hierarchy — academicians are fundamentally very, very social animals. So then we have the discomfiting issue of these famous physicists — social alphas in any academic context — hypothesizing about decidedly un-materialistic versions of the universe we inhabit. Roger Penrose, along with an anesthesiologist, studies a biological structure called microtubules as possible anchor-points for consciousness. John Wheeler proposes the ‘participatory universe’, where events in the universe only collapse to one of several possible states upon observation by a conscious observer. And this is without even getting into all the general metaphysics and interpretations that quantum physicists propose. If you entertain what these physicists propose — physicists who know much more physics than me and the vast majority of this substack’s readers, propose — then you are fundamentally allowing for an epistemic escape-hatch that something as seemingly odd as that Remote Viewing might be an operable concept. Penrose and Wheeler’s work would fit in well with — and routinely does see placement among — our esteemed friends in the Gaia crowd.
In either case of our decision tree , Elizondo’s brand of Disclosure gets halted right at the very foot of the gates to the academic ivory tower. Like a controlled fire, the Disclosure messaging spread is kept within preset collective epistemic boundaries. At least as far as sourcing from Elizondo is concerned, there cannot be sufficient political will to force disclosure from the US government.
Is any of this Elizondo’s fault? I very much doubt it. He has his beliefs, sure. But he is only allowed to disclose provenance per DOPSR, and by extension, Keepers of the Secrets. If I were the KotS and I was trying to discredit the nuts-and-bolts aspect of The Phenomenon, a very good approach would be to ensure any mandated efforts investigating my UAP equities would be closely associated with a popularly-discredited phenomenon. In this telling, we could be seeing the result of discrediting efforts that began at least by the time of AATIP’s creation.
Concluding Remarks
Why am I critiquing a fundamental element of Lue’s book so closely when he is a champion of the UAP transparency movement that I am absolutely a massive support of? Indeed this substack wouldn’t exist were it not for the sequence of events Elizondo set in motion in 2017. The reason is that I strive to take an excessively logical approach to The Phenomenon & especially to the US Government’s understanding of it. I could easily see most of my readers getting as turned off as I suspect I would be, absent a post like this, when in a couple of months some academicians start pooh-poohing Elizondo’s book over the RV aspect. It’s too easy a target for the debunking mindset to hit, and in my view makes for the poison pill that keeps the topic form getting too much traction. Therefore, I urge my fellow left-brained readers to *not get duped*, from what is very possibly a tactic on the part of the Keepers of the Secrets, into dismissing the UAP topic because one author was only positioned to talk about it alongside another controversial topic.
And overall, I loved Imminent! It’s a book that really needed to get out. We understand so much more about Elizondo’s character, his motivation, and we are left inspired to help get some form of Disclosure into the offing. His belief that secrets are like food going back in the fridge is one to take home. We might be left to wonder, given that the DoD has treated Elizondo so badly as he went public, why he maintains allegiance to his security oaths. He seems to see The Legacy Program (and the Collins Elite) as cabals that have usurped enormous amounts of power, weaponizing the secrecy apparatus against Disclosure. Why follow the criminals’ rules? This apparent irony will make for an ongoing intriguing political-philosophical quandary that historians will spill no small amount of ink over.
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I hope the reader will not be surprised to learn that multi-decade clandestine UAP crash-retrieval & reverse-engineering programs operating extra-constitutionally probably don’t extinguish themselves. It takes lots of research effort on the part of many building on each other. If you want to see The Legacy Program brought back under oversight, support this research - its past accomplishments, its awareness building, and growth of its upcoming scope. Together we can bring transparency to an activity of monumental global importance that would rather gaslight us as to its very existence than operate under rule of law.
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RE: terahz not a typical unit of energy for engineers, might Planck's constant E=hv help out?