This subject definitely crosses over with part of what I covered during my interview with Lt. Tim McMillan, but a bit of synchronicity snuck into the mix. After I finished that interview, I ran across this article from Tom Rogan at the Washington Examiner. He tackles the question of why it’s so hard to get a straight answer out of anyone at the Pentagon about UFOs, UAPs or whatever we’re supposed to be calling them this week.

And rather than leaving the question dangling, Tom has his own theory that he backs up with a number of solid assumptions and some historical records. The first part of his article gets right to the point. The Pentagon doesn’t want to tell us anything about them because they view them as a potential threat. What’s more, they don’t have a clue how to deal with it and it would terrify people to hear them admit that.

What I believe is really going on here is that the few individuals in the U.S. government who know about this issue believe the phenomena might be a threat. And that they don’t know how to deal with it.

So, what informs the government’s fear?

Well, first off, the nuclear issue.

The nuclear issue Rogan speaks of is the propensity for UFO sightings reported by military personnel to take place in the vicinity of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier groups, Air Force bases with nuclear weapons and nuclear powered submarines. And not all of those interactions have been totally benign.

He also details the facts that scientists and our military have gleaned from examining military footage of some of these craft and other archival documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. At least some of these vehicles absolutely appear to be intelligently controlled and display capabilities so far beyond anything we possess that they make the military hardware possessed by America, the Russians or the Chinese “look like an absurd joke in comparison.” (One declassified British Ministry of Defence intelligence report from their Project Condign claimed that the Russians lost multiple jets and had several pilots killed trying to engage UAPs.)

So Rogan’s theory basically boils down to a case of the Pentagon not being able to answer the obvious questions people would have if they revealed all they know about UFOs. Primarily, if these things decided to get hostile, what would we do in response? Would we be safe? And they don’t have any answers for those questions so they’d rather not discuss it. (I highly recommend you read Rogan’s full article at the link above. It goes into far more detail than I had room for here.)

This is nothing that can be proven or disproven, at least for now. I wouldn’t write off Rogan’s conclusions, but I do think there are some other possibilities to consider.

The first question to answer is, would the government actually lie to us about this or intentionally keep the information from us? Asking that of anyone in the ufology community will generally result in howls of laughter. Of course, the government has lied and obfuscated facts for as long as we’ve had a country and they continue to do so to this day. Sometimes for good reason. Other times for not so good reasons. Have you ever heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Or how we experimented on our own soldiers with hallucinogens without telling them? Or whatever the hell they were doing out in Fort Hero at Montauk Point on Long Island for all those years.

If you want to drag the question back to the field of ufology, look no further than July of 1947 and the incident at Roswell, New Mexico. The Army put out a press release saying they had recovered a flying disc, sending shockwaves around the world. The very next day they put out another press release saying, nevermind. It was a weather balloon. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a weather balloon.) Years later they claimed it was part of a secret nuclear monitoring program code-named Project Mogul. (Also implausible for a number of reasons.) I don’t know what happened at Roswell, but something happened. I’m not saying it was extraterrestrials. But it was something. The point is, they started lying about it on the very first day, they changed their story a half dozen times in the coming decades and they’re still lying about it to this day.

That brings us back to AATIP (the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program) which burst into the public eye on this date in 2017. In just the past year, the Pentagon spokesperson who is the sole point of contact on this story, Susan Gough, put out multiple statements saying AATIP had been investigating UAPs. Then, inexplicably, on December 7th she put out a statement saying that AATIP had never been investigating UAPs. These two statements can’t be simultaneously true. (For what it’s worth, Harry Reid, the guy who originally requested and started the AATIP program, told a reporter the same day that this was a lie.)

For the record, I don’t blame Susan Gough personally for this. She’s a spokesperson, not a UFO mechanic. She’s given information to disseminate to the public and she follows her orders and does so. But the point is that the government, and particularly the military have been lying to us for ages. They. Are. Still. Doing. It. Today. And they are shameless about it.

But now the question is… why? Or at least why in the case of AATIP, the Navy UAP sightings and any research that’s going on? I would bet the last nickel to my name that they know one heck of a lot more than is being released, though perhaps not as much as some conspiracy theorists suggest. (Government endorsed alien-human hybrid program, anyone?) Multiple sailors present for the Nimitz encounter have testified that they saw much longer, higher quality videos of the UAP than those that were released to the public. They also saw some strange men without military insignia show up on the Princeton and the Nimitz and collect nearly all of the data associated with the event before flying off in a helicopter. So, yeah. There’s more.

But is this a “national security” matter that needs to be kept shielded? If we were talking about our own stealth technology or some hot new project from the Russians or the Chinese I could see keeping it under wraps. We don’t need to know all of the latest advancements if the revelation comes at the cost of giving up an advantage over our adversaries. But what if it’s extraterrestrial in nature? What danger is posed by the public being aware of the situation, particularly if we can’t do anything about it anyway?

The government – and particularly the Pentagon – have a default, reflexive instinct to label anything secret until they know it’s completely innocuous. But in this case, assuming we’re talking about something from “out there,” it simply isn’t justified. Perhaps Tom Rogan is right. Maybe the Pentagon knows they couldn’t lay a glove on these things and they’re just afraid to admit it because we’d all freak out. I seriously doubt we would, but that’s still not a good reason to keep everyone in the dark either way.

Tom ends his article by saying we “need to keep pushing this issue… It will take time, but we’ll get to the truth eventually.” I envy his confidence but I’m not so sure. Some civilian groups, like the one Deep Prasad is working for (UAP Expedition Group), are trying to gather data and making progress. But the government really holds all the high cards. Absent the owners of the tic-tacs starting to directly contact a lot of civilians, preferably scientists and reporters, and volunteering to at least pose for some pictures, the government is the most direct route to any sort of actual disclosure and sharing of information. And given their track record, let’s just say I’m not nearly as optimistic as Rogan is.