"A.D. - After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact" by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. What happens after they finally tell us the truth about UFOs?
It's been a run of important Disclosure-related posts here -- writing about the WikiLeaks situation and even the NASA news conference about life in Mono Lake. Hopefully, then, you can excuse a light, quick end-of-the-year journey into a "making of" story about the A.D. After Disclosure book project.
In his classic rock ballad, "Against the Wind," Bob Seger talks about "what to leave in, what to leave out."
Any finished project -- a film, a television series, or even a book like A.D. After Disclosure -- tends to look after it's over like it could only have been the way it turned out. To the right, you'll see the inner flap to our back cover. It looks familiar to us now but, oddly, it was the very last thing to change as the book was going into the printers.
Two nights before, there was another picture on that cover. We weren't smiling in that one.
We had done an entire photo shoot with the talented Los Angeles photographer Alex Asher Sears for the cover photo and, out of the shoot, came three different looks, all variations on a theme. The theme was basically working writers telling a serious story. So the decision was made to go with collared shirts and loosened ties and no smiles. After all, we thought, when you're talking about a sixty-plus year cover-up, what's to smile about?
But, at the last minute, a debate caught fire and the voices that won the day were the ones that argued that book authors had a duty to appear friendly to their potential buyers and that smiles were not a sign of weakness. That is why, if you buy the hardcover version, you will see the smiles. But there was another picture, one that did not make the first cut, or the last-minute replacement and, yet, oddly, it's the one that both of us actually liked best.
Although we liked this photo by Alex Asher Sears a lot, Bryce's son thought he looked like a "badass" and his wife Jackie thought he looked angry, so it became the one that the subjects and the photographer all liked but, possibly, too controversial for a book project that asks people to actually pay for it.
This photo above was inspired by a photo we'd all admired that had been taken of Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese by French photographer Brigitte Lacombe. We liked the stripped down ascetic of the picture and the white background. We asked Alex not to copy it, but to take inspiration from it, and we knocked off a few quick shots in the last minutes, just for fun.
Alex also shot a couple of other excellent versions. One was what we called the "All the President's Men" photo which we liked but ultimately didn't fit the vertical photo layout we had in mind for the book cover.
Full Disclosure: We still love those photos that Alex took that day.
We know we're not smiling.
Think of it this way. We're thinking about the Breakaway Group of secret-keepers and how they've ignored your need-to-know for almost seven decades. It made us a little more somber than usual...
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
For some time now, a war has been intensifying. Not in Iraq, nor Afghanistan, nor the many other fields of death that darken our world, although all of them are affected by this particular war.
I am talking about an epic struggle -- a war fully and truly -- between the two fundamental forces of our modern age.
For we live in a world of extremes. As amazing as it seems to some, it has been only about twenty years in which the Internet has transformed our world and brought us to a level of interconnectivity that was once undreamed of. Twenty years, one human generation.
Only in the last ten years has the Web become what it is today. Only in the last decade have software and websites risen to the challenge of the possibilities offered by the Web, altering the way we obtain information, and even the way that we interact with each other. For starters, just think of the changes wrought by Youtube and Facebook, each of which is only about five years old.
For a little while, in the early days of the Internet, we used to talk of the "Information Highway." Then that became the "Information Superhighway." But even that phrase is so old, so outdated, because we are now in an era of such instant interconnectedness that our language has yet to catch up. Today, anything in the world can be right there in front of us, instantly and completely.
Or so it might seem. For at the same time, government secrets have multiplied. It may well be that more than half of all U.S. government records are classified. This is the estimate put forth in the fine book by Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map, and which finds support in many other independent studies on government secrecy worldwide.
If more than half of U.S. government documents are classified, you might say that more than half of U.S. political history is classified. And clearly, this is also true for many other nations in the world. Government secrecy has become deeply entrenched, despite all protestations to the contrary by the world’s political leaders.
It isn’t that some things shouldn't be kept secret. Few people would deny that there are legitimate reasons for military and government groups to keep some secrets. The question is, where to draw the line? In the U.S., the secrecy apparatus has been growing steadily since the 1940s. Nearly seventy years of deep secrecy, enormous black budgets, and near-total immunity from the law has only encouraged the classified world to grow. And grow. And grow.
So what happens when the powerful global trend of openness, as expressed via the Internet, collides with an equally powerful secrecy apparatus?
This is the war I am speaking of. It is the one between Freedom of Information versus Secrecy. We are seeing it now. Whether we know it or not, we are also participants. And this war includes the saga of WikiLeaks.
There is something even more interesting about this great clash, the Battle Royale of the 21st Century. It is beginning to involve the most verboten topic of all:
UFOs.
My personal feeling is that the end of UFO secrecy will unleash the greatest changes in human history. This, too, it turns out, may be part of the WikiLeaks story. Indeed, it is one that Bryce Zabel and I predicted might happen in our new book, A.D. After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact. But more on that in a moment.
It's a question of balance. Again, today, the question was called, and fell short.
NASA should know better about non-human life, and may, but still pretends it doesn't. Or the working scientists, who are pursuing legitimate research in their own worlds, know not to ask big uncomfortable questions that will get their funding cut. Meanwhile, the ruling elite of the media buy the the scraps but miss the meal.
Today we heard about some microbes that can exist in the extremely salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that's known as Mono Lake. This death-stew should kill most living things, crushing any primitive will to live completely. But not this new life form that uses arsenic in place of phosphorus to build DNA and proteins. Because Mono Lake is such an inhospitable environment for life, the scientists say, this means that maybe we can find life "in some places we might never have thought to look before."
That's low-hanging fruit. They could start by craning their necks up and opening their eyes.
The esteemed scientists gathered today say their discovery clears the path "for a whole new way of thinking about where to look for life" in the universe, and even in this Solar System. Well, now...
It isn't just that NASA should be scolded for looking down when they should have been looking up, it's the sense of importance they bring to their bacteria while ignoring so many other solid facts, witnesses and reports and that, by doing so, they allow the sense of derision the media heaps on anyone who dares believe that UFOs are sometimes physical craft from someplace that isn't here.
The Web has been percolating for a couple of days now about a hush-hush NASA press conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon about a major discovery in the field of astrobiology — the search for life on other planets. "Has NASA Found Life Near Saturn?" asked the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Has NASA Found Alien Life?" wondered PC Magazine. Well, no, and it's unfortunate that all of this nonsense has been out there, because the real story is important enough without the hype. What a team of scientists actually found, as described in a paper in Science, is what may be the oddest bacteria on Earth.
Let's start with the fact that reporter Michael Lemonick wrote his article from the point-of-view of knowing what was in the paper, but he wrote it before the news conference. This means that he had an early release copy. That's right. Lemonick, like all the other favored reporters, gets his back scratched and he probably likes his insider status. And, in return, he attacks other people for speculating while he acts like the sage and wise man of knowledge. That's just not right.
Remember, it was NASA's own press release that caused all the speculation in the first place, and not just in the blogosphere. So they gin it up by design, then guys like Lemonick get to deplore as "unfortunate" all the "nonsense." Then he assures us the story is important on its own because -- gasp -- scientists have found an unusual and hardy bacteria right here on Earth! On Earth! Amazing!
I'm sure Lemonick also thinks UFOs are deplorable nonsense. He's probably never looked into the area and, if he has, he clearly has not done so with an open mind. I wonder if he would read Leslie Kean's great new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. How exactly would he dismiss all that Kean reports so clearly? What about my co-author's excellent first two volumes of UFOs and the National Security State? There may be different interpretations for what's being reported in those works, but nonsense they are not.
But we can't single out for shame any one reporter on this story. They all contribute to the problem. NBC's Lee Cowan managed -- twice -- in his report to use the phrase "little green men." It's just so ignorant, and the fact that he can invoke this canard in his story, that a segment producer lets it go, that the show producer approves it, and that Brian Williams says, "Well, that settles it" after the piece, simply shows how deeply the media does not get it.
So it's probably no surprise that media poobahs don't fare too well in the new book that Rich Dolan and I have just published, A.D. After Disclosure. But, then again, neither do the scientists. So let's end with another great quote, this time from lead report author Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey. She actually said this at today's news conference:
"We've cracked open the door for what's possible for life in the universe, and that's profound. What else might we find?"
Well, Felisa, how much time do you have?
The problem here is that Felisa Wolfe-Simon is probably an incredibly bright woman, and a top notch scientist. But she is a product of the system that discourages such brainpower as hers from actively looking into the UFO phenomenon. She is doing good, if limited vision, work. Someday, and maybe soon, she is going to have her mind blown by the idea that she was looking at Earth microbes to learn more about non-human, possibly extraterrestrial, life at a time when advanced intelligent non-human creatures had traveled here from wherever "there" is.
Felisa might just answer her own question by looking up at the skies. If she did, with all the sophisticated technological equipment that her employer could bring to bear on that endeavor, we would wager she would find evidence for something like this:
Some Unidentified Flying Objects appear to be physical, structural craft with performance characteristics that defy current public knowledge, things that aren't supposed to exist. But they do, and they don't appear to be from here, and they act with intelligence, either remote or on-board.
That is what else we might find.
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
The revelation of first contact with an alien intelligence is a serious matter. Still, like almost everything else in the world, it will be treated by someone as the inspiration for a joke. Whether it's a riff on 'To Serve Man' being a cookbook, to an alien fixation with babies and crop circles, most comedians see Disclosure as ushering in boom times for joke telling. This is one of a number of cultural topics we cover in our Chapter 7 "The (New) Age of Aquarius" from the new book. We talked to New York comedian Chris Rush who told us he'd be rushing down to get on stage at a comedy club right away.
"Maybe they'll be advanced cow-like creatures who have come to our Earth to arrest Ronald McDonald for war crimes. Or maybe their IQ level compared to ours would be like a human trying to talk to yogurt -- armed and violent yogurt. So maybe they'll sterilize the Earth, turn the Moon into a gigantic mothball and store their winter clothes here. "
Rush, by the way, was friends with the late comedy great George Carlin, and says Carlin expressed his strong view that the "planet's owners" have known about the Others for a long time, but have not confessed their knowledge because they have never felt they could control what would happen if they did. There's more from Carlin in A.D. After Disclosure like his belief that the media just didn't get it.
"You may have noticed that, in the media, UFO believers are frequently referred to as 'buffs,' a term used to diminish and marginalize them by relegating them to the ranks of hobbyists and mere enthusiasts. They are made to seem like kooks and quaint dingbats who have the nerve to believe that, in an observable universe of trillions upon trillions of stars, and most likely many hundreds of billions of inhabitable planets, some of those planets may have produced life-forms capable of doing things that we can't do."
Just like Rush, we have some other readers who aren't waiting for actual contact to start working on their new material. One of them is teenage comic artist Aaron Sallan. He's been doing some regular work already at the nicely done new blog Boomer Tech Talk. And, just for fun, Aaron sent us a tribute strip called "A.D. Aaron's Dad."
Thanks, Aaron. We can't wait for the strip where you see a UFO and your old man gets to gloat...
