"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?
Naturally, at this time and place in the B.C. world (Before Confirmation) that will some day give way to the A.D. (After Disclosure) world, UFOs aren't going to be a significant part of any of 2012's presidential debates.
This is too bad. Just imagine for a moment that the topic of what these unidentified flying objects really are and what they mean was as meaningful to candidates as ethanol subsidies was in Iowa. The candidates would still act and talk like themselves, but they'd be talking about life in the Universe and whether or not it has come here and what we should or should not do about it. Wouldn't that just be astonishing to watch?
For every Dan Ackroyd-style celebrity who has done his homework on this issue and is prepared to speak clearly about UFOs, there are a probably a dozen George Clooneys -- celebrities who haven't read a book and think it's just another chance to score with a cheap joke at the expense of the seriousness of the real issue. In late 2011, in Esquire Magazine, Clooney said:
I keep thinking: Now that every single human being on Earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember you used to see those pictures. Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all bullshit, or my theory is that the Martians have decided, "Don't go down there, man. All those f***ers have cameras now."
Oddly, that's all Clooney really had to say, but it got endless publicity. Maybe the Hollywood celeb machine should just start asking all the stars about it.
Sometimes you have to have a sense of humor. In that vein, we introduce "HIDDEN AGENDA" -- a new comic strip set in the world of Ufology, written by Bryce Zabel and illustrated by Dennis Rano. This particular cartoon, "Petition Edition", is the first in a series.
If you click the cartoon, you'll be able to see it in 800 pixel size the way it's intended to be viewed.
You may recognize some of the people in these cartoons. That, of course, is purely a coincidence. :-)
As Disclosure advocates we may have a dream, but first we have to earn it.
People say it's too hard to get 25,000 signatures on the White House "We the People" site in a single month. The number should be lower or the time should be longer. The site is erratic, they say, and our signature totals are being suppressed, others chime in.
Well, yes, but so what?
If we can't get 25,000 signatures in 30 days -- despite serious obstacles to organizing -- then we aren't really much of a social movement, are we? OWS protestors are getting pepper-sprayed but we can't be bothered to sign an Internet petition?
So, one week in to The Need-to-Know Petition, we know what has to be done. We have to kick it up. We have to kick it way up. We need over 1000 new signatures every day starting now.
If you're reading this, you need to actually get 25 friends to sign, too. And it has to go a level beyond sending it to 25 people on Facebook but actually following through to see that they actually do sign. Good intentions won't count.
There is nothing subjective about what victory is. 25,000 legit signatures from anywhere on Earth at http://wh.gov/jeK by midnight on December 30 (we started November 30). That is hard, cold, objective reality.
As regular readers know, we advocate that people who understand UFO/ET reality need to begin speaking out more openly about their beliefs -- not just to fellow believers, and not just in internet rants, but person-to-person. Our friends at Majic1947's YouTube Channel have put together a little animated back-and-forth on the subject of Disclosure, created using the xtranormal software and published to YouTube. Don't take it too seriously, it's just for fun!
Wonder what office these two work at? Majestic? But the point is if the dynamic is going to change, people have to start speaking openly -- at work, at school, in their homes.
If seeing this video causes any of our readers to experiment with xtranormal themselves, please send us your own bits and we'll put them on the site as well.
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.
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...
While Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had the media focused on their Rally to Restore Sanity,we conducted a poll of our readers to decide which of the two comedian commentators shows should be approached first about an author interview for the A.D. After Disclosure project.
Last night, as the polls closed on the nation's mid-term elections, we counted your own ballots.
It was no contest. Our readers overwhelmingly favor The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a better environment to discuss the issue of the Disclosure of UFO/ET reality.
Stewart got 75.6% of the vote.
Colbert got 24.4%.
There were numerous reasons expressed for this but it seemed to come down to Jon Stewart's likeability, his perception of open mindedness and the opinion of those who had seen Leslie Kean's appearance on The Colbert Report that going on with Colbert playing his conservative persona, rather than himself, makes talking sense about UFOs even more difficult than it usually is.
So, the people have spoken (or at least our slice of people) and we'll be reaching out to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to see if he'll have us.
If Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert truly want to restore some sanity (The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, October 30), they could start with the topic of UFOs after the election is over. Acknowledging the reality of UFO/ET presence is a subversive act to many mainstream voices, and that's why Stewart or Colbert (who see themselves as subversives) need to start getting into this topic.
Based on the competitive way these kinds of shows are scheduled, books authors don't appear on both. So -- during the weekend of the Stewart/Colbert rally -- we're offering up this poll to get your opinion about which show you think would be the best forum, and we'll have our publicist contact the winner after the election. Our poll is in the sidebar to the right.
Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire and sometimes you have to fight silly with silly. This is one of those times when we have to embrace the latter option. Silly is as silly does.
We're asking readers to consider sending cookies to The Washington Post's John Kelly, the columnist who both started and ended his coverage of the September 27 UFOs and Nukes event at the National Press Club with a description of the excellent quality cookies they serve reporters there. We think it is appropriate that Kelly as well as the executive editor Marcus Brauchli receive cookies now as a way to say to them, "Hey, guys, that was a pretty foolish approach you took to a very serious issue and it has been duly noted but, in the meantime, have a cookie on us and think about how you can do better next time."
John Kelly started his original column this way, "The cookies they serve at press conferences at the National Press Club are the same as the cookies we have in meetings here at The Post. I happen to like these cookies..." and he ended with "I grabbed a cookie on the way out." John Kelly, apparently, may not think there's much to the UFO/Nuke connection but he is a big fan of cookies.
So let's send him (and the Executive Editor of The Washington Post) cookies. But let's make sure that each batch comes with a personal note telling them about why the issue of UFOs is a serious one and why they really should accord it more serious coverage in the future. Finally, while it is tempting to send home-made cookies, you know those won't be accepted or eaten in today's world when they come from strangers. Please send store-bought, safely packaged cookies.
COOKIES FOR KELLY CAMPAIGN Send Your Cookies Now!
Marcus Brauchli, Executive Editor John Kelly, Columnist c/o The Washington Post 1150 15th Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20071
We actually wrote the National Press Club and asked them where they got those wonderful cookies that John Kelly seems to be fixated on. We heard back from executive chef Susan Delbert who wrote, "Firehook Bakery... supplies our day to day chocolate chip, white chocolate, oatmeal raisin and oatmeal chocolate cookies." If this is the wrong cookie source, we're sure Kelly or the Post will correct us and we'll issue an apology which is probably a lot more than they will ever do.
We've written three posts on the subject of media bias as it pertained to this news conference:
