UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In 2010, in a disturbing and eye-opening article, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reported the following: “More and more police forces and government agencies are exploring the potential of unmanned drones for covert aerial surveillance, security, or emergency operations across the UK, the Guardian has learned.” According to the Guardian, one of the departments of the British Government that is at the forefront of keeping the population of the United Kingdom under surveillance is SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency. SOCA has a close working relationship with MI5, which is the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ FBI. Government documentation secured by investigative journalists of the Guardian revealed that the growth of the use of drones in the U.K., by regional police forces, is growing at an extremely rapid rate. And it’s not just the Guardian that has reported on such issues in the United Kingdom.

The BBC, in April 2015, told its readers that, “Police guarding London airports will start using drones for surveillance following a review by counter-terrorism officers. An 18-month analysis by the National Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters, which helps develop police policy, found the technology could be ‘transformative.’ Privacy campaigners said they were concerned about the plans. Police are also to take over investigations into drone misuse.”

It’s decidedly disturbing that the very people who, in the U.K, are tasked with investigating the misuse of drones, are the same people who are using such drones, namely the police. The BBC had more to say on this issue. Revealing that, at the time of writing, more than 50,000 drones were in use in the U.K. – whether owned by the public and / or law-enforcement personnel and the intelligence world – the BBC noted how this growing increase in the employment of drones threatened the privacy of the people of the U.K. It quoted the words of Big Brother Watch’s Emma Carr, who said that, in regards to drones it’s vital that we have a fuller grasp of “how they’re used and who they’re being used by.” Amen to that.

Now let us move onto Australia. In 2014, Australia’s ABC News reported that, “The Australian Federal Police has told a federal parliamentary inquiry that drones are among the latest tools it is using in major crime investigations. A parliamentary committee has begun examining the growing use and popularity of drone technology, as well as the privacy concerns it raises for Australians.”

The extent to which the AFP was using drones, and the nature of the technology involved, became very clear in 2013. That was when the AFP used drone-based technology to search for the remains of an anti-drugs proponent in the New South Wales area of the nation. Mark Harrison, the Commander of the AFP, told the Australian press the following: “We assisted in the imagery and the recording of that search and excavation and the UAV provided a different and unique perspective to aid and assist in that process.” Notably, this was the very first occasion on which the AFP acknowledged it had a drone program. As is the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, the citizens of Australia have their deep concerns about how drones may be misused, all in the name of what passes for national security.

Certainly, the provisions of the Australian Freedom of Information Act have demonstrated that more and more people have lodged complaints with the world of law enforcement, chiefly to express their outrage at what they see as flagrant disregard for personal privacy. Much of this was revealed by Australia’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim, the Commissioner himself, admitted that, “There are cases where people have woken up in the morning, pulled their curtains open and there’s been a drone hovering outside. It’s starting to suggest to us that there’s a point in time at which we need to sit back and say: ‘Do we have the right laws in place to make sure that we can regulate to the best extent possible how these devices can be used?’ That is the challenge now facing lawmakers in Federal Parliament and across Australia.”

In Australia, at least, there is some degree of oversight: the police, the military, and the intelligence community are now required to secure a warrant before any kind of drone-driven surveillance of citizens and residents can go ahead – which is very encouraging. We can only hope that such rules and regulations are being adhered to.

The exchange is now a famous one, and also one of the most notable quotes attributed to Hillary Clinton leading up to the 2016 election… at least among those interested in UFOs.

“You know, there’s a new name,” Clinton told comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who asked her about UFOs during an appearance on his program. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon. U.A.P. That’s the latest nomenclature.”

While there was a lot of buzz at the time about the fact that Clinton openly discussed the UAP issue on the program, what many are unaware of is that the question Kimmel asked her had been partially intended as a joke: in fact, it was suggested beforehand to Clinton aides by Kimmel himself.

The story behind the story here takes us back to the infamous Podesta email leaks. In an email exchange dated November 4, 2015, that was published as part of the batch of emails hacked from Podesta’s email account and released by Wikileaks, Clinton staffer Sara Latham wrote that, “[Kimmel] thinks it would be awesome and funny, if she explained that you don’t use the term UFO anymore.”

She further outlined how the proposed exchange might go, outlining the following “rough draft” of Clinton’s response to the question:

‘Jimmy if you talk about UFOs, people think you’re nuts – you have to use the term, UAP – unexplained aerial phenomenon. this is an issue I think the govt should take this more seriously the govt has been too stingy on what information we should know and when I’m President, the american people will find out !!’

There appeared to be some concern (or at least confusion) about the idea early on; in a previous exchange, Latham had noted that “the question seems odd,” and asked if there was “any further context on why Jimmy is going down the alien road.” Reasons were said to have included a Mother Jonesstory that had gone to print around that time, titled “ETs for Hillary: Why UFO activists are excited about Clinton presidency,” along with the fact that Kimmel had previously asked a similar question of the candidate’s husband, former President William Jefferson Clinton.

Bill Clinton, when asked about the issue, told Kimmel that had he found any significant information about the subject, he would have released that to the public. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were slightly less talkative on the matter when asked similar questions by Kimmel, but the exchanges do help establish a sort of track record the comedian has for asking high-ranking politicians questions about UFOs.

Which brings us back to Hillary Clinton, and Kimmel’s plans for the “UAP” gag. As the plan took shape before a live audience during Clinton’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, perhaps the delivery had been just a tad too dry; in any case, it didn’t end up coming across quite like the joke it had been anticipated to be. The result was that Clinton’s widely publicized statements on UAP were offered by UFO advocates as further evidence of her frankness in discussing the matter, rather than a playful joke she was told in advance that she would be participating in.

However, the fact that Kimmel had actually suggested the “UAP, not UFO” statement doesn’t mean that there wasn’t evidence of legitimate interest in the subject by the Clinton campaign. In fact, shortly after the appearance, Joseph G. Buchman, a UFO transparency advocate, was quoted in the New York Times saying that “Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics.” Prior to that, she had also stated in a radio appearance prior to that she wanted “to open the [UFO] files as much as we can.”

This wasn’t a newly acquired interest, either. In fact, going all the way back to just prior to her husband’s inauguration, the Clintons were briefed on the UFO issue by Laurance Rockefeller, who supplied a book on space and extraterrestrial life to Mrs. Clinton (this was determined by researcher Grant Cameron, from a photograph where a portion of the book could be seen protruding from a bag as she and Rockefeller were walking along together). The Clinton’s long-held interest in the subject is further reflected in Bill Clinton’s response to Kimmel asking him about it prior to the comedian’s exchange with Hillary.

And of course, John Podesta (who has appeared on UFO-related television shows that include Ancient Aliens) has quite a reputation for his interests in UFOs, which also may have carried over from his time working in the Clinton Administration during the 1990s. Podesta even wrote the forward to Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Governments, Pilots, and Military Officials Go on the Record.

And, as Sara Latham noted in her emails (which were eventually forwarded to Podesta in 2015, and hence why we know about the exchanges today), she was seen noting at one point saying she was “familiar with [John Podesta’s] area51(sic) and X Files obsession.”

The entire email exchange can be read here.

On a final interesting note, at the time Kimmel was working with Hillary Clinton’s staff to plan for her appearance, news about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had not yet become public knowledge, nor had the Navy’s policies on reporting UFOs, or many of the other “revelations” about UFOs that have fed into a broader shift in attitudes, and thus, further public discourse on the subject, in recent months. However, one other thing we learned from the Podesta email leaks, as many will recall, is that former Blink 182 frontman Tom Delonge had made arrangements to meet Podesta, along with an individual believed to have been Major General William McCasland, Commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

It seems very likely that the early workings of what became Delonge’s To the Stars Academy, as featured more recently on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, were at play here… and that they were aspiring to get whatever involvement from a potential future Clinton administration that they could. Delonge would later state that the Wikileaks email release had been problematic, and caused setbacks for what eventually became the To the Stars Academy.

Why is all this significant? Because more than a year before the pair of New York Times articles that detailed the existence of the AATIP program (of which there now seem to be more questions than answers), and brought renewed interest to the U.S.S Nimitz Incident, Clinton’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel was generating buzz about her advocacy of UFO transparency, even to the extent the NYT carried the headline, “Hillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files.” Suddenly, everyone was using the term “UAP” and touting it as a better, more modern and refined way of labeling the subject.

And if nothing else, well damn it, at least it *sounds* scientific.

So one day, when we look back and begin mapping out the modern history of what slowly led to broader, more open discussion on the UFO subject, let’s not forget to thank Jimmy Kimmel, whose idea for a joke (and Mrs. Clinton’s reliably deadpan delivery) helped set the tone for a new kind of public discussion on unidentified flying objects.