By Kevin Wright
February 11, 2024
Please note that the following column appeared in Sunday’s digital edition of the Roswell Daily Record and has been republished with permission.
The Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Defense (DoD) announced in May 2021 that it would begin an evaluation “to determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding” unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
In late January, the DoD IG released an unclassified summary of its review of the Pentagon’s handling of UAP, the classified version of which was delivered to Congress in August of last year, slightly more than two years after the review began.
The review “determined that the DoD has no overarching UAP policy and, as a result, [the IG] lacks assurance that national security and flight safety threats to the United States from UAP have been identified and mitigated.”
The scathing summary of the DoD’s mishandling of UAP included eleven recommendations for the Pentagon’s top brass to implement. According to a report by Chris Sharp with the Liberation Times, only one of the IG’s eleven recommendations had been implemented five months after the classified version of the IG’s review was delivered to Congress.
While busying itself with not implementing the IG’s recommendations, the DoD’s annual audit was released in November 2023. The comprehensive audit engaged 1,600 auditors in 700 site visits to assess assets valued at $3.8 trillion and liabilities totaling $4 trillion. Legally mandated, the audit examined the record-keeping processes associated with the Pentagon’s global weapons systems, military personnel, and assets.
Out of the 29 sub-audits, only seven were deemed successful across the diverse services of the Pentagon. Astonishingly, the auditors also found that about half of the DoD’s assets can’t be accounted for.
How does the Pentagon explain the failure, despite years of official and unofficial investigations of UAP, to have an “overarching UAP policy” in place? And how do you explain the Pentagon’s failed audit, the DoD’s sixth in a row?
Are these seemingly unrelated twin failures simply emblematic of a bloated bureaucracy too big to implement IG national security recommendations in a timely manner or account for half of its assets? Is the answer for one or both failures incompetence? Or is there purpose behind the ineptitude?
“Hanlon’s Razor,” an adage that we should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” or perhaps in this case incompetence, might be appropriate here to explain these failures. But, if you think about it, there just might be a method to this madness: obstructing Congress’ Constitutional oversight of the Pentagon, its activities, programs, finances, and assets.
In July of last year, intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower David Grusch testified under oath he had learned of an orchestrated campaign within the DoD to avoid Congressional oversight of UAP crash retrievals (CR), reverse engineering (RE), materials analyses, and “biologics,” or presumably bodies, or parts of bodies, of a non-human intelligence (NHI) entity or being, through the use of Special Access Programs (SAP) and the Independent Research and Development (IR&D) financing process used by defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin.
We also know the Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about UAP, what it has learned about the phenomenon or anything to do with technologies of unknown origin, CR/RE, or biologics. And, of course, there’s the nasty little business of running an 80-year disinformation campaign against the public to keep the government’s UAP secrets buried under lock and key.
What better way to keep Congress in the dark and prevent meaningful oversight if members of the House and Senate think the DoD is too incompetent to have more information about UAP or be engaged in expensive, above-top-secret UAP programs?
Hanlon’s Razor is probably applicable. Or, there’s more than meets the eye and more layers to the secrecy and gatekeeping around the UAP issue. Either way, Congress should hold hearings and get to the bottom of all this because whether it’s incompetence or an orchestrated means to avoid oversight, neither answer is acceptable.
