"Hiding in Plain Sight"—Connecting Dots from the Deep State to UFOs

Lurking. In. The Shadows.

Following up on our recent X-Files related story (“Hiding in Plain Sight”—UFOs & Agent Mulder…I Want to Believe), we thought we should reprise some of the salient points and speculations we’ve covered over the years.

First, if you recall the dramatic and legendary TV series, The X-Files, one of its key themes was a surreptitious cover-up of the existence of extraterrestrial life, which was overseen by a “shadow government” called the Syndicate. They were the main antagonistic force facing Agents Mulder and Scully. In some ways, this clandestine agency, a government within the government, was part of what we may call a “deep state” in today’s vernacular. The term has been defined as a clandestine network of members of the federal government (especially within the FBI and CIA), working in conjunction with top-level military, industrial and financial entities and leaders, to exercise power alongside or within the elected U.S. government.

By the way, mention of financial, military and industrial entities brings to mind the term, Military-Industrial Complex, which was perhaps first mentioned by outgoing U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower when warning of a close relationship between the government and the defense industry. He sounded the alarm way back in 1961: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Add the threat of the MIC (who were allegedly behind the assassination of President John Kennedy) to the menace of a deep state, or a state within a state, and it’s downright “spooky” as Mulder would say.

Okay, with us, so far? 

Second, do you remember the film Three Days of the Condor, the classic political thriller and an exercise in theatrical paranoia? All the way through this movie, right up to the finale, we viewers never know who to trust. This is exacerbated when we, through Robert Redford’s “Condor” character discovers that a government within the government—that shadow government—is responsible for the murders, all allegedly for the greater good of the United States.

Yeah, but by whose reckoning?

What makes the looming reality of a “deep state” truly scary isn’t just that hidden agencies will act criminally in pursuit of their agendas to serve what they see as “a greater good.” It’s that they’ll probably never be held accountable, even if/when they’re caught, because they control the information and thus the story.

Now, think of the UFO phenomenon cover-up and the control of the narrative—Roswell, The Phoenix Lights, the US Navy pilot sightings and the Nimitz/”Tic Tac” incidents, the U.S.’s UFO retrieval program, etc.

I’ll turn it over to my associate Stephen Zoller to further explore the state within a state.

Connecting the Dots (by Stephen Zoller)

We thought it useful for the benefit of the thousands of our readers to reprise some of the salient points and speculations we’ve covered over the years—an attempt to “connect the dots.”

The flood of UFO/UAP news these days reminds me of a Russian Matryoshka doll—remove the outer shell only to find a slightly smaller one waiting for you—and so on. As the saying goes, “It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” and that about sums up the UFO phenomenon over the last 75 years.

It can drive a believer insane—which we at Hiding In Plain Sight have come to believe is precisely the aim of an ultra-secret branch of the Government/Pentagon charged with keeping the public confused about UFOs—at any cost, by any means. The entity has no official name but is often referred to as the “Deep State” or “Shadow Government.” And it’s scary, scary stuff. 

Ashley and I have debated whether we should even address this issue head on because it could alienate some of our readers and invite harsh criticism of us for being too paranoid and too alarmist. And part of me wholeheartedly agrees. It’s as if we’ve just discovered that the movie The Matrix was in fact a documentary not fiction.

So, I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t wish to dive down that rabbit hole.

But the truth is that the existence of a “shadow government within a government” and the consequent control of information, is at the core of the UFO conundrum and to ignore it would play right into the hands of whoever its operatives may be.

The idea is ripped straight from The X-Files (see our “Mulder” article) fused with a Cold War slap of Orwellian reality. And, it would have remained so indefinitely had it not been for a few brave souls (whistleblowers) among its ranks who, at great personal risk, gave us a tiny glimpse into the inner workings of this unelected clandestine body.

In the years following the Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash of 1947, there began a concerted campaign by the “shadow government” to use the vast resources of the military industrial complex to deceive the public. For instance, the Air Force commissioned “Project Blue Book” which was billed as an “exhaustive and authoritative” study of the UFO phenomenon which turned out to be an obvious snow job with laughable claims that flying saucer sightings had nothing to do with extraterrestrials but instead were caused by various “misdirecting” factors including: a mild form of mass hysteria; individuals who fabricated such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity; psychopathological persons; or, by the misidentification of various conventional objects.

Consequently, instead of de-fusing the public interest the report motivated serious investigators of UFOs with legitimate academic credentials to double their efforts at getting at the truth—men like  physicist Stanton Friedman and  J.L. Hynek an astronomer, who was originally a U.S. Air Force-sponsored UFO-basher for years, but then published his The Hynek UFO Report, which detailed 12,000 "sightings" and 140,000 pages of Project Blue Book "evidence" into a coherent explanation. Hynek came to believe he’d been deliberately misled about UFOs and joined other scientists to call for full disclosure by the powers-that-be in Washington.

Unfortunately, those secret powers-that-be have continued to lead a surreptitious campaign of intimidation and defamation against anyone who was headed in the right direction.

My personal quest to find the truth about UFOs began in the early Sixties. While sitting in the back seat of the family car I alone witnessed a flying saucer zoom across the sky in a matter of seconds. After that I spent the next decade devouring every scrap of information on the subject I could find. People around the world were seeing them but could produce little “hard” evidence except for a few grainy, shaky photographs taken from cheap Kodak cameras.

But there’ve been other notable and newsworthy incidents since Roswell in 1947, including: the Betty and Barney Hill abduction in 1961 and the Travis Walton abduction in 1975; the sensational crashed UFO event in Brazil in 1996 where countless witnesses observed a team of U.S. special ops personnel rapidly clear the site of wreckage and remove several dead alien bodies.

Then, last but not least the Phoenix Lights occurrence in 1997 when thousands of people, including Hollywood actor Kurt Russell who was flying nearby, watched in awe as a massive V-shaped craft defied our science and sailed silently over Camelback Mountain near the City of Phoenix.

In an effort to control the narrative, the nearby Air National Guard base attempted to dismiss the event as a nighttime paratrooper training mission. But there was a loud public outcry about this feeble coverup. One witness, a retired Shuttle astronaut, made an astute observation, speculating that the occupants inside the vessel were making an effort to communicate with those on the ground. He was also left with the notion that their hands were somehow tied by some ultra-secret diplomatic agreement made between them and the deep state in Washington. But like every other UFO incident that preceded it, within weeks the Phoenix Lights incident drifted away from the public consciousness.

It rattled my brain that such a dramatic and well-documented sighting fail to ignite the general public to demand that the keepers of secrets in Washington finally come clean about the phenomenon and answer the overriding question—Do the alien occupants of UFOs come in peace or do they pose a threat to humanity?  Again, lips were sealed. No one from the military nor the government (including the President) gave it more than a passing mention and no potential whistleblower stepped out of the shadows to help us connect the dots. And with that my personal zeal to search for answers fell into dormancy.

At least that’s the way it was until December 2017, when the New York Times leaked “classified” video captured from the cockpit of a US F-19 navy fighter jet launched from the USS Nimitz carrier and piloted by Commander David Fravor. The black and white video showed an unidentified “Tic Tac” shaped object travelling at speeds beyond our current understanding of the laws of science. Initially, a Pentagon official tried to dismiss the blip as a runaway high altitude weather balloon but when no one took the bait we were told not jump to conclusions, and wait until more data was gathered.  But once his second attempt at deflection ran hollow, the official finally admitted that the video wasn’t tampered with in any way and left it at that.

As I’ve described in our first “Hide in Plain Sight” series, I literally fell out of my chair when it dawned on me that the official had essentially confessed to what many of us suspected all along—that the inner sanctum of the military industrial complex had been covering up the truth about UFOs dating back to that Roswell incident of 1947 and likely further back to WWII.

Since then we’ve seen a growing acceptance of the idea that UAP/UFOs are real and that in all likelihood originate from somewhere out there.

That’s a dramatic shift from the days when serious discussions about the phenomenon were relegated to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast nighttime radio broadcast. Although if memory serves, Art’s show was the first to introduce the out-of-this-world idea that ultra-secret meetings between U.S. officials and a federation of aliens had already taken place on Mars and an agreement had been reached that spelled out the rules of engagement between the two parties.  WTF? Even a die-hard believer like myself had a hard time digesting that crazy idea. But in 2020, Prof. Eshed, the respected former director of Israeli Military Intelligence, went public and suggested the existence of a “Galactic Federation.”

It became clear to longtime observers that the cloak of secrecy surrounding UFOs was being challenged by principled professionals within the military like Commander Fravor and ex-pilot Ryan Graves who were finally motivated to step out of the shadows in an attempt to force the hand of those in power to provide the public with full disclosure, no matter how disturbing or game changing it may be. 

While full disclosure has yet to occur, I’m now optimistic that it will happen sooner than later.  Considering the current worrisome state of our planet with socio-political-climate-military disasters breaking out all over, I’m reminded of a quote by one of the great thinkers of history, Socrates: “There is only one good, knowledge and only one evil, ignorance.”

PS: So, why are shadow governments so bent on controlling the narrative beyond seeking to prevent worldwide panic and hysteria? In a future Blog, we’ll speculate on these reasons. For example, revealing that we are not alone would destroy all our concepts of God and religion. Additionally, one U.S. whistleblower claims that the world has been locked in a “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered physical material” over the years, which has seen nations compete to “identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering.” And, why would we want to reverse-engineer potential alien technologies? To better understand distant civilizations, or even make contact? Or, maybe, it’s more sinister—like seeking to gain an upper hand in global conflict!

Do not switch this channel and, above all, stay informed!

Graphics by Stephen Zoller. Watch out for our upcoming “Hiding in Plain Sight” blog on why the “deep state” wants to control the narrative on UFOs. And, also refer to other UFO interviews/stories posted on BBN Times by author Ashley Jude Collie and filmmaker/UFOlogist Stephen Zoller.

“Hiding in Plain Sight”—So, like, What's Up with Mars?” —“Hiding in Plain Sight—UFOs & Agent Mulder…I Want to Believe” — “Hiding in Plain Sight—While Vegas Wins Stanley Cup, Men in Black & Aliens reported in Sin City Backyard” —“Hiding in Plain Sight—Air Force Whistleblower Suggests that U.S. has UFO Retrieval Program”