Have you ever told a secret? Sure you have. But why did it need to be secret? Were you embarrassed or shy about something, or maybe afraid of the consequences of the secret getting out?
Or are your secrets more internal? Things you keep to yourself for similar reasons? And what does all of this say about trust? Do you trust people?
Maybe really only trust just a few people? And what do you trust them with? If you're like me, you probably have a spectrum of secrecy and trust. Only certain people get so far on either dimension.
But let's scale this up a bit and make it less personal. What kinds of things do parents keep from their children? Now let's go all the way. What does government keep from everyone?
Now before we head down into the rabbit hole, remember to think about your own personal secrets from childhood and maybe even today, at the same time you think about government. In September of this year, 2019, the idea of raiding Area 51 went viral on the internet. Millions of people claimed they were going, because after all, they couldn't stop everyone from hopping the fence simultaneously, could they? But why raid Area 51?
Area 51 has captured the imagination of the world for decades, despite there being next to no real information publicly available about the things that go on at the place. All we can say for certain is that generations of advanced aircraft were tested there or nearby there. The U2, the SR-71, the F-117A stealth fighter, cool stuff for sure. But it is of course more exotic and fringe ideas about UFOs and even aliens that capture the public's imagination.
Mine included. When the Area 51 raid was getting closer to happening, the military stated outright that it had every intention of defending American assets that came to it, even from American citizens. That raised several direct questions in my mind. Number one, what secret is so important that it would be worth a government potentially massacring thousands of its own citizens for hopping a fence?
Number two, if that actually happened, how does the rest of the country react? How does the rest of the world react? Number three, and then when it comes to secrets that are funded by tax dollars, who is really in charge of those secrets and how hard should they be to learn? Obviously the raid was a total bust and myself along with countless others watched in a weird state of amused disappointment as a few hundred nerds, summoned costumes, went out to the desert to stand around the gate and not do much of anything but socialize in the cold air.
But the questions that were raised are still very much valid, even if our lovely mainstream quote unquote journalistic institutions in this country failed to examine a single one of them in a serious way. So for the rest of this episode, that's what I want to do, is look at those questions that I've raised so far about secrecy. Why have secrets? What is the value, if any, in secrets?
I'll pick up on that after a quick break. So far in this episode, several questions about secrets have come to mind, some broad and some specific. Is something secret because it's embarrassing or damaging? Is it a lack of confidence in the thing itself that makes you shy about disclosure?
Does the secret provide an edge or a potential edge against your rivals? Well let's tackle all these questions in a few more. Does the secret exist because the issue is embarrassing or damaging? It's very much human to want to hide your mistakes in your shame.
In the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible that's part of the creation story, Adam hides from God in the trees of the Garden of Eden, naked and afraid after he ate the apple that he wasn't supposed to. Pride, uncertainty, embarrassment are all at play in this regard. Lack of confidence or shyness is often a reason to keep a secret. Maybe you don't feel confident enough in yourself to ask someone out on a date, or maybe you have an idea in your head about a problem, but you just aren't confident enough to let it be criticized yet.
Or maybe you're your own sort of creative, and the people around you just don't quite get it so you keep it hid. Secrets can hide things that are damaging too. You might blame a sibling or some other random circumstance for something that is actually your fault, or actively work to cover something up before someone finds out what you did. Or maybe the secret is that you're lying about something to get your way.
Secrets don't have to be all bad either. For example, at what age do you have conversations with a small child about death, sex, or politics? Is there information that might be worth withholding to a degree until a person is ready for it? I certainly think so.
Which is of course, a whole new question about who is deciding who is ready or not. Is there a secret also be an advantage? If you found a way to do something better, faster, or cheaper, would you tell your rivals? Of course not.
You'd want to keep that for yourself. No sports team hands the opposing team their own playbook. So how about secrets at the state level or higher? If you're like me, you oftentimes think in terms of politicians covering up damage or failure.
From the current Ukraine gate to Fast and Furious, Benghazi, deleted emails, Russia gate, 9-11, Iran-Contra, the Gulf of Tonkin, the assassination of JFK, Pearl Harbor, the USS Maine, the list goes on and on. The same impulses that drive secrecy for individuals are usually work here too. And there's no shortage of content online discussing things that often end up broadly labeled as conspiracy theories. If you look through some Freedom of Information Act findings, you'll find that the government does indeed use tax dollars to fund all sorts of really, really outlandish sounding projects.
In a Freedom of Information Act release from June 6th of this year, which I'll link to at lorenlegends.net, Fusion Propulsion for Aircraft, Warp Drives, the manipulation of other dimensions, wormholes, communicating via gravity waves are all listed as projects that had a budget. Is this good or bad? Think what you want in that regard, and you aren't wrong. But the fact is, most of these things are highly futuristic at best.
So the real question should be less about, do you ever think there will be a warp drive, or should we study Fusion Propulsion for Aircraft? The real question is who is overseeing this stuff, and ensuring that our tax dollars are being put to good use and getting results, and not merely lining the pockets of well-connected and credentialed cranks. That's where secrecy comes in. Who's issuing the money, and who's looking at the results?
After all, many of these ideas have thread in the open market, with very prominent and capable scientists working on them or writing about them. A couple of easy-to-digest books that come to my mind are Physics of the Future, and Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, who is a very outspoken and accomplished physicist. So if this technology is important, and possibly is world-changing as a viable fusion power plant or a warp drive, why is it cloaked in secrecy? In my mind, the answer is actually kind of complicated, and all the things about secrecy that I've mentioned so far are part of it.
Would it be embarrassing in a sort of high-society political sense if you were a scientist, and you were publicly affiliated with some of this stuff? If society at large says x-thing is not possible, but you're working on it anyway, it could make you seem a little crazy. Think about the perception of Nikola Tesla, and what he received sometimes, or maybe the perception of the fictional doctor Emmett Graham before his DeLorean troubled back in time. So it's entirely plausible that a sort of shyness or a lack of confidence in the science necessitates secrecy so that some of these brilliant minds can work in peace.
More likely though, a great deal of secrecy derives from not wanting to hand the opposing team your playbook. Let's say you're working on an aircraft with a real fusion engine. Several things become concerning. Your opponent may never have even thought to do this, so I give him the idea.
Secret projects involve many layers of security that work to protect the engineering data from more open networks, so if you pump millions of dollars into research, only to have it stolen in the end, and what you're actually behind now, because you wasted resources on something that's no longer an edge. Another reason is measures and countermeasures. You would want to keep the project secret for as long as possible. Measures breed countermeasures, and you don't even want your enemy to know the measures that you have.
These things are true at the individual, corporate, and government level. Quite famously, China is believed to have stolen much of the engineering in its newest aircraft, from the American planes, the F-22, and the F-35. Any person or company who makes a financial investment into an idea isn't going to jump for joy at the first person who rips it off. Heck, people online get upset about not getting internet points for being the original creator of a reposted meme.
But what if some of it is just a small circle of well-connected people scratching each other's back? When it comes to any project, you've probably been in some kind of meeting where a person baffles the boss with BS and then gets their approval. It doesn't really even have to be nefarious. Certainly, some well-credential people have imaginations about the impossible just like the rest of us.
The difference is, you might not have the ear of Congress. All of these things are involved when we discuss secrets, or what is and isn't classified. No doubt you could probably come up with a few more reasons and details I've missed. But let's get back to Area 51.
So what could be so secret that it would be worth potentially slaughtering thousands of your own citizens? Honestly, I have a hard time thinking of anything. I like to think that if it truly came to that, Congress, or maybe even the President would intervene in some capacity. If we're just talking about some new physics achievement or a new black plane, then at that point, I do think the cat should come out of the bag.
But it's dicey, because if you do actually believe that secrets can be necessary, you might have unleashed a mob monster onto every sensitive area in existence. But what if the secret was indeed a recovered alien spacecraft that we didn't fully understand? Perhaps the world should have the right to know. That's my knee-jerk reaction anyway.
But do you remember the movie Independence Day with Will Smith? Well, in that movie, Deep Under Area 1 existed a recovered alien ship. And if you don't remember, that recovered ship ended up being the Salvation of Earth, as it allowed the heroes to sneak onto the alien mothership and detonate a nuke. That sort of scenario doesn't really work if the aliens can just blow up Area 51 in the first place.
But aside from an alien invasion, would it be worth keeping technology like that from your enemies? Pick your most hated political figure, 400 domestic, and now hand them something unstoppable. Would you even want to take a chance that some of those people and their followers could figure it out? I wouldn't.
Certainly, you wouldn't hand a toddler a handgun, or even ask a ten-year-old to drive across town. Obviously, Area 51 is a location is hardly secret anymore. But maybe something like Bob Lazar's S4 really does exist somewhere. Bob Lazar, of course, is famous for claiming he worked at a hidden base in the desert on his many as nine alien craft attempting to reverse engineer them with minimal success other than a few short demo flights.
There are actually many claims that UFOs exist in the manner Lazar says, but that they are locked away periodically, awaiting new scientific breakthroughs to happen before a new team of leading edge scientists is invited in. Not so different from the futuristic idea of freezing people until a cure for whatever terminal disease is found. But let's say we figured it out finally, and the Navy's infamous Tic-Tac UFOs are the result, a craft that can defy gravity and our understanding of physics. How long should it be kept a secret?
Consider the societal ramifications of virtually instantaneous travel and the dramatic shift in jobs and existing industries that would be wholly eliminated. Do you slow walk the technology out to the public? Not to mention the fact that it still involves ET. You're talking about a massive shift in society on all levels, at least potentially.
So, would that be a secret worth keeping? Maybe it's really not as easy as a simple yes or no. But let's imagine you said yes. Is it worth potentially killing thousands of American citizens to protect it?
If so, how does the rest of country react to that? I'm guessing you'd pretty quickly have a major crisis on your hands. Not to mention the reaction from other countries, which would certainly include reactions from countries who are also interested in whatever we may be hiding. If you think Russian or Chinese interference is a serious thing, imagine handing them a moral high ground of sorts, not to mention confirming that some secret was really, really worth keeping.
Amongst all of this, there is the question of ownership. Tax dollars, congressional oversight, what do those things mean? And if we're talking about an answer to, are we alone in the universe? Shouldn't we at least get that in a timeline for full disclosure, even if the tech itself is never public?
Well, let's get even weirder with it. What if there was something, but that something was incredibly bad? What if it was an alien or an advanced piece of war hardware, a general zod, or an alien terminator that meant it's harm? Should they be kept locked up where they can't harm and manipulate people until we have a way to fight back?
What happens if a million people hop the fence and they inadvertently unleash what is by all measures, a demon? We also have to consider the idea that there is nothing all that spectacular at these sorts of places, whether it's Area 51, Skinwalker Ranch, or some other place that still doesn't technically exist. Maybe we keep demanding disclosure, but there's just nothing to see or say. Maybe people just want to believe so badly that they wouldn't take no for an answer, even if they opened the gates voluntarily.
The goalposts would just get moved like they do in a lot of bad arguments based on crap logic. They'll just say, but it wasn't a real Area 51. Or maybe, more depressing still, all the secrecy just benefits a handful of well-connected cranks. Who may or may not be sincere about a subject, but in the end, they're just fleecing all of us from massive amounts of cash and will never be the wiser.
I don't think anyone can honestly claim to have all the answers. For the record, I have very libertarian views about most things, so I tend to frown on government every chance I get. But on this subject, I do kind of wonder, because while I don't put a lot of trust in our government, there are other governments and groups that I trust even less. And no matter how cool the thing might be to think about, maybe staying hidden for a while in the hands of a few people who are at best doing very little or at worst doing nothing is the best thing.
Be sure to check out the latest post on lorenlegends.net. I'll have some additional commentary on this topic, some links to some declassified weird stuff I found, a few rumors, and a list of some of my favorite UFO incidents, which leads me into an announcement. So a friend of mine who does a couple of podcasts on his own, Libertarian veterans, and Patreon history, got connected with a guy who worked for Bass, Bigelow Aerospace, Advanced Space Studies. Now, that's the group who owned a Skinwalker Ranch for a long time, and may or may not have done a bunch of weird stuff up there.
Well, we interviewed a guy, and we recorded it, and that's kind of let us down this other rabbit hole. So we decided to make that its own podcast. It might not be something that lasts, it might just be a short mini-series, but we just wanted to put the information out there because it's crazy, as crazy as you might think. That podcast is going to be called Skinwalker Radio, and the first couple of episodes are going to come out really soon.
So certainly subscribe to this podcast, Lauren Legends, and go check out his podcast, Libertarian Veterans and Patriot History. Also pay attention to lorenlegends.net and facebook.com slash lorenlegends, because when that episode comes out or if some other development happens, that's probably the first place you're going to find out. But for now, if you have some weird stuff of your own you'd like to add, drop it in the comments over at lorenlegends.net. You don't need to have an account or anything like that to comment there.
You can also follow me, like I mentioned before, at facebook.com slash loreendlegends, and at mines.com slash bovaid, that's O-B-I-W-A-D-E. And if you really like the show, share it, and if you really really like it, consider supporting it at paypal.me slash loreendlegends. That's all I had for this show. See you next time.
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