Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

This may not be the strangest idea I’ve ever had, but it’s pretty damned strange.

I was born in 1946. Whatever the hell took place in Roswell, New Mexico happened in 1947. Weather balloon my ass. I have been lied to and kept in the dark—and so have you—by the Deepest State ever since then, more than 70 years, and I’m fucking sick and tired of it. We the People can’t make intelligent decisions about the country we’re supposed to be running for ourselves if we’re denied the facts of objective reality. They make fun of us because we can’t and call us “deplorables”; they call us “credulous boomer rubes”. Sure, I am perfectly aware that this is a republic we’re living in, not a democracy, but it is a democratically-operated republic, damnit, and I never voted to be deceived at every turn by overpaid bureaucrats and overstuffed uniforms betraying their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.

What about you?

How bad has it gotten? Several witnesses to the original 1947 event were threatened by “Men in Black” that if they talked about it, they would be taken out into the desert and their bodies left where they would never be found. It wasn’t so comical back then, was it? A sergeant who peeked under a tarpaulin in an Army truck was so afraid of the Deepest State that he waited until he was on his deathbed to reveal what he’d seen: a pair of alien corpses. When Jimmy Carter, who’d seen a UFO ran for President, he promised that he would tell the voters everything the government knew about them; when he got elected, agents of the Deepest State informed the Comnander-in-Chief that it was on a need-to-know basis, and that he didn’t need to know.

And the wimp let them get away with it.

Human beings have been seeing bizarre things in the sky and under the sea for thousands of years. The Bible and other holy books are full of them—think about Ezekial and his Wheel—as are medieval and Rennaissance paintings. There was an enormous spate of sightings of cigar-shaped flying objects in the 1880s. Look up the “foo-fighters“ of World War II. Private pilot Kenneth Arnold flew wingtip-to-wingtip with them in 1947 and gave them their name—“flying saucers“. The most interesting story I know is of a Yuma doctor friend of mine whose description makes them sound like organic life: a mama saucer and her little baby saucers.

I’m not here (at the moment, anyway) to argue the reality of UFOs one way or the other with anybody. After 70-odd years (and they have been very odd), I’m more than satisfied that there’s something there. I grew up in the Air Force; my dad flew B-17s, B-36s, B-47s, and B-52s; I could tell you stories that would curl your teeth. You may not be convinced. But even the most pronounced skeptic should agree with me that whatever the truth, the government of a supposedly free country has no legitimate right to withhold it. It is contrary to everything we’re supposed to believe in and stand for.

So here’s the remedy I propose: an idea that will cost nothing, finally begin to set things straight, and diminish the ill-gotten power of the Deepest State. It hurts me as a libertarian to say this, but what we need is a law—a Constitutional Amendment if necessary, and I think it will be—forbidding the keeping of government secrets with regard to UFOs and other such phenomena and exacting a severe penalty—life in solitary confinement seems about right—for politicians, bureaucrats, or military types who disobey. No redactions of any kind will be permitted. It is our absolute right as Americans to know what’s really going on in the air over our heads.

What in the sacred name of Tycho Brahe are they hiding? It could be nothing at all (after all these decades and all these lies, how will they ever make us believe that?) It could be a hidden foreign policy: diplomatic contact with agencies of other civilizations. There might be secret cabinet appointments: Ambassador to the Court of Alpha Centauri, or the Aldeberani Hive, etc. We might be being denied technical and scientific advances: Betelguesan fingertraps, Fomalhautian tin whistles, the intergalactic chicken dance, a cure for cancer, the common cold or Alzheimer’s, diabetes, old age in general: “You won’t get sick, you won’t get old, and you won’t die“.

Prove it is otherwise, Deepest State. Tens of millions of Americans are weary of being treated like little children by idiots in funny hats. Tell us now or get thrown on the offal-heap of history.