What we’re tracking: The Schumer Amendment - The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023
First: a reminder that the next UAP Digest Community Meeting will be held on November 29th from 7:00 - 9:00 EST. To receive the Zoom link, please RSVP to Janis at wttafriend@gmail.com.
As some of you may recall, at about the time that David Grusch provided July 26th whistleblower testimony for the US House Oversight Committee, Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the highest ranking Senators in Congress, released the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Notably, per Ross Coulthart, the legislation was crafted with the backing of the White House.
While insiders may have known it was coming, for many of us, it was one of the crazy Ivan moves to date (though these are admittedly becoming a staple of the contemporary era).
Why? Well, primarily because although the legislation was backed by Sens. Mike Rounds, Kristen Gillibrand, and Marco Rubio, among others, Schumer has yet to historically associate himself with this topic. This, coupled with the fact that he is one of the highest-ranking members of Congress, makes the timing and robustness of the Act rather surprising.
Besides a light summary provided in a summer Digest, we haven't said much about it until now because it was unclear whether it could survive the backroom power plays. However, there is broad consensus among insiders that it is likely to pass (or if not pass, then lay irrevocably potent groundwork for future legislation). If and when it does pass, it will set a process and timeline for disclosure that even the most devoted disclosure resistors will find hard to thwart.
Here is what you need to know about the Schumer amendment:
e Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023 was modeled after a 1992 US law articulating how records related to the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy were handled. It amends the National Defense Authorization Act and has already been passed by the Senate. (Note: there are a variety of sources suggesting that JFK was killed because he was going to disclose the existence of UAP to the public. It will be an exciting space to watch as disclosure occurs).
The legislation will mandate that all six military branches, all 18 intelligence agencies, and all US government defense contractors provide to Congress ALL records (this includes government-made, government-funded, government-provided records) related to UAP or non-human intelligence (NHI), technologies of unknown origin possessed by their agency dating back to the beginning of any records of this nature (mid-40s in most cases).
It will allocate $20 million in fiscal 2024 funding to establish an official, federal UAP Records Review Board. The National Archives and Records Administration would oversee the review board and be separate from the current Pentagon's AARO office. It would be comprised of nine individuals selected by a Presidential Executive order. The goal is to compile and review all UAP-linked data from federal agencies and release it to Congress and the public. All information can be disclosed without putting any person or program at risk of violating national security.
The legislation allows Congress to exert eminent domain over any physical materials and technology that has ever been recovered, including biologics (NHI bodies). Private contractors must reveal the technologies they have received, worked on, or successfully reverse-engineered to be eligible for any governmental funding. From what I understand, this is one of the most controversial elements of this legislation because there are vast implications for private defense contractors turning over technology, some of which they have worked on developing for over 70 years. It's pretty likely that this facet of the bill will be significantly watered-down before it's passed if it's passed.
What does all of this mean? It's hard to tell, but if the House passes the Schumer legislation and becomes law in any form resembling what it looks like now, 2024 could be one of the most monumental years in human history.
There is a Disclosure Timeline
People have said, ‘Why now?’ Well, because it’s not on our timescale. It’s not on our timeline. It’s not up to us. They’re here, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Lou Elizondo
Daniel Sheehan, constitutional public interest lawyer, speaker, activist, and founder of the New Paradigm Institute, recently provided a detailed outline of the legislation (and thus Disclosure) timeline.
One of the most intriguing parts of the legislation is that once it's passed, a clock starts. The legislation has passed the Senate and will likely be considered, and we hope passed, by the House in December. After that:
The President has 90 days to form an independent review board (The New Paradigm Institute is involved in the selection process).
Once the review board is in place, Government agencies have 300 days to turn over any UAP records.
The review board then has 180 days to review and 14 days to release findings.
Any records older than 25 years must be released to the public. If the release starts in 2024, information related to some of the most well-known cases, like the Roswell incident and the DC flyover in 1952, will be released to the public early.
All information from within the last 25 years will be reviewed by the review board and released to the public as part of a Controlled Disclosure Campaign Plan (CDCP). Note that the agency contributing the information can explicitly request it be withheld from the public, but it would have to be approved by the review board.
All information withheld goes into a postponed bucket and cannot be withheld indefinitely. It must be released to the public through the CDCP.
Sheehan notes that the current Congress is both aware of and quite incensed by the huge volume of information that has been withheld from their oversight by the Department of Defense and other high-level intelligence agencies, and that it is this that is driving this legislation. He also notes, however, that while this is more forward leaning than any other legislation in history, the fact that agencies providing information to the panel can request that it not be released to the public for national security reasons means that a lot of information will continue to be withheld fro the public.
Sheehan went on to talk a little bit about the current state of affairs behind the scenes and asserted:
The most famous of all crash retrievals occurred in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 in July and occurred right around the 509 bomber base, which was the only base in the entire world where they had nuclear weapons. So, there’s been this heavy correlation between the interest in UFOs and their appearances and our use of nuclear weapons on our planet. Ironically but not coincidentally, our national security state has been responding by trying to figure out how to make weapons like nuclear weapons, but only more so using the technology of the UFOs.
This has been a very serious problem. Now that the cold war is over, theoretically, one might have expected the national security state to lighten up on this. But they haven’t. What they’ve done is thrown down on the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from the 75-year cold war with United States and have moved into establish what they call, by their own terms, Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet. They view access to this technology as a major means by which they can exercise full spectrum dominance.
And so, we have a major pushback going on against all of us who are trying to get this information made more public and to allow our people to come into the conversation about how we’re going to relate to the actual occupants of these UFOs. This is not just a weapons development question, this is an extraordinarily important watershed in the entire history of our human family, so the fact that not only are we not located at the geo-physical center of the entire universe. But it turns out that we’re not even at the apex of the pyramid of all sentient life in the universe.
This comment is reminiscent of Dr. Carol Rosin's interview with Dr. Steven Greer about German and American aerospace engineer and space architect Wernher Von Braun's warnings before he died. We hope that the agenda Von Braun detailed to Dr. Rosin has been favorably modified over time, but there is little evidence to suggest that his warnings are not still applicable.
Will the Schumer Amendment be passed?
Your guess is as good as any of ours. No matter what happens next, the existence of this legislation is a significant step forward in the disclosure process. Having such a high-ranking and bipartisan set of senators acknowledging that there is something to disclose and asserting that the Congress and the public have a right to know what it is will open doors that are impossible to shut. And most of the people with inside information are optimistic that some version of this legislation will pass.
However, it will only pass with a raft of critical questions popping up due to its existence. As former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon wrote in a fresh off-the-press Debrief article, disclosure is fraught with dangerous questions with high stakes impact potential for not just Americans but humanity.
Buckle up, everyone; 2024 is shaping up to be quite an exciting year.
Speaking of quite the year... the House Oversight Committee hearing with David Grusch made Time Magazine's top 100 photos of the year!
Other notable movement
Just before Thanksgiving, David Grusch was interviewed by Joe Rogan. it is definitely worth a listen. With Rogan’s audience size, number in the multi millions this means significant mainstream exposure. A quick perusal of the comments suggests it was a massive hit with Rogan’s audience. It is also interesting to note how many listeners shared their own experience.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) also proposed and passed, by voice vote, an amendment to renew David Grusch's security clearance as part of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. This is huge because it has been one barrier to getting some of the critical disclosures House members seek with David Grusch. It suggests that Congress will not be easily shaken and that they are finding ways to move the ball forward despite the kind of pushed-back that Sheehan references.
Garry Nolan and Peter Skafish's Sol Foundation conference, hosted at Stanford this last weekend, just concluded (no one from the Digest was invited, but we're hoping for a future invitation!). The conference was unavailable for virtual attendance, but some comprehensive notes came from the UAP community. By all measures, it successfully pulled together a raft of high-profile, accomplished academicians and others to begin a serious research program on this topic. Well, actually, "begin" isn't quite the right word because they've already started, as was evident from the available notes – – a lot has already been discovered. But, the Sol Foundation gathering provided legitimized space for exploring and extending shared lexicons and concepts, reviewing progress made in theory generation and hypothesis testing, and in establishing future research directions. Most importantly, it provided a legitimized space for scholars, UFOlogists, and a variety of interested and engaged others to come together in service to advancing high quality research in this area.
It's important to note that academic scholarship is fundamentally intellectually conservative -- ideas are slow to be adopted, and lines of inquiry perceived to fall outside of the mainstream are often rejected out of hand. This means that many of the most interesting angles are not likely to be investigated immediately. Doors will open, however, over time, and precisely, this kind of activity will legitimize this entire phenomenon.
A new book out by Garret Graff is getting some attention. Entitled UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here -- and Out There, it's come out to somewhat mixed reviews in the UAP world, but it sounds like it may be a helpful history of the exciting weave-in and out of the various halls of national security, science, and the secrets of space in what looks like a bustling universe.
UAPs on the international scene: Mexico has begun holding UAP-linked hearings. Word on the street is that they will start declassifying all UAP sightings recorded by their armed forces. TinyKlaus reports that on November 22, Yoshiharu Asakawa, a Japan Restoration House of Representatives member, said, "The UAP problem suddenly accelerated today" and announced that a national policy briefing session will be held on December 20. Lastly, multiple outlets reported on a UAP-linked incident that closed the Imphal Airport in Manipur, India, on November 19.
Ross Coulthart signed on as a special correspondent for News Nation. This means that News Nation is committed to following and reporting this story to the public. As Ross has often pointed out, mainstream media has been the epitome of cowardice when covering the stuff, so I'm glad News Nation is putting a stake in the ground. Their courage will go down in history, and hopefully, it will light a fire under other media outlets.
Lastly, a question for you all: is it a coincidence that the timelines for the emergence of early Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the revelation that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are converging? Attend the next Community Meeting on November 29th and let us know what you think!
David Grusch was the surprise speaker at the Sol Foundation conference and had a message for humanity
A hearty thanks to The Juan on the platform formally known as Twitter for summarizing the high-level takeaways from Grusch's remarks. Here is a paraphrased rendering of his notes:
Imagine a future where we no longer need to speculate about our place in the Cosmos. The release of info on NHI has the potential to unite humanity, regardless of the ontological shock that may ensue. This is a new era of spiritual awakening and we are in a paradigm shift with the power to transform our world. We are working toward a more enlightened and interconnected world.
Reminder
The next UAP Digest Community Meeting will be held on November 29th from 7:00 - 9:00 EST. To receive the Zoom link, please RSVP to Janis at wttafreind@gmail.com.
Next up
I hadn't planned to spend so much time on updates, but there was a lot of movement over the last few weeks and several significant developments. Upcoming digests will examine the link between UAP/NHI and consciousness, how to prepare for a monumental 2024, and some of the ontologically shocking information likely to emerge over time. We will also provide more details on Sol Foundation conference highlights as they become available.
Please provide feedback, thoughts, and resources. Leave these in the comment section or email Janis (at wttafriend@gmail.com).
I hope our US-based readers had a peaceful and connective Thanksgiving. There is nothing like living in a time of great uncertainty to take time to celebrate the preciousness of life and love.
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Janis, with support from Dusty, Rich, Jim, and Julie