The Disclosure Activists Have Arrived to Take On the ET Truth Embargo
By Greg Black
For serious followers of the UFO phenomenon, the concept of extraterrestrial (and perhaps interdimensional) visitation to Earth is not a question mark but a reality with a vast array of extensive historical evidence. The question for the Disclosure movement is how to break on through to the other side of the “Truth Embargo” — aka the UFO cover-up — that’s been in place since at least the 1940s. Trailblazing exopolitical activist Steve Bassett has been a leading voice in the movement for two decades, launching a political action committee in the mid-’90s with the goal of lobbying Congress to hold hearings on what the government knows about the UFO/ET phenomenon.
Bassett’s efforts through his Paradigm Research Group reached a fever pitch in 2016 when the buzz for Disclosure seemed to reach an all-time high. This was due to several factors, including Washington D.C. insider/Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta engaging the issue in an unprecedented manner. Rockstar Tom Delonge from Blink 182 was also in the Disclosure news via his “Sekret Machines” project with insiders from the Pentagon, Air Force and military-industrial complex. Wikileaks played a key role as well with publication of Podesta’s emails, including a number that touched on the UFO/ET topic in a compelling manner.
Bassett and fellow activists in a Facebook group named The Disclosure Lobby pursued a campaign to lobby journalists and corporate media to ask Clinton about the UFO/ET issue. The goal was to catalyze a sequence of events leading to a Disclosure announcement from either President Barack Obama at the end of 2016 or President Hillary Clinton in early 2017. But that’s now how 2016 played out. Bassett, dedicatedly dogged yet ultimately frustrated again, has now declared that he intends to shift gears and focus PRG’s efforts on lobbying European media and political leaders. The Disclosure Activists are seizing the opportunity to step into the void to try to crank up both the American and international campaign to new heights.
This reporter (and member of both Disclosure groups) recently interviewed Disclosure Activists co-founder Russell Calka to get his perspective on all the historic exopolitical activity that went down in 2016, what the new group plans for 2017 to raise the bar, and why Disclosure remains the most pressing issue facing humanity. Calka, who works as a Business Development Manager in the software space, has had a profound interest in Ufology for most of his life since an older family member and Air Force veteran regaled him with the tale of a compelling 1953 UFO sighting while on a USAF reconnaissance mission out of Texas.
“The Disclosure Lobby was very successful in raising consciousness about the ET issue despite failing to generate actual congressional hearings, and I’m confident the lack thereof was due in large part to the media. No cable or network news outlets, who are owned by six corporate entities, wanted to act. It was much more the print media that responded,” Calka notes, pointing to the slew of print articles that were indeed generated around Bassett’s efforts to highlight Podesta’s actions and Hillary Clinton’s statements.
“So, where we come in as the Disclosure Activists is we’re going to pick up where PRG left off. We can’t drop the ball on this, there must be more activism for the ET issue… so that’s the goal,” says Calka. “Our mission statement is to use ideation, creation and collaboration amongst all the group members to drive a unified voice in the media, both alternative and corporate. We plan on moving towards a more ‘journalist-based’ strategy to achieve a more open discourse. We’d also like to engage and bring together all the disparate UFO groups.”
As to why the Disclosure Lobby focused so heavily on Clinton and Podesta, Calka points out that it was a logical strategy based on the unprecedented circumstances surrounding her campaign.
“The reason why Clinton and Podesta were so prominently featured in the initiative is because that’s the bait that we had at that time. The goal, after the Rockefeller Initiative failed, was to have Mrs. Clinton become the Disclosure President, but she lost the election, she failed,” says Calka, lamenting the outcome yet with a hardened determination to push the effort further.
“I am confident what needs to happen here is the people need to see everything laid out in sequence, to know that there is a clear indication that key elements within Military Intelligence (i.e. the Pentagon) — that are directly responsible for managing the ET issue under the USAPs (Unacknowledged Secret Access Projects) — want this out one way or another,” Calka says. “There is a great deal that is wrapped around this very complicated phenomenon, but I think we can at least come to the conclusion that a formal acknowledgement of an ET presence engaging the human race is what needs to be announced — we are close.”
The profound and paradigm shifting impact of a genuine ET Disclosure by the American government has long been pondered and sought by Ufologists around the world. Whether a faux-populist demagogue like Donald Trump would participate in such a revolutionary action is a topic for another article, but the available evidence would seem to indicate that such decisions go above and around the White House rather than directly through.
“It will change everything, but it won’t all change overnight,” Calka suggests, alluding to everything from the free energy technology Earth’s visitors use to get here, to the global spiritual awakening, which has been slowly happening, that would ensue from official confirmation of the knowledge that we are not alone. “From what I gather, the Pentagon needs help. They need the media to dig into this question, without their fingerprints all over it, although they certainly have dropped a lot of subtle, yet concrete hints.”
The Disclosure Lobby attempted to catalyze such action throughout 2016 with “tweet storms” to an array of politicians, reporters and media outlets, particularly those participating in the presidential debates. Whether the corporate media gatekeepers cared or even took note remains a question mark, but the fact is that a handful of intrepid print reporters did write about the circumstances involving Clinton, Podesta, DeLonge and associates.
For those who study the media landscape and the hidden history behind it (such as the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird project to infiltrate the media, as first exposed by Carl Bernstein in a 1977 feature for Rolling Stone), the Truth Embargo would seem to center around the editors and publishers who are too closely intertwined with corporate ownership to rock the boat.
“We’re gonna have to let those editors know that we’re not going anywhere and they’re going to have to do it [acknowledge and pursue the story]. That’s the prime directive of the Disclosure Activists movement, using that creation and ideation to drive collaboration,” explains Calka. An example of this mission has already been put in play with a Change.org petition to the United Nations and international media to acknowledge the ET presence.
THE CLINTON-PODESTA-DELONGE TIMELINE
“Everyone needs to see the set of circumstances that have persisted over the last decade, but have become more prominent over the last 2 ½ years, and what the Pentagon has been trying to say to us. When you look at the key players, again Bassett always talks about a chess game, right, checkmate? That’s really exactly what it is. What you have here is on one side you have activists, on the other side you have the Pentagon saying, ‘We’re giving people hints that something is going on,’” Calka explains regarding the timeline that’s led to the advent of The Disclosure Activists in 2017.
“You start with the Rockefeller Initiative,” Calka begins, referencing the 1993–96 effort by billionaire philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller to engage President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton on the UFO topic and try to convince them to open up the files on what Uncle Sam knows about ETs. The effort has been well documented by both Steve Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group and fellow UFOlogist Grant Cameron, who specializes in documentation of presidential UFO knowledge. The effort failed however and Bill Clinton did not become “the Disclosure President.”
Calka then points to October 22, 2002 when John Podesta — Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and “X-Files” man — gave a groundbreaking speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in which he not only professed his interest in the UFO/ET topic but openly pleaded for the government to open up what files they have.
“I think it’s time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark;
on the question of government investigations of UFOs. It’s time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there. We ought to do it because it’s right; we ought to do it because the American people quite frankly can handle the truth; and we ought to do it because it’s the law,” Podesta boldly proclaimed.
“What we have here for the very first time is a very high profile guy who’s at the center of all power in Washington D.C., who comes out and says it’s the law and we ought to do it,” Calka notes of what was indeed a remarkable speech coming from a governmental insider like Podesta, who reaffirmed his sentiment in another National Press Club Speech a year later on October 23, 2003.
Also notable is how the 2002 press conference was held in conjunction with sponsorship by the SCI FI Channel, which was about to air an epic 10-part, 20-hour miniseries on the UFO/ET phenomenon and cover-up titled Taken. For those who believe that a certain faction has been using Hollywood for a “soft disclosure” process over the decades, Taken was prime material. The mini-series traced the history of the UFO cover-up from the 1940s to the modern day, featuring plot points based around a number of historical events.
It was also executive produced by Steven Spielberg, legendary in UFOlogy circles for directing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, long rumored to have been based around files seeded by President Jimmy Carter. This was said to be Carter’s way of keeping a campaign promise to help discover the truth of what the government knows about UFOs and ETs. Carter is the only president that has ever acknowledged a UFO sighting, which occurred when he was governor of Georgia in 1969.
Calka’s timeline takes a quantum leap in spring 2013 when Bassett staged the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in D.C. Bassett and other top UFOlogists such as Cold War historian Richard Dolan, investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe, researcher Stanton Friedman and former British “X-Files” man Nick Pope testified along with military witnesses before a panel of former congresspersons for a session that attempted to demonstrate what an actual congressional hearing on the UFO phenomenon would look like. Calka says Bassett was producing DVDs of the event a year later to send out to all members of Congress when Bill Clinton suddenly scheduled himself to appear on the Jimmy Kimmel show, where he was asked about UFOs.
“Clinton knows there’s a big Rockefeller Initiative connection to that [the Citizen Hearing] and that in fact, he may be questioned on it and he wants to get ahead of the game. Here’s what’s interesting — Bill Clinton didn’t know that there was a latency in the production… and that the DVDs did not go out. In lieu of such events, he schedules himself to be on Kimmel and he talks about being briefed on UFOs,” says Calka.
“If we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised, I just hope it’s not like Independence Day, the movie, that it’s a conflict. Maybe the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours. If they’re out there, think of how all the differences among people on Earth would seem small if we felt threatened by a space invader,” Clinton told Kimmel.
Then time goes by and Podesta sends the tweet heard around the galaxy on February 3, 2015 in which he declared, “1. Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere cc: @NYTimesDowd”. For Calka and the UFOlogy community, this was a bombshell that upped the cosmic ante to a new level.
“And he uses the hashtag #disclosure, which is the same hashtag that the Disclosure Lobby came up with, and that is key, and people need to realize that,” Calka remarks. “Because he’s following the movement of the Disclosure Lobby, he’s fully aware of what we’re doing. He hashtags ‘#thetruthisstilloutthere’ and he cc’s Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who is a hardened and accomplished journalist who wrote an article in ’97 about Roswell, ‘We’re Not Alone.’”
Dowd’s editorial was indeed notable for expressing sincere and deep skepticism of the Air Force’s “Roswell: Case Closed” press conference the previous day, which attempted to dismiss the 1947 accounts of a crashed saucer and alien bodies as being due to crash test dummies from balloon test drops in the 1950s. Her inclusion on Podesta’s tweet signaled that Podesta was tracking journalists who were serious about following the story line.
“Now that tweet makes a firestorm across the world, everybody’s talking about it, they can’t believe he even said that… and then President Obama goes on Jimmy Kimmel, one month and ten days after PRG started meeting with House and Senate staffers on the Hill,” Calka notes. “President Obama is asked almost the exact same questions that Bill Clinton was asked about a year before.
And Obama injects humor in a way where he starts to talk about how they’re instructed to say these things, the aliens won’t allow them to talk about it, they exercise strict control over us. Very unprecedented things that a president has talked about. Now he might have put some humor in there, but there’s some truth behind that humor, not necessarily that the aliens hold control over us, but he’s in public talking about this stuff, phenomenal…”
Calka then moves to the fall where “Podesta strikes again on September 29, 2015” following Hillary Clinton’s interview on the Lena Dunham Show, star of HBO series Girls. Calka suggests Clinton was trying to appeal to millennial crowd when she was interviewed. Podesta tweeted Dunham to “ask her about aliens next time” and this time he cc’d Hillary Clinton.
Then, a week before her first debate against Democratic Party primary challenger Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton goes on the The Late show with Stephen Colbert and talks about the UFO/ET topic again with Colbert asking him how he would respond to an alien attack.
“Now he’s talking about the implications of an alien presence and how we should start to cooperate with an alien presence, almost kind of eerily similar to Reagan’s UN speech about how he thinks the world would unite as a species if we were facing a threat from outside this world,” Calka notes. He then points to Hillary Clinton’s visit to Conway, New Hampshire at the end of the year, where local reporter Daymond Steer questioned her on the alien topic.
“This was sort of a testing the waters campaign for them on the ET issue, they wanted to see what would happen if they started talking about this,” says Calka, noting Steer had previously asked her about the topic in 2008. “This time, she did it on the record. She didn’t have to do that… but she goes on the record. She says something that no other presidential candidate has said before in the history of humankind. And that was, ‘I think we may have been (visited already.) We don’t know for sure.’ That was phenomenal, I mean unprecedented! And she also talks about how she’d be interested in setting up a task force to go into Area 51, I mean unbelievable stuff.”
The Truth is out there and all over in 2016
The Disclosure plotline moved into 2016 with a bang when The X-Files reboot launched with a mind-blowing episode that featured Special Agent Fox Mulder and an Alex Jones-ish media character detailing the history of the UFO cover-up dating back to Roswell. The episode also featured a compelling explanation of a nefarious New World Order plot for a fascist takeover of America (including the 9/11 attacks being an inside job false flag) that rings with even greater resonance a year later, from the perspective of a Trump presidency.
“That was a nod to the truth embargo, that was absolutely incredible what they did…fantastic stuff… It went a little off kilter later in the season but absolutely incredible,” Calka says of the intel offered in the context of the popular television show, while also noting how the CIA timed a release of their own X-Files with the show. “In between all of this going on, the CIA drops a tweet about here are some documents that Mulder and Scully would love to look at and hashtags the word flying saucers. So here’s the CIA in January, already talking about flying saucers again and how people should investigate if there’s a flying saucer sighting or landing. Fantastic!”
February then sees President Obama appear on the Ellen DeGeneres show, where he’s questioned by a six- year-old girl named Macey, who asks him about the “Book of Secrets” in National Treasure and whether aliens really exist. “He actually responds and says we haven’t actually made direct contact with aliens, yet. Now that was the wrong answer, but aside from that… what the hell does that mean? Have you made indirect contact? Have you picked up a signal? So that was very interesting,” Calka points out. “He could have just said there’s no evidence we have made any type of contact, so the fact that he uses ‘direct’ is quite interesting.
Calka then points to March, when Podesta appeared on a local news show in Las Vegas and confirmed the statement by Hillary Clinton that she’s serious about looking into the matter of UFOs.
“I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered. More attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people — who are in public life, who are serious about this — being ridiculed,” Podesta said.
This is followed by a March 24 appearance by Hillary Clinton on the Jimmy Kimmel show where he asks her again about the topic and Calka says she “topsy turveyed” the subject by suggesting a new term. ““You know, there’s a new name,” Clinton said in the appearance. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon… U.A.P. That’s the latest nomenclature,” Clinton said, though Calka notes that the term UAP is actually Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, so she got it wrong.
Podesta and Clinton made several other appearances in which they continued to acknowledge intent to engage the topic, but what really upped the ante were the Wikileaks releases of Podesta’s leaked emails.
“Wikileaks drops some phenomenal bombshells in Podesta’s emails… There’s about 10 emails, that if people and the media started looking at it, they would see that these are some pretty revealing set of facts,” Calka remarks. “What we have here is unprecedented… We have confirmation that John Podesta was engaged at some level with Tom Delonge of Blink 182, and on top of all that, we know through those emails that Delonge was telling the truth when he said that he had a team of 10 advisers via the Pentagon, that were advising him on a way to get this out to the public,” Calka notes regarding Delonge’s “Sekret Machines” project.
Three of those advisers were revealed in the emails: General Neil McCasland, former Commander of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (long rumored to be the place where the Roswell salvage was sent for further study and development); Michael Carey, special assistant to the Commander of US Space Command (who also wrote the foreward to Delonge’s book “Sekret Machines”); and Rob Weiss, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Advanced Development Programs at Lockheed Martin Skunkworks, the military-industrial complex’s leading defense contractor and also long rumored to be involved with reverse engineering of salvaged ET craft. Calka notes that Skunkworks is the top-secret R&D (research and development) arm of Lockheed Martin, the organization that built the SR-71 Blackbird for the CIA.
“The other email that is very telling is the one where McCasland writes a memo to Delonge on Disclosure, how this project should actually be done, and what federal agencies should be involved (i.e.NASA, DOD, DNI & NOAA). This is truly remarkable” Calka says in all sincerity. For long time followers of the Ufology movement, seeing such high level names communicating with each other and a top political player like Podesta is indeed a warp jump ahead in showing the public that such discussions are indeed occurring. Whether Delonge is getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth from his sources is another matter for debate, but the evidence of such high level players being involved in the project remains a compelling development to say the least.
Calka then relates how two days after November’s election, one of Bassett’s trusted contacts that “works at the Pentagon in military intelligence, directly responsible for managing the ET issue at the USAP level (and the ET issue is buried under that umbrella)” contacts him with a message that if he could “create a scenario where the Secretary of Defense is approached about the ET issue, we are ready and willing to support the SecDef with the proper resources needed to make an announcement.”
The SecDef is apparently not read into the ET program and skeptics would be within reason to scoff at the notion of an Ashton Carter or James Mattis taking the lead on ET Disclosure. However, Bassett and Calka suggest that this is how the Disclosure faction within the Pentagon has indicated they would proceed. Bassett has explained that his sources indicate the Pentagon cannot disclose on their own as doing so would amount to high treason. “An acting head of state, POTUS, needs to make the announcement, so, in that light, a deal must be cut between the Pentagon & White House for the President to make such announcement,” says Calka.
“If the media were to go to the Pentagon and say to Mattis, ‘What the hell is going on with this ET issue’?, the Secretary of Defense isn’t aware, so he’s going to turn around and ask his people what’s going on, then these people would step in,” suggests Calka. “It appears that there’s a predisposition for both the military industrial complex and military intelligence to get this out, in one fashion or the other.”
Calka notes that Bassett’s source allegedly indicated a preference for such Disclosure under Obama, but didn’t say they wouldn’t do it under Trump. Calka then points to how the CIA dropped another bombshell batch of 13 million files on the public just days before Trump was sworn in, previously only available at four computer terminals at the National Archives. These included some 2,000 UFO documents as well as some on remote viewing and psychic spies, such as alluded to in the film The Men Who Stare at Goats. The signs keep coming Calka says, even pointing to a passage in Trump’s inauguration speech that could be interpreted as foreshadowing some imminent breakthroughs:
“We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow,” Trump said in the passage that caught Calka’s attention.
Could these words potentially hint at some kind of Disclosure, or are they just more doubletalk from a man who many Americans see as just another hypocritical corporate raider and front man for the New World Order powerplay? “I believe there’s a predisposition, a change of mind if you will at the Pentagon, to say we have held this secret for far too long, but we don’t know how to get this information out on our own without our fingerprints all over this,” Calka says. “The people that are responsible for the ET issue want this out. The more they’re going lie about it, the worse it’s going to get. And we’re at a point now where it’s 70+ years later and I think they’ve had enough guilt — they’re dropping hints left and right.”
Calka believes the media has had some serious blinders on preventing it from seizing upon the story of the millennium, while other observers would suggest the media is too corruptly controlled due to corporate ownership’s conflicts of interest with the fossil fuel monopolies and military powers that be. This nebulous intersection of causality is where the rubber meets the road for the Disclosure movement.
“I don’t think anybody needs a PhD in rocket science to see that there is a clear cut indication that there is a faction in Intelligence communities desiring to tell the truth. I think a lot of people have stereotyped the government for being extremely corrupt. I understand that some elements do fall in line with this notion, but there are a good group of men and women in our government and military that want to see this through, and that is who is prevailing now,” insists Calka. “My goal is to create a voice in media with a group of people in the Disclosure Activists to tell these institutions to get off their butts and do the job they once knew how to do.”
To that end, Calka says he’s been in touch with three Pulitzer prize winning journalists from the New York Times, each of whom has expressed some interest in the Disclosure story but have ultimately been rebuffed by upper management.
“There is definite interest at the highest levels of the New York Times from a journalist’s perspective, as well as other media institutions. They have been embargoed themselves and set back by the editorial board, who unfortunately is who has to approve these articles. Our goal is to go after the editors, journalists, reporters, etc., and let them know it’s time,” says an impassioned Calka. “People need to do real investigative journalism instead wasting valuable time ‘reporting’ on nonsense. The dumbing down of America has been happening for a long time and we’re going to rise back up and have our voices heard… we’re going to lay out the facts one way or the other.”
Calka concludes by emphasizing the imperative necessity for the public to get involved by citing the efforts of filmmaker James Fox, who produced a pair of feature-length UFOlogy documentaries with 2002’s Out of the Blue and the follow-up I Know What I Saw in 2009. Out of the Blue made its television premier on the SCI FI Channel in June of 2003 and seemed to follow up on the network’s efforts to raise awareness about the UFO phenomenon through the Taken mini-series. Fox then sought to raise awareness by distributing DVDs of the film to every member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I handed out copies of Out of the Blue to every member of the House. It took me a week. I sent a personalized letter to every member’s chief of staff, and I’ve had some conversations with them, and some of them didn’t know any more than the man on the street but others did,” Fox has reported. “They said ‘Look, we can’t touch this subject matter unless the general public — our constituents — put enough pressure on us.”
Calka cites that response as a key motivator behind his efforts to ramp up public pressure on the media, and in turn the Pentagon, with the Disclosure Activists. “The point to this is that Disclosure must be a forced issue by the public — we need to want it and act upon it, otherwise the media and Pentagon have no motivation to do such a thing,” implores Calka.
Mobilizing such pressure has long been the goal of Steve Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group. Bassett even went so far as to create a “Paradigm Clock of Disclosure” to gauge how close the movement is getting. This clock is analogous to the “Doomsday Clock” that the Union of Concerned Scientists updates annually to gauge the danger threatening humanity due to the specter of nuclear holocaust and now global climate change as well. That clock was advanced from 11:55 to 11:57 in 2015 and to 11:57:30 in 2017.
“It is my firm belief… that it’s a race between which clock will strike first, the Paradigm Clock of Disclosure or the Doomsday Clock of nuclear war,” Bassett concluded in his talk at the 2015 Contact in the Desert conference in Joshua Tree, California.
Framing the stakes in such a dramatic way was no hyperbole, but rather a sincere assessment of the perilous times in which we live. One need only look to the Obama administration’s agreement to advance a nuclear arsenal modernization process at the price tag of $1 trillion to realize that the nuclear arms race is far from winding down. The need to advance the Paradigm Clock has therefore only increased and has now been joined by the Disclosure Activists.
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EDITORIAL NOTE — SUMMER 2020: It pains me in hindsight to report that Disclosure Activists co-founder Russell Calka has jumped the shark badly by falling prey to the devious Qanon propaganda psy-op. I don’t know what happened to this guy who seemed to have a great head on his shoulders in 2017, but he’s since become just another Qanon cult member. I stand by everything that he and I discussed in this interview in 2017, but he is no longer a credible source moving forward. #FuckQanon
To learn more about the Disclosure Activists, visit: www.disclosureactivists.org
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