I was watching a documentary on UFO’s  where there was a discussion of when the US government was going to tell the truth about UFO’s – which, at the bare minimum, would be to admission that there have been credible UFO sightings. One commentator speculated that it would be difficult for the government to admit the truth because they would also have to admit to lying for the past 70 or so years. The irony made me laugh.  What a quandary. 

I can’t tell the truth now because then you will know I lied to you in the past. How can a battered institution with low public confidence come clean when, by doing so, it confirms all of the public’s worst suspicions and fears that they already have about the institution. It really is an impossible situation and reveals the problem with lying in the first place.

In the late 1940’s when there were few UFO sightings, a world recovering from the most horrific war of all time and very little information on what exactly a UFO meant, there may have been some justification for the government lying.  But now, there are many independent accounts of UFO’s. There are reputable scientists who think there is enough evidence that this information should be put into the public domain. Unfortunately, the US government has a tiny problem with giving people access to the information they have gathered. They would have to first admit they were lying and they don’t want to undermine the public’s confidence in their information. This lack of trust could cause problems in a genuine crisis.  Like, say, for example, if the government was encouraging people to take an effective vaccine during a global pandemic.

The  government is so desperate to look honest, they end up preferring to look incompetent instead. Almost as if incompetent is a more preferable look to dishonest. Both the Viet Nam war and Afghan War were a good examples of this thinking.  The US government realized long before the collapse of these ally governments that these were hopeless situations.  Instead of coming clean with their findings, they doubled down on the lie.  Pouring good soldiers and a lot of money into causes that they already believed to be hopeless.

But they were in a bind. If the government did nothing, the public would get suspicious. Why aren’t we fighting back? Why are we abandoning our ally? To keep the whole mess from seeing the light of day, the government, instead, sent troops, equipment and money to a doomed enterprise. All to keep the truth from the American public.  They would rather lose American soldiers, leave billions of dollars of equipment in the hands of enemy combatants and put billions more into the hands of locals who want the money but don’t necessarily believe in the wars to beat the enemy. And, for these efforts, they get to look incompetent.

Instead of cutting our loses, telling people we gave it our best efforts, we gave our allies a chance to show they could put a viable government together and they failed, we relentlessly do the same thing over and over again – just to avoid telling the truth after lying. The problem is, particularly in these inevitable situations, the truth eventually does come out.  The government only delayed the day of reckoning.

When that day comes, instead of saying yeah we knew this was a stretch but we felt like we had to give it a chance, we say we weren’t expecting that, we can’t explain what happened, complete surprise.  So the public sees incompetence and, unfortunately for the government, it has the same effect as lying. What is also troubling, particularly in the case of UFO investigations, is that a lot of money goes into programs whose only purpose is to quash independent people from investigating UFO occurrences. Yes, you read that correctly. The government is spending billions ruining the reputations of whistle blowers and witnesses to UFO’s instead of enlisting these interested parties in finding out more about the phenomena. Why? What purpose can this serve?  According to a Gallup poll taken in May of 2021,  about one third of the American people believe that UFO’s are a possibility. Are these people running amok in the streets shouting about little green men? There doesn’t seem to be a panic to worry about so let them investigate. I don’t know what to do about this. Apparently, the best and brightest in government don’t either because they continue to double down on keeping the lies hidden and the truth seekers under heel. But when people stop believing the lie, you might as well stop lying and tell the truth. The mixed reception that the COVID vaccine received should give us all pause. COVID is, at least so far, a minor world crisis.  Government was tested and we can see some problems that need to be addressed if we are to succeed in a bigger crisis (say a UFO invasion of earth). Some of the responsibility for these problems lay outside of government, but this is a fact of life – there were assholes thousands of years ago and there are assholes now.  Assholes always have to be factored into any crisis. The truth isn’t always popular or pleasant and it is sometimes quite ugly. It is also the best place to start when faced with difficult problems. But until the government addresses the well-founded belief our government lies and directs us to take actions against our own best interests, we won’t have the tools a democratic nation needs to resolve these problems.