Please note the following column appeared in Sunday’s edition of the Roswell Daily Record and is republished with permission.

Hiding Behind Sources and Methods

By Kevin Wright

When Operation Desert Storm launched on January 16, 1991, so did the advent of watching war from our living rooms in real-time, simultaneously detached from the reality of its horrors. Famously, CNN news anchor Bernard Shaw and correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett were on the ground in Baghdad, broad casting from telephone lines they had set up before the bombing began. Soon after, TV screens were filled with video of Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery tracers in the night sky and explosions on the ground from U.S. bombs hitting their targets.

The eye candy of war was sweetened by Pentagon press briefings, making celebrities of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, then-commander of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and others. Those early press briefings gave the world its first look at laser-guided “smart bombs.” In one instance, the Pentagon showed video footage from the cameras mounted on radar-evading F-117 stealth fighters.

The government wasn’t concerned about revealing some of the capabilities of stealth aircraft and never-before-seen munitions to the public. At the time, Bob Niedt wrote in The Post-Standard, the entire affair was “America’s first TV war with marketing savvy as cool and slick as anything dreamed up in Hollywood.”

In the decades since Desert Storm, the Pentagon saw fit to publish videos of Tomahawk Land Attack Missile launches from naval battleships, precision bomb strikes, and drones taking out terrorists in caves with Hellfire missiles. All are impressive displays of U.S. military prowess and might. But that’s precisely the point. When it is good for public relations, the government rushes to the podium to provide the public with breathtaking photos and videos.

In recent years, our government has been quick to show videos from jets, drones, and even satellites. In April 2017, U.S. Central Command showed off its use of the “mother of all bombs,” also known as MOAB, against ISIS in Afghanistan. Last March, two days after Russian Su-27 fighter jets dumped fuel on an MQ-9 Reaper drone, causing it to crash into the Black Sea, the Pentagon’s European Command rushed a 42-second full-color video of the incident to the press. A few months ago, the Pentagon declassified videos of Chinese jets performing “‘coercive and risky’ maneuvers, sometimes within a mere 20 feet of U.S. jets in the Indo-Pacific region.”

All is well and good for the government to be transparent with the American people a bout our military’s capabilities and threats from foreign adversaries. But in not one instance, from Desert Storm to now, did the government say it was concerned with giving away information about military capabilities when providing video that served its purposes.

But, hold on, when there’s something the government doesn’t want us to see, for whatever reason, it classifies information and hides behind a recurring excuse for secrecy: sources and methods.

In December 2021, CIA Director Bill Burns sent President Joe Biden a letter requesting that some files related to “the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy remain redacted.” Burns justified withholding information from the public, citing “intelligence sources and methods of current relevance” despite the passage of nearly 60 years.

The justification for withholding information by citing sources and methods is as common as noses on faces, even when doing so flies in the face of reasonability.

The public’s right to know about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) falls victim to the government’s typical deflections and obfuscation, hiding behind the well-worn sources and methods excuse, too.

In May 2022, the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee held an historic hearing on UAP with witness testimony from then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (DUSD(I&S)) Ronald S. Moultrie and then-Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray. According to the hearing transcript, Moultrie and Bray continually cited “sources and methods” to evade questions about the phenomena.

In April 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then-Director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), gave testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Like Moultrie and Bray before him, Dr. Kirkpatrick cited sources and methods to hide what the government knows about UAP.

With only a handful of exceptions, the government has not provided data, photos, or videos of UAP in its possession, dating back to at least the 1940s. For example, some records from Project Blue Book remain classified despite the passage of 54 years this past December when the U.S. Air Force closed its public investigation in 1969.

A month from now, a year will have passed since the intelligence-gathering surveillance balloon sent from China and other unidentified objects were shot down by the military in U.S. and Canadian airspace. Except for one image of the Chinese spy balloon from the cockpit of a jet, no other photos or videos of the other objects have been made public. Why?

In the public interest of a transparent government and the furtherance of clarity, there should be no reason the Pentagon can’t provide video of the objects in question, or at least still images from the video. The same is true of other incidents and military encounters with UAP dating back decades. We know the jets have cameras; we saw them in action on board stealth fighters 30 years ago when it suited the Pentagon’s purposes.

So, if you hear a talking head on TV or a government official tell you a video of a UAP is sensitive and classified due to concerns over sources and methods, tell them they’re as filled with hot air as a Chinese spy balloon.

About the author: Kevin Wright has 20+ years of experience in Washington, DC, in public relations, communications, and issue advocacy. He founded Solve Advocacy, an issue advocacy and communications consulting firm dedicated to UAP and edge science issues. He advises the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies’ (SCU) Board of Directors on public affairs and public relations and is a consultant to Daniel Sheehan’s New Paradigm Institute..

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