The current obsession with UFOs will be forever linked to the watershed event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, through the last week of June and into early July of 1947.^[1]

Believers claim parts of a non-terrestrial craft crashed on a remote ranch owned by W.W. “Mac” Brazel (also spelled “Mack”) near Corona, NM.

He showed a few pieces to the Roswell sheriff, George Wilcox, who suggested he talk to the military at Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509th Composite Group. At the time, the world’s only unit tasked with dropping atomic bombs.^[2]

Brazel was accompanied back to his ranch by three members of the 509th: Major Jesse Marcel and Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents Lt. Colonel Sheridan Cavitt and Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett.^[3]

The day after they arrived, Brazel helped load some of the debris into a Jeep and a second Army vehicle, and the three 509th members headed back to the base.

On the way back to the airfield, Major Marcel decided that the debris was strange enough that he wanted to show some of the pieces to his son, ten-year-old Jesse Marcel Jr.

Years later, Jesse Jr. described one of the pieces as ‘a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics on it.’^[4] The beams were described as being as light as balsa wood yet would not break or burn.

Some of the metallic pieces were as light and thin as cigarette package foil, yet when crumpled, would return to their original shape as if they had a memory.^[5]

The original collected debris — there was more recovered later — was loaded onto a military plane and flown to the 8th Army Army Air Corps headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.^[6] There Marcel was ordered to pose with pieces of the wreckage for photographs.

According to Marcel’s later testimony, he stood in a room with pieces of the debris around him, along with General Roger Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force.

Marcel was led out of the room, then brought back in later for official photographs. The second time, there was different debris scattered on the floor: parts of an ordinary weather balloon that Marcel was quite familiar with, but not at all like the original material he’d first brought in.^[7]

Marcel followed orders and had his picture taken holding up the weather balloon debris, although the skeptical look on his face was very telling.^[8]

Marcel would say much later in life, ‘General Ramey was the one who told the newsmen what it was, and to forget about it, (that) it was nothing more than a weather observation balloon. Of course, we both knew different.’^[9]

One very significant clue occurred during this photo session. More on that later.

Supposedly, the original debris was placed on a special flight to Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, home of the Army Air Material Command. Once there, specialists would study the debris to determine its origin and capabilities.

According to Lt. Col. Arthur Exon (who would in the 1960s become base commander), the characteristics of the material ‘had them pretty puzzled. . . [The] overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.’^[10]

Back in Roswell, news quickly spread around town.

Following a press release from the base itself that they had recovered a crashed ‘flying disc,’ on July 8th, the Roswell Daily Record carried a banner story declaring, ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.’^[11]

The local radio station also carried the news, but the next day, was ordered to halt reporting on the incident or face losing its broadcasting license.^[12] The local morning newspaper also was ordered by the military to rescind its previous statement and printed a retraction, claiming the debris was only parts of a weather balloon.^[13]

Their headline carried the significantly worded headline, ‘Army Debunks Roswell Flying Disk.’

The weather balloon explanation flies in the face of everything we know about the capabilities of the officers and enlisted men of the 509th Bomb Group. They were briefed on the most advanced technology in the world, and kept up to date on whatever flight characteristics they might encounter against their adversaries, especially the then-Soviet Union.

To suggest the highest officers of the 509th didn't recognize balsa wood, rubber, and tin foil is a slap in the face not just of their capabilities, but of the training of the entire U.S. military.

Major Marcel himself was a highly decorated officer with intelligence training. He had assisted in the administration of the 1946 nuclear test Operation Crossroads, and was awarded with two letters of commendation for his handling of that event, including one from Brig. General Roger Ramey, later his C.O. during the Roswell incident.^[14]

Marcel was even promoted after the Roswell incident in December 1947,^[15] so he must have done something right.

Even the FBI believed something, possibly a ‘flying disc,’ fell near Roswell, as they reported in a memo sent on July 8th from the Dallas FBI office to their office in Cincinnati.^[16]

However, in the brief one-page teletype message, the disc was described as ‘hexagonal’ in shape, and was suspended from a balloon twenty feet in diameter.

Interestingly, immediately following the weather balloon description, there’s the additional note that ‘telephonic conversation between their (presumably the Dallas FBI) office and Wright Field had not (two or three words redacted) borne out this belief.’

Following the delivery of the ‘weather balloon’ debris to Dayton, a massive cleanup was ordered by Roswell base commander Colonel William Blanchard,^[17] involving hundreds of soldiers from Roswell AAF as well as other support units.

They combed the Brazel ranch and nearby areas for days, and set up roadblocks to keep everyone, including the local police and other emergency responders, out of the area. Would all this effort be undertaken for just a weather balloon?

Locals also had run-ins with the military. Roswell sheriff George Wilcox and his family were ordered by military police not to talk about what Brazel showed him or, according to his wife’s and granddaughter’s testimony, their bodies would be buried out in the desert where no one would ever find them.^[18]

Brazel himself was held incommunicado by Roswell AAF military personnel for almost a week, until upon his release, he appeared in town driving a brand-new pickup truck.^[19]

When asked about the debris, he said, ‘I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon.’^[20] But after all the harassment the military put him through, he also said, ‘[If] I find anything else besides a bomb, they’re going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.’

Again, the type of harassment and intimidation, even possible bribery, visited upon the witnesses seems out of all proportion to the finding of a simple weather balloon.

In our next newsletter, we’ll explore how the Air Force’s explanation about the Roswell incident keeps changing over the years, and we’ll examine the two most interesting pieces of evidence that suggest there really was something extraordinary that crashed at Roswell.

^[1] https://www.seeroswell.com/the-1947-roswell-incident/

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509th_Composite_Group

^[3] https://www.dvidshub.net/news/475677/intelligence-agents-investigate-ufos-roswell-7-jul-1947

^[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/roswell-jesse-marcel-dies

^[5] https://www.sunrisepage.com/roswell/pdf/Summary_of_Witnesses_Claims_for_a_Shape_Memory_ Roswell_Foil.pdf

^[6] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/history-roswell-incident.htm

^[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEro5RedFf8&t=271s

^[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdv3z97lE2E&t=30

^[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdv3z97lE2E&t=124s

^[10] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/history-roswell-incident.htm

^[11] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/3f/ab/f7/3fabf74f486ce3cd20426875e2b1636a.jpg

^[12] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[13] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roswell-ufo-incident-1947-headline-dispatch/

^[14] https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Jesse_Marcel#509th_and_role_in_Operation_Crossroads

^[15] https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Jesse_Marcel#509th_and_role_in_Operation_Crossroads

^[16] https://vault.fbi.gov/Roswell%20UFO

^[17] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[18] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[19] https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/ufo-crash-site-tours-to-begin-soon-on-new-mexico-ranch/

^[20] https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/roswell-ufo-strange-metal-mystery/

In our previous installment on the 2017 UAP videos, we discussed the 2004 Nimitz UAP craft^[1] and the 2017 Nevada-to-Oregon craft.^[2]

Both are described as fast-moving white Tic Tac-shaped objects, and how they might have been advanced U.S. aircraft being tested near U.S. military assets.

In the case of the Nimitz events, this may have been done in order to gauge the ability of recently released U.S. radar technology. That’s the state-of-the-art AN/SPY-1 passive electronically scanned array (PESA) 3D radar system.^[3]

It had just been installed on the Princeton guided missile cruiser, which was assigned as part of the Nimitz battle group.

We also covered that some U.S. government spokespersons, including Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the UAP-investigating All-domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO),^[4] were willing to attribute these sightings to secret CIA craft or even to advanced military test vehicles.^[5]

This position was directly contradicted by a report from a different government UAP investigating body, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program (AAWSAT). It left the public to wonder which government-supported agency was telling the truth.

That leaves us with two questions: have these craft been spotted elsewhere in the U.S.? And if so, does it suggest they may have a common location that they’re operating out of that can further confirm these are U.S. military craft?

As with the previous two questions, the answers here are also yes.

Multiple times since early 2018 — the same time frame during which NORAD released the voice recordings and radar transcripts of the Nevada-to-Oregon object — pilots flying private and commercial aircraft in Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona have reported a very fast white tubular object, spotted flying through commercial airspace in the U.S. southwest.^[6]

The pilots of at least three aircraft — a Phoenix Air Learjet 35, an Airbus A321, and American Airlines Flight 1095 — all reported an incident on February 24th, 2018.

In each instance, the aircrews reported some unknown craft passing over their planes at an altitude they estimated as being 40,000 feet.

In all three instances, no other craft but the reporting aircrews was spotted on radar. Seemingly an identical situation to the Nevada-to-Oregon craft, which was visible to aircrew, but which dropped off radar after turning north upon entering California airspace.

One pilot described the craft as ‘really beaming light or had a big reflection, and several thousand feet above us going in the opposite direction.’^[7]

Just as in the Nevada-to-Oregon Tic Tac incident, this craft did not have a transponder and was not communicating with air traffic control. Such intruding objects should be enough of a concern that the U.S. Air Force and NORAD would have taken a strong interest in determining what the object was. But no such reports have been released.

Such a lack of a response is curious. Since the area where this 2018 incident occurred is the center of a lot of military activity. White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base are just to the east, while to the south lies Davis Monthan AFB, as well as Tuscon International Airport.

Then there’s Luke AFB to the north, and a collection of military test ranges around Yuma MCAS to the west.^[8]

This leads us to ask another question: how likely is it that the U.S. military can fly its top–secret aircraft over the U.S. without being positively identified?

We know that many of the UFO reports from the 1960s and 1970s in the southwest were actually top-secret test flights of various advanced aircraft, from the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, to the F-117 Nighthawk and B-1 Stealth Bomber a few decades later.^[9]

In fact, it was the CIA that launched disinformation campaigns to discredit those sightings, blaming them on UFOs.^[10]

An example of how top-secret craft can be flown in U.S. airspace yet hardly ever acknowledged or even photographed is the aircraft known as ‘RAT 55,’ a converted 737 with long tubular radar domes at both the front and rear of the plane’s fuselage.^[11]

This aircraft has been flying since the late 1970s, and yet has been photographed only a handful of times. The RAT part of its name stands for Radar Aircraft Testbed, and describes the plane’s ability to test other aircrafts’ radar signature in real-world conditions.

It’s not only hard to spot, flying mostly (it’s believed) over the Mojave Desert, but it’s not even clear where the aircraft is based, though speculation includes the Tonopah Test Range and Groom Lake.

So, if we assume the Tic Tac craft is indeed an advanced U.S. craft of some sort, what rationale would the U.S. military have for allowing such a confusing hodgepodge of sightings, and for flying unproven craft both in commercial airspace as well as near combat-enabled military assets?

That the three original 2017-released UAP videos have been continually referred to as ‘unidentified’ is something of a joke to many neutral researchers.

As we discussed in the first three newsletters covering these sightings, the U.S. military had to have known that those videos showed easily explained terrestrial aircraft before the videos were declassified.

That raises the question: why would the U.S. military allow pilots to continue to use these videos to support their claims of non-U.S. aircraft performing ‘impossible’ maneuvers? 

There are two main possibilities:

A) That the Pentagon wants the world, primarily our two current adversaries China and Russia, to believe the U.S. has back engineered non-terrestrial aircraft and that we are confident enough of their reliability that we’re currently test flying them against our own forces and in our own airspace; or

B) That the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies want to sow discord among the UFO community by confusing civilian expectations about the possibility of non-terrestrial craft, a position that’s been the case since the CIA infiltrated the UFO observation group NICAP as far back as 1967.^[12]

It’s also possible that both of these conditions overlap. That the Pentagon wants to muddy the water in UFO investigations, making it more difficult to determine what is a UFO and what’s a current top-secret project, just as the CIA did with the SR-71 and the F-117.

And if the response from Russian president Vladimir Putin on March 1st, 2018 is any indication, at least one of our adversaries considers it highly likely that these are indeed advanced U.S. military aircraft.

To sum this all up, we the public may never know exactly what the white Tic Tac objects are, unless and until the Pentagon discloses their secrets. But a well-educated guess would suggest these are advanced U.S. military craft, possibly unmanned, that are so far ahead of our current technology that our own pilots are astounded at their capabilities.

As Ben Rich, the long-time director of Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works research program that developed top secret craft like the SR-71, was quoted as saying:

‘We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.’^[13]

Maybe someday, someone will play God, and show us what’s behind all the mystery.

^[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/09/18/those-ufo-videos-are-real- navy-says-please-stop-saying-ufo/

^[2] https://he.flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/unset/user/65767/FAA_Tapes_From_That_Oregon_ UFO_Incident_That_Sent_F_15s_Scrambling

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office

^[5] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[6] https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-sighting-new-mexico-arizona-albuquerque-air-traffic-control-american- 861975

^[7] https://www.twz.com/19095/listen-in-as-a-learjet-and-an-airbus-encounter-a-mystery-craft-high-over- arizona

^[8] https://www.twz.com/19095/listen-in-as-a-learjet-and-an-airbus-encounter-a-mystery-craft-high-over-arizona

^[9] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0611ufo

^[10] https://amuedge.com/beyond-ufos-what-are-navy-pilots-seeing-in-the-skies

^[11] https://www.twz.com/40915/these-are-best-images-ever-of-the-worlds-most-secretive-737

^[12] https://www.theufochronicles.com/2018/06/the-cias-infiltration-of-nicap-national.html

^[13] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7372138-we-already-have-the-means-to-travel-among-the-stars

Religion interfering with governmental administration is nothing new.

Whether we call the government head a Pharaoh, a Divine King, or a President of the United States. Many times, in history, religious leadership was the government.

The United States made the effort since its formation, to combat the encroachment of theocracy on democracy. Initially, with the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. More recently, with the 1954 Johnson Amendment, named after its proponent, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, since 1954, that prohibits all 501(c) (3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates.

That, of course, would include religious organizations. See: 26 USC 501c (3).

In a Revenue Ruling 2007-41, the IRS stated ‘for their organizations to remain tax exempt under section 501(c)(3), leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official functions of the organization.’

But as has become abundantly evident, it appears that within the last ten years, this prohibition is honored more in the breach.

The pulpit has been found in the middle of U.S. politics, from Christian Nationals openly supporting Donald Trump, to Trump holding an unintentionally upside down bible for a photo op… and then hawking his own rather low rent bible as a fund raising mechanism.

Trump, has proven to be all in when it comes to watering down the Johnson Amendment’s protections against pulpit politics. In 2017, he signed an executive order that limited enforcement of the Johnson Amendment or any other adverse action against any individual or religious organization for speaking about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.[1]

Perhaps emboldened by the obvious support of Trump, (who prior to his entry into politics was about as concerned with religion as he was with the restrictions of Fair Housing Laws), churches have turned to the courts to challenge the remnants of the Johnson Amendment. And to eventually get a pass on political involvement and propaganda promotion.

No Taxation Even With Representation

A variety of church groups, in 2024, including the National Religious Broadcasters, have brought suit to declare the Johnson Amendment unconstitutional. Ironically, they are using the First Amendment right to free speech, to enable them to substantially violate the First Amendment safeguards against the intermingling of church and state.

In reality, it is not freedom of speech they seek, (which they have never been denied), it is freedom of speech while enjoying the freedom from taxation afforded to 501[c] (3) organizations — like churches. They want their wafer and eat it too, so to speak.

The suit was brought in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division, naming the IRS and its director as defendants. The complaint alleges, inter alia, that with respect to the Internal Revenue Code, (IRC), ‘The IRC places them automatically within the ambit of 501(c)(3) and thereby silences their speech, while providing no realistic alternative for operating in any other fashion.’

In the suit, the plaintiffs self-identify as ‘religious nonprofit organizations in the business of communicating their views to the public’ that ‘desire to communicate their views about candidates’ positions that are relevant to the issues Plaintiffs care about.’

It is further alleged in the suit that the IRS ‘operates in a manner that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations.’

Not only are they seeking freedom from the Johnson Amendment, they are seeking their legal fees in so doing. In other words, they want the government to fund their legal fight for legal ‘rights’ to which they are not entitled.[2]

The word ‘chutzpah’ comes to mind to this reporter. Although it would not be one in the vocabulary of these plaintiffs.

Is there any ‘good faith’ amongst those who claim to be both good and faithful when they seek tax benefits while expressing political opinions proscribed by the Johnson Amendment? Tax benefits that the average citizen does not receive while expressing his political opinions.

Bogus Religions

Head honcho, Troy Miller of the National Religious Broadcasters had this to say, ‘We believe that all nonprofits should have the constitutional right to freely express their point of view on candidates, elections, and issues on the ballot. Our challenge to the Johnson Amendment is about securing the future of free expression for all Americans, particularly those standing in the pulpit.’[3]

That is of course bogus. They aren’t seeking ‘the right to freely express their point of view,’ they are seeking the right to do it free from taxes, which is an advantage not enjoyed by those who are not under the protection of 501[c](3) status.

And the rank and file Americans are clear on their viewpoint regarding the endorsement of candidates by religious organizations. In a 2017 research poll undertaken by Pew Research, it was found ‘Just 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 26% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say churches should endorse specific political candidates.’[4]

For a specific reason to worry about this lack of separation of church and state when it comes to pulpit pounders and politicians, it has been revealed that ‘Pete Hegseth, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Defense, has close ties to an Idaho-based Christian nationalist church that aims to turn America into a theocracy.’

That church is Christ Church whose pastor, Doug Wilson, ‘has a rigid patriarchal belief system and don’t believe in the separation of church and state.’  On top of that bit of theocratic attack on our freedom, the church also is in favor of  ‘taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community.”

Wilson said, ‘I was grateful for Trump’s win, and believe that it is much more likely that Christians with views similar to mine will receive positions in the new administration.’[5]

Think about this.

Many of the hot spots of war in the world deal with Islamic populations. Besides blowing them up, we likely will need to deal with them diplomatically.

When the individual who may be tasked as Secretary of Defense has ties to such a conservative Christian organization that doesn’t believe in the First Amendment separation of church and state, while it believes in being free from taxation, diplomacy may take a back seat to Crusade.

Why You Should Care

These are powerful groups whose finances are abundant, yet not taxed. They align themselves with those who will be making crucial domestic and foreign policy decisions on behalf of the people of the United States.

For that reason, it’s likely that those who do not have such connections and benefits will be powerless to have their viewpoints adequately represented.

When such groups are ultra-conservative Christians, it is likely that the protections of the First Amendment, and other important safeguards of individual freedom, will be tossed out with the water in the baptismal font.

Non-Christians, non-males, and non-heterosexual citizens will experience what amounts to a political pogrom, deeming them to be, at best second class citizens, and at worst persona non grata.

[1] Trump Signs “Johnson Amendment” Executive Order Limiting Treasury’s Actions Against Religious Organizations Engaged in Political Campaign Activities Proskauer, 5/19/17 https://nonprofitlaw.proskauer.com/2017/05/09/update-president-trump-signs-johnson-amendment-executive-order-limiting-treasurys-actions-against-religious-organizations-engaged-in-political-campaign-activities/

[2] Religious broadcasters, churches file lawsuit against Johnson Amendment Christian Post 8/30/24 https://www.christianpost.com/news/unconstitutional-churches-file-lawsuit-against-johnson-amendment.html

[3] THE TENNESSEAN lawsuit against the IRS aims to allow churches a greater role in politics 9/16/24 Angela Latham https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2024/09/16/texas-religious-groups-file-lawsuit-against-irs-to-blur-line-between-church-and-politics/75089290007/

[4] Most Americans oppose churches choosing sides in elections 2/3/2017 Gregory Smith https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/03/most-americans-oppose-churches-choosing-sides-in-elections/

[5] Trump’s Defense secretary nominee has close ties to Idaho Christian nationalists Idaho Capital Sun, Heath Druzin 9/21/2024 https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/11/21/trumps-defense-secretary-nominee-has-close-ties-to-idaho-christian-nationalists/

Religion is great for fooling the faithful, conning people into conversion, and providing them with a bunch of made up props to further the cause, or in other words, relics.

In the religious sense, relics are the body parts or belongings of saviors and/or saints, which must be venerated, and can be visited. They provide a profitable tourist trade to the location which houses them.

The world of relics can reveal more amazing miracles and ‘facts’ than can be found even in the Holy Bible and its functional equivalents. For instance, the observation by John Calvin the OG of the Protestant Reformation, when speaking of religious relics:[1]

‘Every Apostle has more than four bodies, and every Saint two or three.’

The Catholic response has been that a relic serves for a spiritual connection, and if that connection ‘is made through an object which maybe forensically won’t stand up to the test, that’s of secondary importance to the spiritual and emotive power that the object can contain, and does contain.’[2]

That is really fake it ‘til you make it, or perhaps better said, make it so you can fake it.

The Catholics are kind enough to explain to us the three types of relics:

‘First-class relics are items that are directly associated with the events of Christ’s life or the physical remains of a saint; second-class relics are items that were owned or used by a saint; and third-class relics are objects that have come in contact with first- or second-class relics.’[3]

Since many modern scholars cast doubt on the actual existence of Christ, and observe that many ‘saints’ are conversions of pagan gods/goddesses, viewing from that perspective would make all relics fake.

Speaking of saints and phony relics, let’s pay a flying visit to Saint Rosalia and her relics.

Known as the ‘little saint’ she is the patroness of Palermo, Sicily, which is the land of those good people who brought us the Mafia. She lived in a cave in the 12^th century, on Mount Pellegrino. She died in the cave.

In the 17th century, when a plague struck the region, the inhabitants began seeing visions of Rosalia, who rose to the occasion by leading them to the cave she supposedly had inhabited, and wherein, the locals found her bones.

The bones became relics. That ruse worked for about two centuries, even though logic and experience would tell a person that many bones could be found in a cave over the centuries, because many types of creatures might take shelter there.

A goat for instance. Because in 1825, it was determined by a British geologist, William Buckland, that either Saint Rosalia was a goat, (which would probably not strain the credulity of the average devout Catholic), or the bones supposed to be those of the saint, were actually the bones of a goat.[4]

Then we have the OG of relics, the Shroud of Turin. This cloth, ‘discovered’ in the 14^th century, was purported to be a piece of textile that held the image of the crucified Christ. It was put forth as the actual bloodstained shroud which covered his crucified body.

Christianity is certainly a collection of convenient coincidences, whether contrived or not. But in the case of the Shroud of Turin, let’s go with contrived. It was determined in 1978, that the supposed blood stains were painted on, and weren’t blood.[5]

Now, was the story of this relic made out of whole cloth? (Pun definitely intended.)

While a carbon dating in the 1980s found the cloth to be of contemporary origin with its appearance, newer testing methods do date the cloth back to what could have been the time of who could have been Christ. Using something called Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering.[6]

Let’s give the church a hand, and for the sake of argument, agree that the cloth itself could have been of first century C.E. origin. But what of the image?

In 2024 it was demonstrated that the image could not have come from a three-dimensional human underneath it, but was likely from a relief sculpture.[7]

Now, let’s get really familiar with Jesus, and discuss the relic that purports to be that part of him which was removed that symbolized the covenant with God and his people — his foreskin.

This relic, known as The Holy Prepuce, purports to be just that, the foreskin of Christ. Of course, since there were a variety of churches that claimed to possess this relic, one might be justified in casting a jaded eye at the claim.

However, The Holy Prepuce makes a great gift. In 799 King Charlemagne gave it to Pope Leo III. It remained there until 1527, when the church reliquary was, appropriately enough, ‘sacked.’

Thirty years later, it winds up in another church, located outside of Rome where it remained, until it was discovered ‘missing,’ in 1983. Theories of who the thief was, range from the Vatican, to Satanists.

But perhaps that wasn’t the real foreskin, because during the Middle Ages, it was estimated that over thirty churches possessed the ‘real thing’.

Even the church was somewhat upset about this much ado about very little, and in 1900 threatened to excommunicate any believer that wrote about it. (Apparently it was a subject that unlike the object from which the subject was removed, was to be kept under wraps).

Why You Should Care

Most religions require that as one of the faithful, you, as did Alice in Wonderland, believe six impossible things before breakfast. Virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, talking snakes, burning bushes, temporary residence in whales, demolition by trumpets and such are the stuff that faith is made from.

But when it comes to the manufacture of relics to sucker the supplicants, it gets really down and really dirty.

Phony faith-oriented objects designed to put a church or a village on the Pilgrim’s map, to take in from believers what supposedly belonged to Caesar (according to the Bible), but was always actively sought by the Church — coin.

Such sharp practices are an insult to those that believe, and another piece of evidence for the arguments of those who don’t.

[1] BLIND FAITH RELIGIOUS FORGERIES, JUSTINE DAMIANO 2019 https://www.magellantv.com/articles/blind-faith-religious-forgeries-from-the-middle-ages-to-the-age-of-technology

[2] CATHOLIC HERALD 6/2011 https://catholicherald.co.uk/debate-does-it-matter-if-relics-are-fake/

[3] BLIND FAITH, op.cit.

[4] BLIND FAITH op. cit.

[5] THE SHROUD PAINTING EXPLAINED, McCRONE, BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY  https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/sidebar/the-shroud-painting-explained/

[6] NEW X-RAY TESTS DATE TURIN SHROUD TO THE TIME OF JESUS Laura Gilb 11/1/2024 https://www.patternsofevidence.com/2024/11/01/new-x-ray-tests-date-turin-shroud-to-the-time-of-jesus/

[7] Shroud of Turin was not used to wrap Jesus’ body after crucifixion, bombshell study asserts NY POST 10/30/24 https://nypost.com/2024/10/30/science/shroud-of-turin-was-not-used-to-wrap-jesus-body-after-crucifixion-bombshell-study-asserts/

In our last newsletter, we asked three questions about the white Tic Tac objects reported in 2004 near the Nimitz carrier group off the coast of California.^[1] And a similar object spotted outrunning commercial airline traffic from Nevada to Oregon in October 2017:^[2]

1) Is there any evidence that this Tic Tac object may in fact be a top secret US craft?

2) Does anyone else in the Pentagon say officially that these craft may be US technology?

3) Have there been any other sightings of such Tic Tac-shaped craft in US airspace?

All three questions can be answered with a surprising, ‘Yes.’

First, there is some admittedly debatable evidence that the Tic Tac object in 2017 might be a top-secret US experimental craft. For one, this object was first spotted on radar somewhere over southern or southwestern Nevada.

That’s where the US military maintains many of its most secretive testing facilities.

Most people know about Area 51, part of the Nevada Test and Training Range,^[3] also called Groom Lake. It’s located 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. Not far away is the Tonopah Test Range,^[4] where advanced aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk were flown.

Tonopah is a mere 70 miles northwest of Groom Lake. There’s also Nellis Air Force base, less than ten miles northeast of Las Vegas, and home to the US Air Force Warfare Center, the largest and most challenging air combat training center in the world.^[5]

Such a concentration of advanced combat and top-secret aircraft testing locations suggests the Tic Tac craft may have been one such craft, though its proximity to such locations alone is not hard proof.

But if this craft were an intruder, it’s hard to explain why the US Air Force never tried to intercept it, nor alerted any other military assets like NORAD of its intrusion. Of course, it’s possible they did alert NORAD, and might even have attempted an intercept.

But in the wake of NORAD itself releasing details (after several FOIA requests) about trying to intercept the craft,^[6] it seems unlikely that any Air Force response in Nevada airspace would have been hidden from prying eyes.

There’s another singular detail in the October event that we referenced earlier: that the craft originally appeared on radar, but then disappeared from radar, though it was still visible to pilots and aircrew. There is an explanation for this, and it directly involves advanced stealth aircraft like the US-built F-22 and F-35.

One problem with stealth aircraft is their invisibility to commercial radar, which makes for a significant flight hazard when flying in commercial airspace. One way to make such planes visible is for the stealth craft to be equipped with Luneberg detectors.^[7]

These are also called Luneburg lenses, small angular metal pieces designed to reflect radar and make them visible to civilian traffic control. When F-22s and F-35s fly in commercial airspace, both in the US and in NATO countries, they carry these reflectors, usually bolted in place by their ground crews.^[8]

But it’s possible for Luneberg lenses to be discarded by a plane in flight, if they’re mounted by a magnetic attachment. All the pilot needs to do is to turn off the magnetic link, and the Luneberg lens would fall away from the craft. Some analysts suggest this could be done by a stealth aircraft if it wanted to approach enemy airspace originally as a commercial airplane, then discard the lens and continue on stealthily.^[9]

China currently has one advanced fighter, the Chengdu J-20 (see the image at the top of this newsletter), which has a retractable Luneberg lens.^[10] The original Chinese version of the lens was designed to make it more difficult for adversaries to determine its true radar cross-section, though it’s unclear if that’s the intended purpose of the retractable version.^[11]

There’s a third trail of evidence that the Tic Tac craft might be an experimental US vehicle, though this path is a little more indirect.

When the Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group detected the first Tic Tac object in November 2004, the group included the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, which was the first Navy ship that detected the objects. It was responsible for vectoring in the F/A-18s that reported their own close-in sightings.

The Princeton, which carries the advanced AEGIS radar detection system, had been outfitted with a newly upgraded AN/SPY-1 passive electronically scanned array (PESA) 3D radar system.^[12]

Some researchers have speculated that this would have been the perfect time to test the new system with whatever secret aircraft the Pentagon had available. This isn’t hard evidence by any means, but it is a possible clue.

Another theory about the Princeton tracking the UAP craft includes the possibility that the objects detected on radar were anomalous readings from the new AN/SPY-1 system that hadn’t been calibrated correctly.

In fact, the ship’s own meteorological officer originally attributed the readings to airborne ice particles.^[13] The Princeton’s crew took that possibility into account: after the initial sightings, they recalibrated the AN/SPY system, which resulted, their systems operators said, in even clearer signals than before.^[14]

There are also reports from crewmen aboard the Nimitz that the ship had its hard drive data recorders, full of data gathered by the F/A-18s involved in the sightings, confiscated by unidentified men who landed in an all-black Blackhawk helicopter.^[15]

These ‘bricks,’ as they’re called, also included information gathered by one of the Nimitz’s E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft that had also reportedly recorded the craft on its own equipment.^[16]

Another officer onboard the Princeton had a similar encounter with two unidentified individuals, to whom he was ordered to turn over all the data recordings from the AEGIS AN/SPY-1 system.

One reason for these confiscations might have been to analyze how much data the most advanced US radars had taken of these craft, if they were in fact advanced US aircraft. What’s interesting is that these men who retrieved the data never bothered to debrief the pilots or aircrew that spotted these craft up close, as if their eyewitness accounts didn’t matter.^[17]

There’s also the estimate made by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO), formed in 2022. He says the Tic Tac craft was perhaps a CIA balloon or some other top secret military craft that were being tested intentionally close to one of the Navy’s most capable combat groups.^[18]

This estimate was contradicted by a report from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program (AAWSAT), which began in 2002 and later became the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2017.

That report stated that the unidentified craft displayed speed and turning capabilities ‘far greater than anything known to exist, (and) could turn itself invisible both to radar and the human eye,’ which rendered even the best US aircraft’s capabilities ‘ineffective.’^[19]

The Tic Tac craft, if that is indeed what they were, seem to have a very baffling history. Yet they also appear to be of significant interest to the US government, who worked to retrieve all electronic data collected by the Nimitz battle group.

The final question yet to be answered is this: Have any other Tic Tac objects been sighted in US airspace?

As we’ll uncover in the next and final installment, the 2004 Nimitz and 2017 Nevada-to-Oregon Tic Tac craft are far from the only such craft seen in US skies.

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

^[2] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft- over-oregon

^[3] https://now.northropgrumman.com/area-51-aliens-or-just-a-simple-myth-understanding

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range

^[5] https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/nellis-afb

^[6] https://www.twz.com/tic-tac-uap-incident-included-in-72-newly-released-range-incursion-reports

^[7] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-stealth-aircraft-visible-on-radar-screens/

^[8] https://theaviationist.com/2022/03/02/f-35-without-reflectors-over-poland/

^[9] https://www.quora.com/Can-an-F35-drop-its-luneburg-lens-The-F35-can-keep-the-luneburg-lens-to-set- up-a-trap-and-then-drop-them-to-become-stealth-and-attack-the-enemy

^[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1gjxqt8/retractable_luneburg_lens_will_this_ become_the/

^[11] https://www.twz.com/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new- capability-insights

^[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1

^[13] https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3447233/cutting-the-chaff- overlooked-lessons-of-military-uap-sightings-for-joint-force/

^[14] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[15] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[16] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[17] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[18] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[19] https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20 UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf

Let’s sum up the events from 2017 that we’ve covered so far.

Three brief U.S. Navy F/A-18 infra-red videos were released, first in the summer of 2017 by To The Stars Academy.^[1] Then later semi-officially in December coinciding with major media coverage.^[2]

This media frenzy prodded the Pentagon to admit much later (in 2020) that yes, the videos did originate with U.S. military aircraft flown by military pilots, but without any confirmation or denial of the objects themselves.^[3]

Only one pilot out of the half-dozen or so involved with the initial 2004 USS Nimitz sighting has said he spotted a white Tic Tac-shaped object doing what he described as ‘impossible’ maneuvers.^[4]

However, neither his plane nor his wingman’s plane were equipped with weapons or infrared sensor arrays. The F/A-18 that supposedly captured video of the Tic Tac object was a different aircraft that arrived in supposedly the same location an unknown number of hours later.

However, that second aircraft’s video does not record a Tic Tac-shaped object, nor was the object near the water’s surface, and it did not exhibit any anomalous flight characteristics.^[5]

Despite claims that the object was also recorded by other Navy aircraft, as well as at least one surface vessel, none of those recordings have been released.^[6]

In October 2017, before the major media coverage exploded, a New York Times reporter was given a private briefing with what was described as unnamed intelligence officers,^[7] as well as with Lue Elizondo, who has claimed he headed a UFO/UAP investigative office for the Pentagon^[8]. However, the Pentagon denies his claims.^[9]

In the words of ‘The Intercept’ author and reporter Keith Kloor, ‘There is no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one.’

Elizondo has, however, been verified as having worked for the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence service, whose job is specifically to ‘detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit and/or neutralize adversarial, foreign intelligence services.’

Such an agency would not be above creating false stories nor spoofing technology and assets to mislead our adversaries, as has been done continuously since World War II.^[10]

Later in October 2017, there was a major incident in the skies over California and Oregon that received much less media coverage.^[11] In this event, a fast, unidentified, uncommunicative craft without a transponder signal was caught on radar going in excess of Mach-1 out of southwestern Nevada, flying west into northern California airspace.

At that point, it made a hard right-hand turn and began paralleling and outpacing commercial airliner traffic, flying north at 37,000 feet, just above the commercial traffic lanes at around 35,000 feet.

It had appeared on radar initially, but soon after it turned north, it disappeared from radar, though the commercial airliner crews continued to maintain visual contact.^[12] The craft was far enough away that the crews could not make out any specific details or control surfaces.

It should be noted that any large aircraft at two or three miles distance painted white would indeed appear as a white Tic Tac object, similar in appearance to what was reported in the original 2004 Tic Tac incident, though this craft made no ‘impossible’ movements.

In fact, multiple videos of Tic Tac-shaped craft flying near commercial airliner traffic have been made by both passengers and aircrew, when these objects have all been shown to have been known commercial airliners whose details cannot be made out by the cameras recording them.^[13]

In late December, the New York Times reporter broke the story about the three original US Navy IR videos, which created significant media attention.^[14]

In February 2018, following several Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests regarding the October 2017 incident, the U.S. Air Force released the radar tapes of the craft on its flight through three states.

In a highly unusual move, the Air Force also released the recorded conversations between the FAA controllers, the commercial pilots, and the NORAD officers who vectored in armed F-15 fighters with the intention of finding and possibly engaging the mystery craft.^[15]

The fighters never reported seeing the craft, which was lost to visual sighting by the commercial aircrews somewhere north of Portland, Oregon. The recordings paint a very unflattering picture of the FAA’s lack of preparedness in dealing with such an incident. Not to mention their inability to relay what action the commercial air traffic should take to avoid the armed F-15s entering their airspace.

There is one more ensuing event that happened after all this that adds an interesting bit of context to these previous events…

On March 1st, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced with great fanfare in a public speech that his country’s military had perfected several new ‘super weapons’.^[16] This included a nuclear-powered stealth cruise missile that could loiter indefinitely (theoretically) near the U.S. coastline, ready to divert and attack U.S. cities with barely a moment’s warning.

The good news is that this particular weapon, codenamed the RS-28 SARMAT — Russian for ‘Satan’ — is nowhere near being ready for active service: at its latest test launch in September 2024, it appears to have exploded in its silo, leaving a 200-foot-wide crater where the silo used to be.^[17]

Putin’s announcement was accompanied by a video presentation with an oddly specific target: not Washington or New York City, but the state of Florida, home to then-President Donald Trump.^[18] At the time of the presentation, pundits suggested this may have been an intentional warning to Trump to take Putin’s threats seriously.

The question is, why would Putin feel the need to threaten the U.S., since Trump had treated Russia so well during his first term? The reason behind this threat has everything to do with the image at the top of this newsletter: Putin was responding to the Pentagon, more specifically, the Tic Tac-shaped craft that the Pentagon had been so delicately supporting throughout 2017.

The theory goes that Putin was responding to the possibility that the U.S. had back-engineered UFO technology, and was beginning to test it near US assets like the Nimitz carrier group in 2004.

When that revelation was about to become public knowledge in 2017, the Pentagon appears to have tested the same or an advanced version of that same technology over U.S. soil, launching the craft from one of its test ranges in Nevada, home to both Area 51, officially called the Nevada Test and Training Range,^[19] as well as the Tonopah Test Range.^[20]

But is there any evidence that this Tic Tac object may in fact be a US craft?

Have there been any other sightings of such Tic Tac-shaped craft in US airspace?

And does anyone else in the Pentagon say officially that these may be US technology?

Amazingly enough, all three questions can be answered with a surprising, ‘Yes.’ More on this in our next newsletter.

Editor’s Note: Have you ever experienced anything that just didn’t seem right? Reply and tell us and we will use our sources to dig into it and uncover the truth behind the lies.

^[1] https://tothestars.media/blogs/press-and-news/to-the-stars-academy-of-arts-science-acknowledges-the- pentagons-official-release-of-uap-video-footage

^[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/index.html

^[4] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/01/16/this-former-navy-fighter-pilot-who-once-chased-ufo- says-should-take-them-seriously

^[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ

^[6] https://www.twz.com/Tic Tac-uap-incident-included-in-72-newly-released-range-incursion-reports

^[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html

^[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

^[9] https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/

^[10] https://www.army.mil/acic#org-history

^[11] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[12] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[13] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-serious-ufo-uap-security

^[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[15] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[16] https://www.twz.com/18906/heres-the-six-super-weapons-putin-unveiled-during-fiery-address

^[17] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/09/satellite-images-suggest-test-of-russian-super-weapon-failed- spectacularly/

^[18] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43248794

^[19] https://now.northropgrumman.com/area-51-aliens-or-just-a-simple-myth-understanding

^[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range

With the rise of the gig economy, and with electronic banking largely replacing personal visits to the brick and mortar institutions, we have seen the rise of computerized money transfers and third-party electronic payors.

Along with these developments has been the rise of fraudsters, seeking to enrich themselves by exploiting security flaws in the payment and receipt of electronic funds. 

But despite the requisites and responsibilities of the banking industry to prevent and remediate fraud, the reality is far different from the theory. Many banks have refused to act in accordance with the law when it comes to reimbursing depositors who have been defrauded.

A quick look at Federal Law shows an adequate description of the problem, at 15 USC §1693, entitled Congressional findings and declaration of purpose:

(a) Rights and liabilities undefined

The Congress finds that the use of electronic systems to transfer funds provides the potential for substantial benefits to consumers. However, due to the unique characteristics of such systems, the application of existing consumer protection legislation is unclear, leaving the rights and liabilities of consumers, financial institutions, and intermediaries in electronic fund transfers undefined.

In subsection (b) we see:

b) Purposes

It is the purpose of this subchapter to provide a basic framework establishing the rights, liabilities, and responsibilities of participants in electronic fund and remittance transfer systems. The primary objective of this subchapter, however, is the provision of individual consumer rights.

In 1693 (c) of the law, it details the notifications a bank must provide a consumer when an account is open. This includes the consumer's liability for unauthorized electronic fund transfers, and the telephone number and address of the person or office to be notified in the event the consumer believes than an unauthorized electronic fund transfer has been or may be effected.

Meanwhile section 1693 (f) requires among other things, that the financial institution shall investigate the alleged error, determine whether an error has occurred, and report or mail the results of such investigation and determination to the consumer within ten business days.

Subsection (e) of 1693 (f) deals with a situation when the bank does not carry out its obligations under the law with respect to the consumer, stating:

(e) Treble damages

If in any action under section 1693m 1 of this title, the court finds that-

(1) the financial institution did not provisionally recredit a consumer's account within the ten-day period specified in subsection (c), and the financial institution (A) did not make a good faith investigation of the alleged error, or (B) did not have a reasonable basis for believing that the consumer's account was not in error; or

(2) the financial institution knowingly and willfully concluded that the consumer's account was not in error when such conclusion could not reasonably have been drawn from the evidence available to the financial institution at the time of its investigation,

The above laws have been provided so that you might have some idea of what bank responsibilities are, and what happens when they are not being met.

They frequently have not been met, ergo, a rash of recent litigation.

It has been estimated that fraud has cost consumers $870 million dollars, due to improper bank procedures with respect to the bank-to-bank payment platform of Zelle.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has in December 2024, announced that it has commenced litigation against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Early Warning Services, and Zelle for their failure to property implement the safeguards mandated to protect bank customers with respect to Zelle.

The Director of the CFPB was quoted regarding the defendant banks as saying, ‘By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while leaving victims to fend for themselves.’

In his prepared remarks on the CFPB website, the Director, Rohit Chopra, stated, ‘The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo for their role in enabling systemic fraud and then playing dumb when consumers were exploited.’

He went on to say, ‘In case after case, banks routinely denied requests for help, turning a blind eye even when customers provided clear evidence that criminals had taken over their accounts and that the transactions were unauthorized -- including police reports documenting the crimes.’

With respect to the suit against it by CFPB, Zelle spokesman said, ‘The CFPB’s misguided attacks will embolden criminals, cost consumers more in fees, stifle small businesses and make it harder for thousands of community banks and credit unions to compete.’

It seems that every time a corporation is taken to task for its negligence and/or malfeasance, in its defense it raises the specter of increased consumer costs in order to have the corporation follow the rules it was supposed to follow in the first instance, which would not have necessitated litigation. This is a specious argument.

In the allegations of the complaint against the banking defendants, the CFPB raised the issue that, ‘Despite receiving hundreds of thousands of fraud complaints, the defendant banks have failed to use this information to prevent further fraud.’

The CFPB director adequately summed up the gist of the litigation, ‘This is about financial institutions fulfilling their basic obligations to protect customers' money and help fraud victims recover their losses,’ said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. ‘These banks broke the law by running a payment system that made fraud easy, and then refusing to help the victims.’

Why You Should Care

It’s probably safe to assume that the majority of the readers of this article have used some form of electronic payment services, either to send money or receive it.

As a consumer, you have to rely upon the banks to adequately protect your account, to follow the rules and regulations regarding that protection, and to engage in consumer-friendly practices to provide for the investigation and resolution of cases wherein the consumer has been defrauded.

They haven’t done it, and it isn’t unreasonable to assume, that but for the institution of litigation by the CFPB banks would continue to engage in their negligent and shoddy practices, in violation of the law, and in violation of the trust placed in them by the consumer.

Editor’s Note: Have you ever experienced anything that just didn’t seem right? Reply and tell us and we will use our sources to dig into it and uncover the truth behind the lies.

Resurrection is a major tenet of the New Testament…

The receipt of the Ten Commandments is a major religious and legal event in the Old Testament…

The First Amendment is one of the most important of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution…

These now meet in the crossroads of our society. The outcome of their interaction will affect how we, as Americans, will live in the future.

In 2024 in the United States, we have seen attempts to resurrect the public presence of the Ten Commandments in the schoolroom, creating a challenge to the First Amendment. It marks a dangerous turn in our country — a case of those in support of a would be Theocracy, and by that support, potentially encumbering our Democracy.

Biblical scholarship has cast significant doubt on the actual existence of Moses; he is, by most scholars, regarded as a mythical figure. Yet this myth, and the laws he supposedly received from his god on Mount Sinai is creating a very real clash of faith vs. freedom.

In June of 2024, the legislature of the state of Louisiana decreed that as of 2025, the Ten Commandments were to be displayed in every public classroom. It was the first state to do so.[1] An easy-to-read poster sized image of the commandments was to be displayed from kindergarten classes up to and including the rooms of state funded universities.

Republican Governor Jeff Landry, quoted in an Associated Press article by Sara Cline, stated, ‘If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses who got the commandments from God.’

Two percent of the religious people in Louisiana are not Christians.[2] They enjoy the same constitutional protections as do Christians — in theory, at least.

Not Ethical or Moral Behavior

This act, by the Republican dominated state legislature, of course, didn’t go unchallenged by those who believe more in the Bill of Rights than they might in Moses.

They believe in that First Amendment, which states, inter alia, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’

The legislature reasoned that since the costs of implementing the law was not to be financed by public funds, but by private donations, the requirement should pass constitutional muster.

It should be noted that a significant portion of the Ten Commandments is not the statement of ethical and/or moral behavior. It is religious in its mandate, and not a part of the Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Abrahamic faith canons.

It prohibits the worship of other gods, it prohibits the making of idols, it prohibits the taking of the ‘lord’s’ name in vain, it orders the keeping of a weekly Sabbath.

This type of legislation is symptomatic of the return to political power and influence of the religious right, many calling themselves, ‘Christian Nationals.’ It should be remembered that as of 2020, seventy percent of the population in the United States self-identify as Christian.[3]

Which by extrapolation, means thirty percent of the country do not.

Forty-four years, ago, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Stone v. Graham that such legislation was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and therefore, unconstitutional.

Yet now, the Christian right, emboldened by the results of the 2024 election and the growing power of Republicans in state legislatures, seeks once again, to eviscerate the protections of the First Amendment for the sake of their religion, their beliefs, their way of life.[4]

In November of 2024, a Federal District Court judge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ruled that the law regarding the posting of the Ten Commandments in the classrooms of the state was ‘unconstitutional on its face.’ Unlike the legislators, the Judge recognized that such a law was overtly religious and could not stand.

The Attorney General of Louisiana, disagreed, and vowed to seek an appeal in the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.[5] The status of such appeal is awaited as of this writing.

Not to be undone, the Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, declared he will seek legislation mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in every Texas classroom in 2025. That’s in spite of the injunction that was preliminarily granted by the Louisiana court against the same legislation.

He was quotes as saying, ‘Texas WOULD have been and SHOULD have been the first state in the nation to put the 10 Commandments back in our schools.’[6]

Unfortunately for Catholics, and Orthodox Christians, the Texas proposed law would use the translation of the Ten Commandments from the King James Bible — a Protestant scripture.

The Texas supporters of such legislation point out that ‘American Society is rooted in Christianity’[7] an observation that not only might not meet with the agreement of the thirty percent of this country that does not identify as Christian. It may clash with the actual viewpoint of the Founding Fathers.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Monroe identified as ‘deists,’ which is more of a philosophical belief in the utility of human reason, and one that held that after creation, God was absent from the world.

Not exactly the kind of Christianity these proponents of commandments in the classroom are espousing as being a foundation of our democracy.[8]

While there are supposedly no atheists in foxholes, there are definitely no atheists in politics where such an admission would be political suicide.

In order to pander to their electorate, it appears that legislatures are fully ready, willing and able to ignore the mandate of the First Amendment, and put that old time religion back in the schoolroom.

Why You Should Care

Regardless of your personal religious beliefs, when a government entity in our country seeks to create laws (which if passed, it will enforce), that infringe on the religious beliefs of a significant portion of the citizens of the United States, you should be deeply concerned.

Because one of the reasons the refugees of the world run towards us and not from us, is our Constitution and the rights of our people guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

We have examples of theocratic governments in our world — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen to name a few.

There, the rights of the individual, at least those who do not bask in the warm sun of petroleum plutocracy, are not protected. The rights of women in those countries are by and large non-existent, and deviation from the state mandated faith can be a death sentence.

As an American, you do not want to have to defend you rights in your living room. You are best protected by rigorously guarding freedom at the constitutional borders where there are powerful groups that would seek to undermine your faith and your freedom to worship as you will.

It is by your being a concerned citizen, an informed citizen; that you can help protect our constitutional democracy from becoming a theocracy, and keep yourself, your family, your community and your country free from the tyranny of those who propose laws that diminish our freedoms.

[1] ASSOCIATED PRESS BY SARA CLINE June 20, 2024.

[2] PEW RESEARCH CENTER https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/state/louisiana/

[3] PRRI Research https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/#:~:text=%2Fcensus%2D2023.-,The%20American%20Religious%20Landscape%20in%202020,identify%20as%20Christian%20of%20color.

[4] FREE SPEECH CENTER TENNESSE UNIVERSITY https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/stone-v-graham/

[5] Federal judge blocks Louisiana law that requires classrooms to display Ten Commandments ASSOCIATED PRESS BY  SARA CLINE AND KEVIN MCGILLUNovember 12, 2024

[6] Patrick vowed to require Ten Commandments in schools. Will lawmakers do it? CBS AUSTIN by Michael Adkison, December 26th 2024 at 6:58 PM

[7] HOUSTON PUBLIC MEIDA Andrew Schneider November 15, 2024 https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2024/11/14/505960/texas-lawmakers-set-to-take-up-fight-over-ten-commandments-in-public-schools/

[8] THE FOUNDING FATHERS RELIGIOUS WISDOM 1/8/2008 https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-founding-fathers-religious-wisdom/

While the five major UFO/UAP stories of 2017 through 2019 are widely known — nicknamed as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST from 2017; and SPLASHDOWN and the TRIANGLES videos from 2019 — there is a less well-known event from 2017 that got much less press coverage.

And yet it provides a more rational explanation of what’s behind these objects.

This event also explains why the Pentagon has been willing to throw nominal support behind the first five videos, despite them being easily recognized examples of standard artifacts from the sensing and recording equipment themselves.

Setting the Scene

In the summer of 2017, mainstream media was buzzing with coverage of the first three UAP videos,^[1] as we covered in our previous newsletters.

Many outlets erroneously reported that these were Pentagon-supported proof of UFOs flying in our skies.^[2] In reality, the only thing the Pentagon would later confirm is that the videos came from US military craft piloted by US military officers.^[3]

At no time did the Pentagon nor the Navy claim these were extraterrestrial craft, even though some of the pilots involved — most notably Navy Commander David Fravor, piloting an F/A-18 from the carrier USS Nimitz — claimed the objects performed maneuvers ‘impossible’ for currently known piloted aircraft.^[4]

Speculation ran high: was this the beginning of Disclosure on the part of the Pentagon, possibly followed by more revelations from the US government?^[5]

Were these objects the beginning of an alien-led contact effort, or worse, imminent alien attacks against US military assets?

As calls for action on the part of Congress began to be raised,^[6] a different and much more serious UAP event was about to occur. One that involved not just military aircraft but commercial airline traffic as well.

This time, almost no one talked about this much more serious event.

From Nevada to California and Oregon

On October 25th, 2017, at around 4:30 PM PST,^[7] the FAA air traffic radar in Oakland, California, picked up an object flying out of the southwestern Nevada. It was heading west towards northern California airspace.

Initially, the craft was visible on radar, but it then made a sharp turn to the north and disappeared off the radar (more about this unique feature later).

Significantly, radar returns indicated the craft was doing in excess of Mach-1 when it made its tight right-hand turn. Very few aircraft can do that, and nearly all of them are military.

The craft was reported to be flying at 862 mph (Mach-1.12), so it was clearly not a commercial aircraft. It was also reported to be flying at around 37,000 feet altitude, 2,000 feet higher than commercial airliners that usually stay close to 35,000 feet, unless landing or taking off.^[8]

The craft began to pace commercial airliners flying towards Oregon and Washington State, so the FAA controllers asked several pilots in the area if they could spot the craft. Several pilots reported seeing something.^[9]

Most of the reports stated there was an indeterminate white object some miles to their east, outpacing the commercial traffic. None of the aircrews could determine what type of craft it was, although one pilot suggested the craft was ‘big.’

Though how he could determine that without knowing the craft’s distance puts his estimate in doubt. One aircrew was able to keep eyes on the craft from first spotting it over northern California until they had to land at their destination in Portland, Oregon.^[10]

Because the craft didn’t respond to repeated attempts to contact it by the FAA controllers, and because it broadcast no transponder signal, the FAA eventually contacted NORAD and requested military assistance.

Some months after the event, the U.S. Air Force released voice recordings between them, the airline crews, and the FAA controllers. Although some small sections of the recordings were blank (most likely due to redacted military callsigns), the story they paint is not a comforting one.

The FAA seemingly had no idea what to tell the airliners when the U.S. Air Force decided to send a pair of armed F-15s into that commercial airspace to try and locate the unidentified craft.

Somewhere between northern Oregon and the Seattle, Washington area, the nearest commercial airliners lost sight of the object. It wasn’t picked up again visually or on radar, and the Air Force claims they never located it.

There was no initial news coverage of this event, until pilots who overheard the FAA commercial traffic reported it on a Reddit thread.^[11] This led to a two-part report on the website The War Zone at TWZ.com.^[12]

Their efforts through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) led to an eventual release of not just the radar data but the actual audio as well, confirming all of the details previously discussed.^[13]

While this October event preceded the massive coverage that occurred following the release of the three first UAP videos in mid-December, 2017, they actually came just a few weeks after a confidential October 4th media briefing between certain unnamed intelligence officials and New York Times reporter Leslie Kean, at a Pentagon City hotel.^[14]

At that meeting, Kean also met Luis Elzondo, a controversial figure in the UFO community after his claim that he ran a Pentagon-based UFO/UAP study group going back several years, but for which he could provide little proof.^[15]

Interestingly, Elizondo could provide proof that he worked for the U.S. Army Counterintelligence service,^[16] which is tasked to ‘detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit and/or neutralize adversarial, foreign intelligence services, international terrorist organizations, and insider threats to the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense (DoD).’

It’s interesting to note that one of the only two other counterintelligence services in the DoD is the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). This has long been thought to be behind the notorious Men in Black episodes that have plagued UFO sightings and witnesses for decades.^[17]

Armed Fighters to Intercept

Strange white craft outpacing commercial airliners, first on radar then off radar, within visual sight of several commercial aircraft, an event so serious that armed fighters are sent aloft to intercept and possibly shoot this object down.

This strange event is sandwiched between unofficially released UAP videos slyly supported by the Pentagon, while behind the scenes, an ex-Pentagon counterintelligence agent sets up the biggest UFO discussion in decades across multiple mainstream media outlets. What does this all mean?

We’ll reveal the most plausible answer in our next newsletter.

^[1] https://tothestars.media/blogs/press-and-news/to-the-stars-academy-of-arts-science-acknowledges-the-pentagons-official-release-of-uap-video-footage

^[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/politics/pentagon-ufo-project/index.html

^[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-defense-department/index.html

^[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-weigh-in-on-pentagon-ufo-report/

^[6] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111/

^[7] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[8] https://aviex.goflexair.com/flight-school-training-faq/commercial-plane-altitudes

^[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/78ktlp/strange_nordo_aircraft_in_the_flight_levels_above/

^[10] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[11] https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/78ktlp/strange_nordo_aircraft_in_the_flight_levels_ above/

^[12] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[13] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html

^[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Elizondo

^[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Counterintelligence

^[17] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-original-men-in-black-3849054/

Gordon Gekko, the fictional corporate raider, told us in the movie Wall Street, that ‘Greed is good.’ (Corporations were listening and became dedicated practitioners of the creed.)

The classical Greek philosopher Epicurus told us to seek aponia, or freedom from pain.

Big pharma not only greedily agreed with him, but promoted and profited from the sale of drugs that promised just that — freedom from pain. While at the same time, at least one of those pain relievers was killing children who ignorantly abused it.

Among those pain killing drugs that were sold to the public, (by doctor’s prescription of course), was Oxycontin the trade name for pills containing the narcotic oxycodone hydrochloride.

The pills were designed to be swallowed whole. But when crushed and turned to a powder and ingested, it brought on a euphoric state. That of course, led to abuse of the prescription drug by those in search of a chemical good time.

It was popular among high school children. It has been estimated that four percent of them have abused the drug at least once. Many of them without benefit of a prescription. Some of those, who ‘knew not what they did,’ took too much of the drug and wound up being cured of their dependency on it — permanently.[1]

Promoting Increased Sales of Deadly Drug

Purdue Pharma LP, the manufacturer and legal distributor of the drug, in order to boost sales, initiated an active marketing campaign. It sought to ‘encourage’ primary care physicians, among others to prescribe oxycontin as an initial pain killer.

From 2004–2019 McKinsey & Co. Inc. a management consulting firm, advised Purdue on how to better market oxycontin, among other services McKinsey performed.

McKinsey counseled Purdue as to which health care providers the drug company’s sales force should concentrate on to increase sales of oxycontin. They did so with full knowledge that this drug was not only subject to widespread abuse, but that abuse was growing among users without benefit of a prescription. (Some of the patients with the prescription were selling the pills to those without one.)

Additionally, sales pressure was put on providers to prescribe oxycontin for conditions in which it was not only unnecessary, but medically ineffective.

The consulting company was also aware that Purdue had been criminally sanctioned in 2007 for misbranding the drug, and engaging in deceptive marketing practices — minimizing the actual danger of the drug.

Purdue later manufactured a version of oxycontin that was more difficult to grind into a powder, and supposedly, more difficult to abuse. Eventually, pharmacies and physicians in light of the abuse of the drug, and growing regulations on its dispensation, reduced their promotion of the drug, and lost sales as a result.

McKinsey, to the rescue, implemented marketing methods to counteract lost sales. This included the potential for legal mail order distribution, ‘ride alongs’ with drug sales representatives calling on high volume prescribers of the drug, and orchestrating a sales focus on those providers who proved more amenable to the prescribing of oxycontin on a more frequent basis.[2]

Profiting from Addiction

It was obvious that profits were top of mind in the joint efforts of McKinsey and Purdue to aggressively market the drug that was number one on the abuse list. The drug that was killing American teenagers who abused it.

They sought to aggressively promote oxycontin to high volume prescribing providers, and they knew exactly what the consequences could be. They weren’t concerned with patients… they were concerned with profits, and the high fees that McKinsey was earning for consulting.

As you may imagine, eventually, the government got involved in an attempt to resolve the opioid crisis. It initiated civil and criminal investigations against both McKinsey and Purdue.

The investigations and actions pursuant to them settled last month.

From the DOJ site:

‘This global resolution shows the department’s commitment to holding accountable those who played key roles in fueling the opioid crisis,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “Consulting companies cannot advise their clients to break the law, and then skirt responsibility when their clients do so.’

The site also referenced that:

‘“McKinsey’s management consulting work with Purdue Pharmaceuticals significantly contributed to a devastating public health crisis affecting American families and communities nationwide,” said Inspector General Christi A. Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG).’

As part of the resolution of the actions, ‘McKinsey will pay $650 Million, cease work relating to controlled substances and implement significant new compliance measures,’ according to the headline on the DOJ press release. [3]

Why You Should Care

One of the powers of the Federal government is the regulation of interstate commerce. That is included in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution. It empowers the government to ‘provide for the general welfare’ of the United States.

The FDA is the federal regulatory agency empowered to, among other things, regulate prescription drugs.

When these agencies do their jobs, when they investigate and prosecute those corporations that knowingly engaged in unethical behavior that can cause harm and death to our citizenry, that’s something to care about. Something to acknowledge — that yes, sometimes the government is here to help us. (As rare an event as that might be.)

No doubt that some of the readers of this article have either lost a family member to the abuse of narcotic substances, or know someone that has. The statistics are grim, and from 2011–2021 it has been estimated that 320,000 children across the United States have lost a parent due to a drug overdose.[4]

In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 81,000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States. [5]

While many of us believe that there is too much government in our lives, that we would be better off with a great deal less of it, when it comes to reeling in the greed of large corporations, that would do almost anything to bring in profits if free of any restrictions, we are fortunate to have legal and regulatory oversight agencies protecting our safety.

As evidence of that statement, the 2023 number of opioid deaths reported above, and perhaps in a sign of progress, it was a decrease from previous years.

[1] NATIONAL DRUG INTELLIGENCE CENTER OXYCONTIN FACTS https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs6/6025/index.htm

[2] AGREED STATEMENT OF FACTS US V. MCKINSEY https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1380371/dl

[3] DOJ OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS PRESS RELEASE 12/13/2024 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys

[4] NPR MAY 8,2024 REPORT https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/08/1249918051/drug-overdose-orphans-opioids-cdc-nida

[5] CDC PRESS RELEASE 5/15/24 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240515.htm#:~:text=The%20new%20data%20show%20overdose,psychostimulants%20(like%20methamphetamine)%20increased.

Earth has always been a stew pot of pandering, pandemonium, and every so often, pandemic.

Like an iceberg, the greatest danger of this latest pandemic lies not in what is on the surface, but that ninety percent of the truth lies beneath the waves.

That’s the part that can get really deadly — and did.

Towards the end of 2019, the world was ‘blessed’ with the appearance of COVID-19. A disease of disguised origin, a malady that killed millions while making for a select few, millions of dollars.

It birthed masks, moronic quarantine mandates from government, the rushed development of questionable vaccines, and economic devastation for many small businesses.

During the several years that it spread worldwide, it killed (as of 2023), about seven million people.

Not quite the numbers of the 1918 flu epidemic, but still rather ‘impressive’ — especially to those who lost family members who died in isolation in overcrowded hospitals, and others who suffered long term illness.

But it wasn’t only the disease that damaged human immune systems it was the rushed to market vaccines, shoveled out to the public for profits for the privileged.

Conflicts of Interest

In its report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated:

‘The fast pace of research and development and the urgent demand for a vaccine may create opportunities for corruption that are likely to impede public health efforts. Conflicts of interest related to the funding of the research and development of a COVID-19 vaccine is such a corruption risk.’

It further noted, ‘With the urgent global demand for vaccines, there is a risk of substandard and falsified vaccines entering a market.’

The report acknowledged the reality that risks were:

‘[Further] compounded if quality assurance measures are absent or bypassed during the emergency response, resulting in adverse health outcomes for the population and an erosion of public trust in the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.’

In 2023, the website for the Attorney General of the state of Texas revealed that:

‘Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Pfizer Inc. for unlawfully misrepresenting the effectiveness of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, and attempting to censor public discussion of the product.

‘Pfizer engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.’

The antics of big pharmaceutical companies are nothing new, and lawsuits against them are nothing new, including huge settlements paid out, but in this case Pfizer apparently outdid itself because, according to the Texas AG:

‘Pfizer fostered a misleading impression that vaccine protection was durable and withheld from the public information that undermined its claims about the duration of protection. And, despite the fact that its clinical trial failed to measure whether the vaccine protects against transmission, Pfizer embarked on a campaign to intimidate the public into getting the vaccine as a necessary measure to protect their loved ones.’

The author of this article had the misfortune of taking the Pfizer vaccine and booster. He was rewarded with ten months of hives over fifty percent of his body, and daily hour long episodes of shortness of breath.

The ‘Stink’ of Misrepresentation

When I caught COVID-19, in spite of the ‘protection’ of the vaccine, it amounted to 36 hours of a reduced olfactory ability, and then it was over, and the sense of smell was fully restored —sufficient to perceive the stink of the Pfizer misrepresentations of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

I got off easy, because reports stated, ‘evidence of serious neurological harms, including Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myasthenic disorder and stroke’ were effects of the vaccines for some.

These effects were possibly under reported. A German study determined ‘data suggested that there is very significant under-reporting of suspected cases of COVID-19 vaccination side-effects.’  The report concluded, ‘It can therefore be assumed that there are probably about three million suspected cases of vaccine side-effects.’

These were not the rants and ravings of unqualified conspiracy theorists. In fact, ‘Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pushed a false “safe and effective” COVID vaccine narrative by underreporting adverse events.’

While people were getting sick or dying from the vaccines they were told were safe, the National Institute for Health was having its coffers filled during the pandemic. In a FOIA suit to uncover the details:

‘[The] lawsuit turned up records of payments totaling $710 million from private pharmaceutical companies going to the NIH, including royalties to its scientists during the pandemic as treatments were being developed and licensed.’

Why You Should Care

It’s likely that you or someone you know contracted COVID-19. You might have known someone who died from it, or from the vaccine that was supposed to prevent it.

It’s likely that you or someone you know, were vaccinated, and suffered serious side effects. Your government and its public health agencies may have, according to recent revelations, fudged the facts, and put our citizenry at risk, without properly informing them of those risks.

All the while the public suffered, a select few agencies and individuals were raking in the profits from the pharmaceutical companies who quite likely more interested in profits than public health.

In the preamble to the United States Constitution, that document that all of the politicians promise to defend, it is stated:

‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’

In the case of COVID, the more perfect union was between big pharma and big government at the expense of the ‘general welfare’ of the people of this country.

That should make you very angry.

Mark Twain said it best, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

When it comes to the realities of inflation and employment, that quote must be on every politician’s desk.

No surprise here. Since it seems to be a government function to continually lie to its citizens. All in order to short change them on the benefits it pays out… while taxing you more and to make our ‘public servants’ look like they are actually serving the public who voted for them.

Those same voters that gave them the jobs and benefits many everyday people don’t have.

They’re serving us alright, and they’re cooking the books as well as our futures.

The Government Lies About Your Cost of Living

As those who have been looking for jobs for months know, as those who go to the grocery store know, and as those who are trying to pay for medical care know, we’re all getting screwed. Meanwhile the government paints an unrealistically positive picture about just how screwed we really are.

Let’s look at inflation. Specifically, how the government deflates the reality of how much it really costs us to live, and why.

Many government aid programs like social security benefits, disability payments and others have their annual adjustments tied in with what the government tells us is the CPI, the Consumer Price Index.

Obviously, the lower the method of calculation, the lower the payout to the public. Perhaps the BLS, doesn’t stand for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s actually the word Bullshit, missing some letters.

In case you don’t know, those are those good people who calculate the Consumer Price Index, or better said, miscalculate it.

The government has this concept of the ‘fixed basket’ of goods to calculate inflation. This fixed basket needs some new handles, because the only thing it can carry is the ‘bill of goods’ the government tries to sell us.

This basket contains statistics concerning groceries — the basic ones — housing costs, clothing, transportation, medical care, recreational expenses and communication expenses. It’s an historical basket, and basically ignores changes in consumer behavior, because that’s the most convenient method of calculation for the government to mislead you.

What it doesn’t consider is how corporations rip off the consumer by, for example, selling a food product for the same price, yet reducing the amount of said product. ‘New and improved’ usually refers in reality, to the profits of the corporations, and not the quality or quantity of the goods they sell.

Also, the method of Consumer Price Index calculation is proportionately weighted — by the government — to mislead consumers on the reality of price increases. The Feds assign percentages to the cost of living. A certain percentage for housing, food, and other expenses.

By playing with the figures, there is a direct effect on government’s monetary policies, what the interest rate should be for example. This can affect the cost of consumer credit, the cost of mortgages, how much we can earn from the banks, and so on.

The Substitution Con

You may have noticed the soaring mortgage rates, increased credit card interest rates, and consumer loan rates.

For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in an analysis of the 2024 interest rates of credit cards has determined that ‘over the last 10 years, average APR on credit cards assessed interest have almost doubled from 12.9 percent in late 2013 to 22.8 percent in 2023 — the highest level recorded since the Federal Reserve began collecting in 1994.’

If we use the rule of 72—the calculation that tells us how many years it will take to double an existing amount, we see an increase of almost 7.2% per annum. It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize, that isn’t exactly what the government tells us the inflation rate is.

So, if you’re paying for the things in the ‘basket of goods’ with a credit card, even if those goods have increased two or three percentage points in a given period, if you carry a balance on the credit card you used, your costs have far exceeded the government inflation figure.

Let’s go back to that ‘basket’ of goods. There is the concept of ‘substitutions’ which means if a consumer uses a lower priced substitution for a grocery item, for example, that isn’t figured in their CPI calculation.

So Jane Doe buys chicken instead of beef, because it’s cheaper and she can’t afford beef — that doesn’t count as far as the government is concerned. Investopedia reveals the effect of substitution neatly, with ‘The change in purchases by consumers in response to price changes, changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI.’

Now, you need a place to live to put those basket items on your kitchen table. But when it comes to a calculation for housing costs, the government gives us ‘fugazy’ figures once again. They calculate that by using an estimate of the rental cost for living in a house, not the actual price increases in buying the house.

What’s the deal in housing prices in 2024? Well if we want to use some other government agency figures, then we see that the cost of housing increased 4.2% over the previous year—and who knows if this is even accurate.

How does Uncle Sam come up with that rental cost figure? Here we get some more government inspected Grade A bull, and the concept is a beauty. It’s called the OER, or Owner’s Equivalent Rent figure. How do they get that figure? The BLS (Bureau of Lying Statistics), asks consumers what they think the rental value of their homes would be.

Not exactly science.

When it comes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculating the CPI, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Let’s look at employment statistics.

Why You Should Care

It’s not a wild assumption, that many of the readers of this article are looking for a decent job, or know someone that is and are having a hell of a time in finding one.

The government, who is ‘here to help us’ doesn’t count those who have given up looking for jobs as unemployed. And they count freelance and part-time jobs as ‘employment.’

How does the good old BLS determine and define unemployment? They require that an unemployed person must be available for work and must have looked for a job in the last four weeks.

Oh, by the way, 40% of the country isn’t even consider in the figures. That includes individuals who are students, retirees, military, stay at home caregivers, and the incarcerated and institutionalized (which is a category in which we should place those government employees who come up with unemployment figures for the rest of us — if we only could).

You are a consumer.

You eat and hopefully live somewhere with a roof over your head. You have to pay for that, and you probably need a job to do that.

However, the reality is, it’s getting much harder to do all of that. And the government’s figures disguise it. If it feels as though things are getting more expensive, and it’s harder to keep pace. The answer is, that’s because it is… whatever the government tries to tell you.

As we discussed in our previous post, there are two sides to the recent drone swarm reported over New Jersey and other East Coast states.

More evidence is coming out that the majority of the reports are normal objects: airplanes, stars and planets, and even Christmas lights displays.

A cloudy night on Sunday, December 15th, 2024, saw a remarkably low number of drone reports. That’s likely because the low-lying clouds, rain and fog prevented people from seeing stars and airplanes, reducing the number of false identifications.

Meanwhile, other mistaken reports, from former Maryland governor Larry Hogan claiming the constellation Orion was a drone swarm to Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano’s falling for a meme of a Star Wars TIE-fighter on a trailer have shown how easy it is even for government officials to make mistakes.

Despite these false reports, there are still many sightings made by trained observers, as well as numerous and continual drone sightings involving military assets and bases. This includes incursions over CIA headquarters in Langley in Virginia, the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, the top-secret air facility at Nevada National Security Site, and U.S. destroyers 100 miles off the coast of California.

We know the U.S. government is taking such incursions over military sites seriously. Two Chinese nationals have been arrested in the past year in separate incidents where they were using drones to violate such locations.

The first incident came in late 2023, soon after the drones spotted over Langley, Virginia in December 2023.

A few weeks after that rash of sightings, a 26-year-old Chinese citizen and U.S. grad student was arrested after taking photos of classified naval installations at Newport Naval Base with a commercially available drone. He had purchased the drone from a Virgina store just days before.

His prosecution was the first under a law dating back to just after World War II that makes it illegal to photograph military sites ‘using aircraft.’

The second incident came more recently, as a 39-year-old Chinese citizen was caught photographing Vandenberg Space Force Base with a drone that he was flying from a public park a few miles away. Both these Chinese nationals were arrested just as they were attempting to board one-way flights back to China, and both nationals have since pleaded guilty to the charges.

But it’s not just military bases and assets that concerns the government. In the summer of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security issued a classified warning to state and local law enforcement that has since been revealed to the public.

In the statement, DHS warned of the growing use of drones for what they considered ‘illicit’ purposes. DHS further recommended that state and local agencies needed to conduct what they called ‘exercises to test and prepare response capabilities.’

The fact that the DHS has advocated for testing exercises using drones can be seen as part of the same federal position of being more prepared, when earlier in 2024 NORAD commander Air Force Lt. Lt. General Guillot testified in the Senate that ‘This emerging capability outstrips the operational framework that we have to address it.’

These statements make it clear that elements of the U.S. government are aware that we are unprepared for a drone incursion on a par with what’s occurred in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where hundreds of drones are being used in massed attacks and Ukraine believes they’ll be able to manufacture 4 million drones a year, beginning in 2025.

The question then becomes, how will the Pentagon convince the American population that we need a better defense against so many drones. In a country that has as much territory as the U.S. to protect. That’s where one possible answer to these drone waves begins to make sense.

During the Vietnam War, a young Marine began to make a name for himself with his bravery, his cunning, and his leadership skills. That Marine was Richard Marcinko, who went on to create the famous unit SEAL Team Six, which he commanded for three years.

Nearing retirement, Marcinko was asked in 1986 by Navy Admiral James Lyons to create a new unit that was tasked with testing base security. This new unit was dubbed Red Cell, named after the enemy aggressor squadron often called the Red Team in Western military combat practices, and was also known by the official designation OP-O6D.

Marcinko selected members from SEAL Team Six and Marine Force Recon, and proceeded to test Navy and Air Force base security in a number of novel ways.

The unit’s purpose was to challenge base security and expose defense vulnerabilities, by infiltrating those locations without detection, while recording their intrusions on video to later share with base personnel in order to improve overall security and readiness.

Those Red Cell goals – to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within military bases and installations by simulating real-world threats through aggressive tactics, and to test security measures and improve overall preparedness against potential enemy actions – sound exactly like what’s been happening with various drone incursions at sensitive military bases over the past five years.

One of the reasons the U.S. military hasn’t admitted that they’re executing the current drone missions is because they may not be: Red Cell was defunded at the end of Marcinko’s tenure. In part, Marcinko claimed, because his unit was ‘too good,’ and exposed lax base security allowed by too many higher-ups.

After Marcinko’s Red Cell was disbanded, it appears that the CIA picked up their portfolio, and began their own, much more secretive version of Red Cell in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Their ability to classify and compartmentalize their activities provides government officials with plausible deniability. While the CIA claims their Red Cell are only analysts, there is no way to prove their involvement doesn’t extend to running the kind of drone incursions that we’ve seen at military facilities across the U.S.

In fact, the CIA is responsible for much of the classified drone attacks that the U.S. government employs overseas, including Predator attacks on enemies in the Middle East.

It’s also relevant that a December 17th joint statement on the drone swarms over the Northeast was underwritten by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA and the Department of Defense, but did not directly contain any statement or denial by the CIA.

While a definitive answer to who’s behind these incursions might never be made known to the public, you can be sure several things will happen in the wake of these drone swarms:

- New laws will be written to allow the military to better protect their bases,

- New funding will be enacted to create better defenses against drones of all types, and

- The CIA and other covert agencies will continue to test America’s defenses without being caught, and without admitting to their actions.

This story still has much longer to run.

Stay tuned for more as we continue to dig into this story!

Are these objects in the skies over the East Coast just drones, or are they something else?

Some suggest they’re a precursor to an alien invasion. Others suggest they’re military controlled sniffers looking for a lost nuclear weapon.

Another theory is that they’re being sent by an Iranian mothership off the U.S. coast.

First off: no, they aren’t aliens. Nor are they military craft looking for a lost nuke. And if they were Iranian or any other hostile country, we’d have stopped them a long time ago.

Heck, our Coast Guard would simply love an opportunity to be the heroes by stopping a hostile ship in home waters.

We do know that most of the reported sightings are actually not drones.

A great example is former Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who claimed to have seen a drone swarm above his house, only to find out later that he was photographing the constellation Orion.

Another good example of how even our supposedly ‘intelligent’ government officials are falling to drone hysteria was when Pennsylvania state senator (and former Army officer, and gubernatorial candidate) Doug Mastriano saw an online meme of a Star Wars TIE-fighter on a trailer with the joking caption suggesting it was a recently shot-down drone in Orange Beach, New Jersey.

He fell for it hook, line, and sinker, claiming it was proof that the drones are a ‘threat to our nation and our citizens.’

Not Aliens, Iranians, or Any Other -ians, So What Are They?

Meanwhile, cooler heads are trying to prevail. Former congressman and veteran pilot Adam Kinzinger has said in a CNN interview and on social media posts, ‘I’ve spent days looking at every one of these videos. Every video I’ve seen on Twitter and on the Internet are all airplanes… If they are drones, they are apparently complying with FAA lighting requirements.’

So, if they aren’t aliens, Iranians, or any other -ians, what are they?

First: yes, there is reason for some concern. The ability for someone, even civilian pranksters, to fly drones near commercial airfields or over U.S. military bases or through controlled airspaces is concerning.

While the recent drone inclusions in New Jersey and adjoining areas on the East Coast have been a national story for weeks now, what mainstream media isn’t reporting is that these drones are not the only swarms this country has had to deal with.

There have been similar drone swarms in recent years in Colorado in 2019 and 2020. Also at the highly sensitive Nevada National Security Site in 2023, and multiple incursions in California.

As far back as the summer of 2019, several USS Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were swarmed by multiple drones, or as the U.S. Navy called them UAVs, ‘unmanned aerial vehicles.’ As many as six at a time were spotted performing maneuvers extremely close to the ships, less than 100 miles off the California coast.

Just as alarming, for 17 days in December of 2023, drones flew unchallenged over Langley, Virginia, home to the headquarters of the CIA. There have also be incidents adjacent to the largest naval base in the world, Naval Station Norfolk, home to the U.S. Navy's Fleet Forces Command, and not far from the HQ for Seal Team Six.

It wasn’t until March 24, 2024, at a Senate Armed Force hearing that the first official comment about the Langley drone intrusions was officially announced. At that hearing, Lt. General Gregory Guillot, commander of NORAD and NorthCom, admitted not only that Langely and the adjacent areas were inundated by dozens of unknown drone overflights, but that more than 1,000 drone incursions occur over the U.S.’ southern border each month.

Regarding the Langley drone problem, General Guillot testified that ‘This emerging capability outstrips the operational framework that we have to address it.’

This comment from one of the most high-ranking Air Force officers in the country might be a clue. He’s saying under oath that we don’t have the resources to combat this many drones in so many locations.

Should we be worried? The short answer is, yes.

The U.S. Has No Way to Prevent It

Not because these may be aliens or Iranian craft, but because these drones are overflying military installations, and we currently have no way to prevent them. In addition to the drones over Langley in 2023 and the ones harassing the U.S. destroyers in 2019, there have been additional military sites that have been the subject of these drone swarms.

More recently, the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton saw multiple drones over its airspace, which is a federal offense. The Department of Defense has also admitted, as of December 14th, 2024, that drones have been sighted over Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle, both in New Jersey.

Then there are the drones over the Nevada National Security Site, where test flying of top secret aircraft is performed, including the new B-21 Raider.

These overflights of military bases seem to rule out civilian craft, especially as they’re flying with lights on them and clearly following FAA regulations. If someone was trying to spy on or even prank the military, they’d conceal their craft by dousing their lights.

These overflights would also appear to rule out one of the most recent explanations: that the drones are part of a NASA project testing a project called the Advanced Air Mobility Mission, which just happens to be based two miles from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

This close proximity, some researchers are suggesting, explains why there were so many overflights of the Langley area in December of 2023.

But this explanation doesn’t answer a number of questions. For example, what would NASA be doing messing around with destroyers performing active naval duties a hundred miles off the coast of California?

And if the drones in New Jersey were indeed part of this program, why wouldn’t NASA have come forward immediately and admitted they were behind these events?

In fact, as of December 18th, NASA has still made no such admission.

A Deeper and Darker Cause

Another problem is that it’s extremely risky to be testing unproven technology, whether NASA or military, over civilian locations, and in such close proximity to busy airports and active military bases.

Military and foreign affairs commentator Paul at Combat Vet News remarked, ‘None of this is the response that you'd expect from the government if this was a classified program that was being tested,’ which includes the NASA program as well.

These concerns suggest the drones are not part of any NASA or military testing, especially if you’re unsure of the crafts’ success, and you want to be able to recover any debris or failed craft.

There is one more possibility that has not been offered up yet that we’ll cover in our next newsletter. One that does include why these drones would be overflying military bases, why they’re harassing on-duty naval ships, and why these drone swarms seem to move from place to place, perform their actions for weeks on end, then simply stop, pick up their gear, and move on to another location.

And this answer contains a much deeper and darker cause, and explains why no one in the U.S. government wants to admit what’s really going on.

For the last month, Eastern states (predominately), have been fascinated and fearful concerning the (as of yet) unexplained appearance of multiple drones in the sky. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman?

Nobody seems to know.

Our government, which of course, is here to help and protect us, has provided a definite “we don’t know” answer to the public, which of course has calmed things down absolutely nowhere. This is a perfect example of our tax dollars at rest.

We in the United States are proud of our fiercely independent nature, proud of our property ownership, and we are ready to exercise our second amendment rights at the drop of a hat, or, these days, the flight of a drone.

But before anybody brings out the shotgun and tries a little skeet shooting at a those unidentified lit up things in the sky that are buzzing around the barn, you’re going to want to know a little Federal Law.

Specifically that Federal Law that we find at 18 USC 32. (For those who haven’t gone to law school, “USC” stands for United States Code). Here’s the part you want to closely read:

18 USC 32

 a)Whoever willfully—

(1) sets fire to, damages, destroys, disables, or wrecks any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States or any civil aircraft used, operated, or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce;

(2) places or causes to be placed a destructive device or substance in, upon, or in proximity to, or otherwise makes or causes to be made unworkable or unusable or hazardous to work or use, any such aircraft, or any part or other materials used or intended to be used in connection with the operation of such aircraft, if such placing or causing to be placed or such making or causing to be made is likely to endanger the safety of any such aircraft;

(3) sets fire to, damages, destroys, or disables any air navigation facility, or interferes by force or violence with the operation of such facility, if such fire, damaging, destroying, disabling, or interfering is likely to endanger the safety of any such aircraft in flight;

(4) with the intent to damage, destroy, or disable any such aircraft, sets fire to, damages, destroys, or disables or places a destructive device or substance in, upon, or in proximity to, any appliance or structure, ramp, landing area, property, machine, or apparatus, or any facility or other material used, or intended to be used, in connection with the operation, maintenance, loading, unloading or storage of any such aircraft or any cargo carried or intended to be carried on any such aircraft;

(5) interferes with or disables, with intent to endanger the safety of any person or with a reckless disregard for the safety of human life, anyone engaged in the authorized operation of such aircraft or any air navigation facility aiding in the navigation of any such aircraft;

(6) performs an act of violence against or incapacitates any individual on any such aircraft, if such act of violence or incapacitation is likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft;

(7) communicates information, knowing the information to be false and under circumstances in which such information may reasonably be believed, thereby endangering the safety of any such aircraft in flight; or

(8) attempts or conspires to do anything prohibited under paragraphs (1) through (7) of this subsection; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years or both.

 That’s not even the whole of the law, but it will serve for our purposes. Since that is a ton of close reading to have to do, I’ll make things a little easier.

 Let’s look at paragraph 1. It states you can’t do naughty things to an aircraft, and a drone is an aircraft. It further states that aircraft has to be flying in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States and it would be handy to know what that jargon means.

The special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States in English means, pursuant to another law found at 49 USC 46501 [2] :

"special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States" includes any of the following aircraft in flight:(A) a civil aircraft of the United States.(B) an aircraft of the armed forces of the United States.(C) another aircraft in the United States.”

So, the aircraft has to be in flight. Drones you see in the sky are in flight. Let’s look at C, and that says “another aircraft in the United States.” That would cover a drone. So in other words, if you see a drone flying around overhead, and you are living in the United States, you are in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and going back to 18 USC 32 (1) means you can’t shoot the thing down.

But what if you do?

Then we take a look at paragraph 8 of 18 USC 32, and the stupid prize you can win for playing stupid games is twenty years in prison and/or a fine. How much is the fine? Well, it could be about a week’s pay, if you earn $250,000 per week.

Don’t forget, depending upon which state you live in there are likely to be state laws that can put you in jail or the poorhouse if you shoot at a drone. This is on top of the Federal consequences.

As the author of this article worked as an attorney for over forty years, I can tell you that both the cuisine and the medical care in the US Bureau of Prisons is not going to get a five star rating any time soon. It’s the kind of secured gated community you don’t want to live in.

So my advice is don’t shoot at a drone, even if it is over your property and possibly invading your privacy, and don’t point a laser at it either in case what you think is a drone is actually a small manned aircraft.

That can also be a major legal problem.

Maybe, just maybe, the various alphabet organizations in our country that deal with things like intelligence, security and defense will sooner or later turn off CNN for their information, and tell us just what the Hell is going on.

Until then, watch those itchy trigger fingers gentlemen.

In 2021, two more videos were released to the public and later admitted by the Pentagon to be “official,” at least as both were filmed by U.S. Navy personnel. But neither of these were filmed from F/A-18s, nor were they captured by the craft’s infrared sensors, as the first three videos from 2017 and 2018 were.

Both of the newly released videos were supposedly filmed in July of 2019 on ships at sea off the coast of San Diego, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, a film producer with an interest in UFOs, and who previously made a name for himself by recording a video with Bob Lazar, whose claims about working at Area 51 have been widely disputed.

In July of  2019, the  video known as SPLASHDOWN was reportedly filmed onboard the USS Omaha in its Command Information Center (CIC). This video includes the voices of several off-screen U.S. naval officers discussing multiple objects being visually observed, though only a single object is seen in the video. This object is a blurry circular craft, seemingly flying over the ocean. The video itself is extremely fuzzy, as, according to one report, the video was made by a cell phone recording a display on one of the ship’s monitors. This result provides much less clarity than any of the previous FLIR videos. 

Near the end, one of the offscreen personnel calls a “splashdown” of an object into the water. Science writer and current UFO researcher Mick West shows that this was most likely not a splashdown. He goes on to explain that the video has several flaws in it, besides the very poor resolution. The first problem is that according to the timecode on the monitor, six minutes of footage of the round object descending towards the water’s surface is missing, thus making its descent appear faster than it normally would seem. 

West also explains the apparently rapid left-right movement of the object is due to the camera itself moving left and right. He supports that interpretation by showing how the movement of the waves are comparable to the movement of the object. He further explains if the object fell directly into the water, the object would disappear at once. Intead, what the video shows is a brief series of what appear to be the tops of waves obscuring the bottom half of the object, which is what one would see if a bright object, like the engine exhaust of a distant jet plane, were seen dropping below the horizon of a large body of water. 

West shows later in the same video how the “shrinking” effect of the object dropping below the horizon indicates it’s a hot, flaring heat source, larger than the object itself, and most likely an engine exhaust.

Interestingly, Jeremy Corbell claims to have seen a classified briefing document regarding this event that says there were up to 100 solid objects, each traveling between 46 and 158 mph, surrounding Omaha during the incident. Since this video’s release in 2021, there has been no evidence to support these claims.

At approximately the same date and time as the SPLASHDOWN video was recorded, a fifth video was recorded, since known as the TRIANGLE video.This event was supposed to have been filmed aboard the USS Russell, also in the ocean off the coast of San Diego. This video contains night vision images of dozens of triangular objects in a dark sky. Jeremy Corbell immediately claimed this was “proof” that triangular or pyramidal shapes were flying around our skies, and that their close proximity to U.S. naval ships proved a serious military matter. This warning was shared by oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who said at a 2024 Congressional hearing that our inability to identify such objects "jeopardizes U.S. maritime security, which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean."

However, even a cursory examination of this video shows that it’s merely a recording of regular airplane traffic, including the telltale strobe effect of flashing FAA avoidance lights, as well as normal astronomical objects like stars and the planet Jupiter in the background. 

As with the SPLASHDOWN video, this video appears to have been recorded with a cell phone using an inexpensive “night vision” attachment, and is not made with military-grade night optics. The recording artifact of an object being out of focus and showing instead the triangular arms of the shutter is called “bokeh” (pronounced bo-kay), and can be easily duplicated, as Mick West himself does with both a standard camera lens and one covered by duct tape. It’s also clear that the primary object is flashing standard navigation warning lights, as a normal aircraft would be expected to, surrounded by objects in the night sky like stars and the planet Jupiter.

These two additional videos beg the question: why would the Navy and the Pentagon not be able to discern immediately that these two videos were not “unexplainable,” as the term UAP, for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” would suggest? Indeed, in connection with the SPLASHDOWN video, wouldn’t the experienced naval personnel manning the Command Information Center on the Omaha not be able to tell immediately that there was in fact no “splashdown”? Not only that, why would naval personnel be allowed to record military displays with a private cell phone? And why would a video with six minutes edited from it not carry the disclaimer that it’s been edited, making the apparent movement of the object being filmed appear highly distorted in time?

These questions lead an objective observer to ask the question: is there something going on behind these five videos that suggest the Pentagon is deliberately using these videos to perform some important task, and that the U.S. naval personnel are themselves performing a role in this mission? If highly trained and experienced military personnel are complicit in the release of easily explainable prosaic events, using clipped and edited videos, while not releasing the entire videos, are they all part of a larger plan, one that they believe is important for the national security of the country they’ve sworn to protect?

In the next article in this series, we’ll present an event that happened at the same time as the original three videos, in late 2017, an event that was largely ignored by the national media, but one that goes a long way in explaining what may really be going on behind these events. 

As we covered in our previous article, the first three UAP videos in the 2017-2018 wave, known as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST, were all eventually admitted by the Pentagon as having been recorded by U.S. navy pilots flying U.S. military planes, in these cases, F/A-18s from U.S. aircraft carriers. 

Despite the Pentagon officially admitting their provenance, however, there has still been plenty of controversy surrounding the videos.These controversies are not just matters of opinion: they suggest that any competent aviator familiar with the system should have known right from the beginning that the objects captured by the sensors were not any kind of anomalous objects, but rather, were easily explained terrestrial objects that the Pentagon could have and should have explained from the very beginning, rather than allowing the situation to fester for years. 

Beginning with the FLIR video, it must be noted that the video itself does not actually represent what the most famous pilot involved in this incident, Commander David Fravor, claims to have seen. His F/A-18 from the USS Nimitz wasn’t the aircraft that recorded the video. That second plane came on the scene around an hour later, and may not have even been in the same location. Even then, the weapons officer who recorded the video, Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, admitted he himself never saw the object with his own eyes, and merely saw what was on the weapons display.

The object being recorded in infra-red was most likely the heat plume surrounding a normal jet aircraft, which will appear to an IR camera to be larger than the object itself, and will somewhat resemble an oval Tic-Tac, except for the fact that it’s extremely hot and very blurry with no discernable outline to its shape.Noted science writer and investigator Mick West showed an example of how such an image looks around a standard aircraft, and also how the “sudden moves” described by many viewers at the end of the video are in fact an artifact of the camera unable to maintain a lock on the object, as the object is heading to the left and the tracking plane is heading to the right.

This event in 2004 cannot have been the first time an F/A-18 with a FLIR camera had recorded such an incident while tracking traditional aircraft. For both the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon to remain silent about what is clearly an easily explainable occurrence suggests that either or both organizations deliberately wanted to maintain confusion about the incident. Even more alarming, it appears this confusion was deliberately sustained in order to appear to support Commander Fravor’s earlier account. 

The second video released, the GIMBAL video, is named for the rotating mount for the infra-red camera below the host aircraft, in this instance, an F/A-18 flying from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida. Again, Mick West explains that the apparent “turning upside down” movement of the object is from the Gimbal mount itself turning upside down when its plane-host is pointing far enough away from the object that the Gimbal can no longer keep its original observation focus on the object. Note that this makes the object appear to invert while keeping the horizon at its original aspect. West later explained how you can easily duplicate the rotate-non-rotate effect on your own cell phone.

It’s also clear that the “spike” elements that appear to the relative top and bottom of the object are an artifact of the camera receiving more information (heat from the object’s jet engine) than it can process. The same spikey effect happens when a telescope takes in more energy from a nearby star than it can process, thus creating the well-known eight-point star effect. 

Again, these elements have to have been common to any flight officer familiar with the F/A-18 and its Gimbal-mounted FLIR system. It is almost impossible that no one from either the Navy or the Pentagon was aware of these as being simple artifacts of the system. Again, we have to conclude that both the Navy and the Pentagon deliberately pretended they did not know that these were standard elements inherent in the manner in which the system operates. 

The third video, the GOFAST video, is the shortest of the three, and has now been explained with a prosaic explanation even by the Pentagon itself. The apparent speed of the object against the background ocean was caused by parallax. As Pentagon spokesperson Jon Kosloski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), explained it in November, 2024:

“Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis, using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” Kosloski said. “As the platform (with the sensors) is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called ‘parallax’ makes it look like the object is moving much faster.”

Since the 2017 and 2018 release of these first three Pentagon UAP videos, several more recordings have been released. Two of these in particular got nearly as much attention as the first three. They’ve been nicknamed the Splashdown video, and the Triangles video. Both were supposedly filmed in July of 2019, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, who has been a filmmaker specializing in UFOs  for many years. 

Despite the interest they generated when they were first released, both of these videos also have easily explained reasons behind their creations, which we’ll explore in our next article.These two, however, are a bit different. While in keeping with the first three released videos, the Pentagon at first would not admit these were official videos, though later they did admit they were filmed by U.S. military personnel. But the manner in which these two later videos were filmed were very different from the first three. 

A March 2024 poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov revealed that 32% of Americans believed that UFOs might be signs of extraterrestrials visiting our planet, while only 32% responded that such UFOs or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomena,” always have terrestrial or astronomical explanations. The number that believe UFOs are visiting aliens has increased from only 20% in 1996, an increase of more than 50%. 

Even more stunning is that the same 2024 poll reported that 63% of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling the public. That comes on the heels of a March 2024 Pentagon report that claimed the government has no knowledge whatsoever of aliens or alien technology.

How can we explain away such a disparity between what the Government says it knows, or in this case “doesn’t know,” and the public being so certain that they do know something, and that they are unwilling to share it? We could go back to the time of Watergate and how the office of the President lied to the American public, beginning an erosion of public trust that has only grown since then. We could go back a decade before that and see that a vast number of Americans have lost trust in the U.S. government, and believe there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination that our government refuses to reveal.

But there are even more recent and concrete examples that display clear evidence that the U.S. government is not only not sharing what it knows about UFOs and UAPs, but is deliberately using such obfuscation to, at its base, spoof America’s military adversaries.

These following events cover multiple years, and will require several articles to completely tell the story in full. But by the end of this series, those with an open mind will probably agree that it appears the U.S. government has been lying to the public in order to both muddy the waters of real UFO investigations, while also using such evidence for a much darker purpose.

Much of the recent interest in UFOs was stoked in 2017, when a pair of UFO/UAP videos were released to the public.These were first given to the UFO-supportive group To The Stars Academy during the summer of 2017, and then reported on by the New York Times on December 16th, 2017. They were known by the nicknames FLIR (for Forward-Looking Infrared Radar, the device used by the pilots to record the phenomena) and GIMBAL (for the gimbal-mounted camera used by a different aircraft). These videos were not officially acknowledged as official at the time, but the Pentagon in 2019 did admit that they were filmed by U.S. military personnel using military equipment.

The FLIR video was reported to have been recorded in 2004 by an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying from the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego. This video was used to bolster the testimony of fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who claimed that he, his weapons officer, and another F/A-18 and its two personnel witnessed a 40-foot-long oval craft below them, hovering above a disturbance in the ocean. His testimony included the claim that the white oval craft spiraled up to meet their two planes, mirrored their plane’s movements, then took off at incredible speed. Because his plane was unarmed, he did not have the necessary equipment onboard to record any sensory data, so no recording of this event exists.

However, about an hour or so later, a second group of fighters from the Nimitz were sent aloft to do further investigations. In that group was weapons systems officer Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, whose F/A-18 was equipped with the FLIR equipment that captured the video. It was Underwood who suggested the object appeared like a “Tic-Tac,” basing the term on a joke from the 1980 film “Airplane.” However, Lt. Cmmdr. Underwood admitted in a 2019 interview that he didn’t see the object with his own eyes, and was focused instead on trying to capture as much information through his FLIR equipment.

There are problems with the chain of custody for this video, since it appears it was first hosted online in 2007 by Visions Unlimited, a video production company, which does not lend credence to the video’s authenticity. 

The GIMBAL video was reported by the Pentagon as having been recorded on January 21st, 2015, by another FA-18 Super Hornet aircraft assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt carrier battle group, operating off the eastern coast of Florida. The GIMBAL video shows an infrared target glowing hot, that appears to rotate left, leaving the pilots in awe. It was night time, however, so again, the aviators didn’t see anything with their own eyes.

 As with the FLIR video, this video first caught the public’s attention when it was posted by To The Stars Academy, who had apparently received both videos from Christopher K. Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who had himself received them (and a third video, discussed next) from an undisclosed source in a Pentagon parking lot, according to Mellon’s own admission in the UFO documentary, “The Phenomena.”

Additionally, the Washington Post reported in March, 2018, on a video of a similar encounter, nicknamed GOFAST, also supposedly filmed on January 21, 2015, again by an F/A-18 aircraft from the Roosevelt carrier battle group, and also having occurred off the coast of Florida. In this video, an object appears to be moving at incredible speeds over the ocean, and the aviators laugh and cheer as they’re finally able to get a lock on the object. As with the other two previous videos, this recording was made by the same FLIR system, and again, this video has a frustratingly short duration.

There has been a storm of controversy over these three videos, as well as a few other videos that were released subsequent to these, which we’ll cover in the next article. 

We’ve discussed why BRICS, the loose coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, now with the addition of new members Egypt, Ethiopia, the U.A.E. and Iran, are hoping to launch a new currency to rival the U.S. dollar as a benchmark currency for the world’s trading partners. But can BRICS really launch such a currency, and keep it stable? What will they use to back it? How will it be traded, and which countries could be enticed to actually trade in it?

The recent devaluation of the Russian ruble has shown that Putin’s trading partners are willing to risk limited sanctions from the West, as long as Russia sells its goods, primarily crude oil, in the currency of the buying nation. That means China and India are forcing Russia to buy their currency in order for those countries to then be able to buy Russian crude. This has caused a massive drop in the value of the ruble, and a follow-on response from the Russian central bank to halt foreign currency buying until some time in early 2025.

These retrenchments to individual government-backed currencies shows the difficulty BRICS countries will face in trying to get its members to agree on a common currency, and to give it precedence over their own currency.

The second problem is getting nine nations to simply agree on a common currency. While the Indian rupee is strong on its own, and the Chinese yuan is based on the world’s second strongest economy (though China’s economy is facing many crises), the other BRICS nations don’t have the kinds of economic policies and histories that would make their fellow BRICSters comfortable. This was another problem India had with admitting too many neighbors too soon: the difficulty in getting multiple nations and their various governments to agree on anything has always been a challenge. 

The third problem the BRICS nations must face is what to back their new currency with. Currently, the US dollar is backed by two things: its ability to generate steady revenue either through taxes or by taking on more debt, and by the U.S.’ ability to demand that its trading partners make transactions using dollars, rather than their own currency. That’s where the BRICS nations hope to make their inroad. 

Following the October 2024 meeting held in Kazan, Russia, it was announced that a new joint currency was being planned, called “the Unit.” There are no definite plans for the currency to be rolled out just yet, but it’s intended to be backed by 40% gold held jointly by the various countries, and 60% backed by a conglomeration of BRICS currencies that would theoretically be convertible into gold. This agreement to include all of the different members’ currencies presents a challenge, as the economies of some member nations might be in a recession while other economies are doing better. This could create a situation where some currencies might appear to be doing the heavy lifting to support other members whose currencies might be struggling.

But the BRICS decision to use gold as part of its support reveals an additional problem: that of limiting their economic freedom. 

Until 1971, the dollar was backed by gold, when President Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard so that the economy could “float.” This move allowed the U.S. government to print as much money as it needed to pay for things like an expanded military budget, which was needed for the Vietnam War. Later during the Reagan administration, such flexibility allowed the U.S. to outspend the Soviet economy with Regan’s two big-ticket items: a planned increase to an 800-ship navy, and his aborted Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed the “Star Wars” program. 

The 800-ship navy fell far short, only reaching approximately 600 ships, But that massive building program combined with the huge planned cost of S.D.I. helped bring a crushing end to the Soviet Union by putting a strain on their already struggling economy during the latter years of the Cold War.

The ability for the U.S. to simply outspend the U.S.S.R. shows the problem modern countries have when relying on gold to back its currency: for one, the lack of enough gold to back all of the currencies means that each BRICS nation may have to limit its economic policies. In addition, the volatile nature of gold, which has climbed from $2,000 an ounce in January 2024, to an all time-high of $2,800 an ounce in October 2024 means pegging any currency to its price comes with a big risk. Some analysts have suggested gold may rise to $3,000 an ounce by the end of 2025, which is the figure the BRICS nations are hoping to reach for their combined holdings of gold to meet its target of 40% of the Unit’s backing. 

But gold has since slipped from its October high down to $2,672 an ounce in December. Such volatility in the value of gold means the BRICS Unit could suffer an equivalent level of volatility. 

Even Vladimir Putin seems to have walked back his previous calls to “de-dollarize” their economics, saying at the October summit: “"We are not refusing, not fighting the dollar, but if they don't let us work with it, what can we do? We then have to look for other alternatives, which is happening." The collective assessment of the post-summit attitude seemed to be that the goal of the BRICS member nations is not to move away from the current SWIFT banking platform, dominated by the dollar, but instead to develop alternative systems for using their countries’ currencies in financial transactions between themselves and their trading partners.

It’s notable that seven of Russia’s largest banks have been banned from using SWIFT, the international banking messaging system, since 2022, following its invasion of Ukraine. This has severely limited how Russia can conduct international trade, especially currency trading. This has led Russia especially to push for alternatives to SWIFT, though the BRICS members have not yet created any meaningful alternative.

Due to these challenges and constraints, the future of a BRICS Unit remains unclear, and its future cloudy. The next year, with threats of tariffs and trade embargoes, will no doubt see a massive change between the U.S. dollar and its rivals around the world, a world in which alternatives to the dollar may seem increasingly valuable to countries that are not so strongly linked to the U.S. 

Money for Nothing

If it’s one thing we’ve learned from both Hollywood and organized religion, imagination and story-telling can provide a big payoff. Is it any different when we journey to the realm of the discussion of extraterrestrials visiting our earth?

There’s profit for the prophets, and the monetary angle of promoting little green—or gray-- men should be examined as it has an effect on the credibility of those who serve us the existence of extra-planetary humanoids on a flying saucer.

Many readers are familiar with the rather wild haired gentleman who offers his “expertise” on a variety of UFO and ET related television programs. They’re out there, and they were here, he says.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos has an unconfirmed estimated net worth of four million dollars, and the majority of his discernible expertise comes from promotion of important bodybuilding contests. He has a degree in communications, and he certainly is an excellent communicator. He’s fun to watch.

But, should we listen to him? As far as can be determined academically speaking, he has no science background, no astronomy background, no astrobiology background—just a communications degree, which isn’t exactly hovering up there in STEM land.

If we wish to listen to him, it should solely be out of politeness.

Dr. Steven Greer, a retired medical doctor, is another well known personage to those who watch “documentaries” about UFOs and ETs. Now the good doctor has a B.S. in Biology, and an MD, (which is exactly hovering up there in STEM land). He is the founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

His organization claims some 4,000 cases of traces of UFO landings. Maybe the pilots just stopped for gas and then zoomed back up to whatever planet they were from, because there has been no credible confirmation of these landings—at least none that have made main stream media.

In his 2013 documentary, Sirius, it was claimed that a fifteen inch skeleton, the Atacama skeleton was of alien origin. It wasn’t, it was, after genetic testing, human, and just the remains of a deformed individual.

It should be noted that Dr. Greer was able to retire from the practice of medicine and become a full time saucer seeker, so it’s a safe bet that his well-produced (if not well evidenced) documentaries have done rather well from a financial point of view.

The above are just two of the examples of those out there who make a living from promoting and promising the “I want to believe” X-Files types, that yes, they are out there those little green men, and they’ve been visiting us without having left a phone number to contact them.

With regards to electronic evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials, let’s take a quick look at the results of the SETI program, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

A flying visit to their site informs us that this organization which started out with two workers now has about 100. Star search must be good, but how have the SETI fellows done?

Well, according to their site, there has been no evidence of extraterrestrial life found. This organization has been around for forty years, and they have found nothing with respect to ETs. Not even a promising radio signal from out there.

Yet they have been funded for forty years.

What about the recent government investigations into extraterrestrial craft and presumably life?

These were the key takeaways from the hearing:

First, The DoD has failed to provide transparency on the existence and effectiveness of programs related to UAPs not only to Congress, but to the American people. Second, Congress and the American people have fundamental questions on the topic of UAPs and incursions near sensitive military installations. Increased disclosure and transparency are needed to provide security and information.

That’s it. No ETs were harmed—or found—in the making of this hearing. No UAP or UFO or BVD sightings were found to be extra-terrestrial. 

But what of the recently disclosed footage from Navy pilots observing unidentified aerial phenomena buzzing about in the not so friendly skies? Was there any proof adduced that they were extra-terrestrial?

No. However, they exhibited abilities not known to be possible to the pilots. Is that proof of an extraterrestrial origin? No. Pilots are pilots, they are not cleared for the kind of work that DARPA and its equivalents might be doing under wraps and that are financed by a black budget that was, in 2019 according to Trump, eighty six BILLION dollars. That can buy a whole bagful of way out wonder technology.

Advanced technology from right here on good old Gaia is zipping around for years before it’s discovered by John Q. Public. For example, we the people learned of the U-2 in 1960 when the Russians got lucky and bagged one with a missile. That plane had been operational since the mid-fifties, but until the shoot down, nobody knew who didn’t have a need to.

Why You Should Care

Ever since Klaatu came down for a visit in the 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still, portraying an ET who cared about our welfare, a segment of the public has been seriously awaiting his return, or the factual equivalent thereof.

Fantasy is nice to play at, but when it’s funded by cold hard cash, and when it’s funded by your tax dollars, or charitable contributions, then, we need to look at this fantasy with a wide open skeptical eye.

No doubt, there are those out there who would seek to personally profit from our desire to have confirmed that we are not alone, that in fact, there is a Mr. Spaceman out there who is just waiting to come down and help us out with our math homework, so we can approach light speed in our space explorations and be disintegrated by minute particles in space hitting our craft in the process.

We especially need a peek at a black budget that at least, is seven percent of our military budget to see what kind of woo-woo is being funded and how much it’s costing, because there’s one truth out there that nobody disputes—government spending is out of control, and is often wasted on nonsense. 

THE CURRENT SITUATION REPORT

For over sixty years, there has been a lot more to Cuba then rum and cigars. 

In the past, besides a parking lot for Russian missiles during the US showdown with the Soviets in the early sixties, it was the catalyst and consultant for revolutions in South America and Africa. It also is the communist country that experienced the longest lasting single dictator in the world—Castro, and has engaged in significant hostile intelligence activities within our country. It has an excellent intelligence service, the Dirección de Inteligencia, the DI.

While travel restrictions have now eased somewhat, so that Americans can more easily visit this small impoverished oppressed country to buy cigars and see very old cars, another country has been welcomed with wide open arms—China.

It needs to be remembered that unlike Russia, China and Cuba never strayed from Communism; they were and are, old school.

China is the second largest trading partner with Cuba, and a major investor.

Chinese investment in Cuban infrastructure and development of its energy sector doesn’t come free of course. While the sinking economy and rampant inflation of Cuba does not make it a very attractive economic partner, its proximate location to the United States puts a lot of lipstick on this pig, with respect to Chinese spying efforts.

One of the most important sources of intelligence information is COMINT, or communications intelligence. There’s no risk to agents, no arrests of assets, and it is literally conducted right there out in the open, able to be set up anywhere you can plug something in and put up an antenna--and it is the reception capability of the Cuban location that attracts the Chinese with open wallets and open ears.

There are at least four potential communication intercept sites useful to the Chinese in Cuba, an island just 100 miles away from the US. Further, there is the US prison facility on Guantanamo, on the island itself, that can offer much useful information about US military activities, especially since there are two undersea communication cables that belong to the US and connected to Guantanamo that are on Cuban territory.

There is also the consideration that the Southern United States is brimming with military bases, including a variety of Special Operation facilities. There’s Homestead in Florida, along with Hulbert Field and MacDill Air force Base. There are a variety of Special Forces related bases in Georgia, and Washington D.C. is only a hop, skip, and electromagnetic jump away from Cuba.

  The Fab Four

So what are the four locations in Cuba where Beijing’s finest can listen to America’s “broadcasts”?

First up is Bejucal. It is the largest COMINT site on the island, and it has been around a long time. It has the capability to track and listen in on American satellites, and rocket launches from Florida, which the Chinese are very interested in. They invented rockets about a thousand years ago, and they like to keep up.

Then there is a new facility at El Salao, outside of the Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba, which has intercept capability ranges in the thousands of miles. This location just happens to be near a major infrastructure improvement project of the Chinese, and perhaps some of the construction engineers from China are also “engine ears” at the intercept location.

A third location is Wajay, with a dozen antennas, and they probably aren’t all tuned in to the Yankee game, although they may be listening to Yankee military communications.

The fourth is at Calabazar, and among its diverse capabilities, space communications are likely given its antennae type and array.

  Can You Hear Me Now?

Even though anything militarily or diplomatically important is going to be encrypted and therefore very difficult to understand, and fiber optic communications aren’t as easy as microwave transmissions to break into, the arcane art of traffic analysis by intelligence agencies, or in other words observing and recording the frequency (as in number of times) the location of the originating signal, and the length of the transmission provides, or can provide significant intelligence value.

Obviously, if something naughty or nice may be happening, there will be an uptick in messages and their length, which can be an indication of what that activity may be. Major military exercises, or even the reallocation of military assets as a precursor to an invasion are going to generate a lot of communication traffic.

In times of international crisis, diplomatic communication traffic is going to significantly increase in number and duration.

 Why Should You Care

China, the greatest adversary of the United States is not only upping its technology game, and significantly increasing its blue water navy, it is ramping up its intelligence efforts against our country, not only for obvious reasons such as industrial espionage and every day intelligence gathering against a potentially hostile force, but with an eye towards an upcoming direct military conflict, originating, but not necessarily limited to Taiwan and contested Pacific regions.

Especially with the incoming Trump administration that has vowed to Tariff the hell out of Chinese products, the Chinese have, besides a military interest, a significant diplomatic and economic interest in monitoring all of our communications, and Cuba is the ideal place to do that.

Of even potential greater threat, Cuba has the potential to be a staging area for Chinese military assets, and having Beijing’s bombs and boats a hundred miles from our shores, could give us pause in any negotiations with the Chinese, and in any conflict. The likelihood of this will increase the closer the world gets to a Beijing-Taiwan showdown.

Further, Cuba has been, and with Chinese assistance, can once again be a source of upheaval and regime change throughout South and Central America, via election interference, supporting of various anti-American groups within our own country, and (in an area where they are not exactly inexperienced), increasing the flow of illicit drugs within the United States.

In our previous article, we discussed why BRICS, the loose coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is currently hobbled with two larger members, Russia and China, with failing economies, and two other members, Brazil and South Africa, whose economies don’t measure up to the standards Russia and China are attempting to set.

That leaves only India as a stable, near-Western peer in terms of both an expanding economy and a government that can be trusted to lead BRICS. But why is a trustable government necessary for a leadership role?

Consider China. Its banks are wholly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The Bank of China, for example, is a state-owned Chinese corporation. There are strict regulations that investors must follow in order to withdraw funds, or to divest themselves of stakes in Chinese companies. It's not like an investor could simply call up a bank in Beijing and ask to have their millions in gold transferred to, say, Switzerland. China would forbid it, or at least, hamstring it with hundreds of regulations that any transfer would have to jump through. Currently, anyone considered a “domestic entity” (including foreigners who’ve lived in China for more than a year) are prohibited from removing funds more than $50,000. Even with that limit, these groups are still limited to using those funds for very specific applications, including training, study, travel or family support.

Despite these severe restrictions against withdrawing investments, many Western companies are doing just that. Many U.S. pension funds are already divesting themselves from Chinese companies over worries that such funds could become frozen if tensions between the two countries increase, which seems increasingly likely as the new administration comes onboard.

Then there’s the problem of Russia. It’s currently hammered by Western sanctions, and any country, even one as large and influential as China, risks being sanctioned themselves if they work with them. So despite Russia desperately wanting to be the leader of BRICS, or anything else for that matter, they’re out, too.

So, how does India look as the financial leader of BRICS? 

First of all, India is well aware that they’re walking a diplomatic tight rope between its Western allies and its desire to keep all options open by still dealing with Russia. China and Russia have both become leading buyers of Russian crude oil, as Russia has provided incentives to keep its price low and affordable. But India has angered Putin’s plans by demanding that all oil purchases have to be done in Indian rupees, rather than the Kremlin’s preference of the ruble. 

India has also angered the West by never condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is still importing weapons made by Russia, despite being a member of QUAD, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue made up of the U.S., Australia, and Japan. But the dismal showing of Russian weapons in Ukraine is making India rethink its weapons purchases. India is taking steps to pivot to the West, specifically the U.S., in its future weapons purchases. India’s percentage of its weapons purchases from Russia has fallen from 76% in 2009 to only 39% in 2023.

These competing alliances have made India’s rise to the top of BRICS problematic. And it hasn’t gotten easier with its opposition to five new members just recently added. 

As of October of 2024, four new nations have been brought under the loose BRICS umbrella:  Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. This expansion was criticized by India, who specifically did not want to see Iran included, as they’re one of the greatest proponents of chaos in the Middle East, and whose backing of Houthi rebels has sparked a volatile situation off the Indian coast. Iran’s inclusion was also one of the reasons Saudi Arabia, who was invited to join in 2023, declined to come onboard. 

Then there’s China’s desire to pull BRICS into a more anti-U.S. position, while India wants to remain a neutral block with options open to counter what it sees as a Western-dominated economic system, including the World Bank, the E.U. and the United Nations.

Then there’s the half-century of direct conflict between India and China. Dating back to the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and continuing up to 2020, when dozens of deaths were reported over a brawl near their joint border high in the Himalayas, both countries have hurled insults and claims of aggression at each other. The 1962 conflict saw 7,000 casualties on the Indian side and a chastening rebuke they have never forgotten. China, on the other hand, feels like an occasional demonstration of their military superiority will cow its neighbors. 

There’s also fierce competition between the two countries in the South China Sea and the bottleneck that is the Strait of Malacca, which is threatened by China’s expansion into the Indian Ocean. India’s 2023 offer to provide helicopters to the Philippines, itself threatened by China’s attempts to expand its influence into Philippine territorial waters, has China wondering if India could be designated as a new “troublemaker” in the area, a term Beijing normally reserves specifically for the U.S. 

These tensions between BRICS’ two largest economies means that there will be no easy path forward for the aligned countries, especially as Both China and India are wary of falling afoul of Western sanctions currently in place against Russia. There is no clear middle ground between China’s desire to make BRICS more anti-U.S., while India has yet to persuade Xi Jinping to accept a more moderate road to economic neutrality.

Assuming for a moment that a miracle does happen, and that India and China do manage to forge a joint destiny for BRICS. What would be their most immediate goal? That point is very clear: they want an official currency to rival the U.S. dollar in international holdings. 

We’ll explore that element in the next installment on this subject. 

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On Sunday November 30th, President-elect Donald Trump said on his social media platform that he was going to slap a 100% tariff on any of the BRICS countries that tried to move away from the U.S. dollar as the World’s standard currency. But what is BRICS, and what chance do they have of creating a rival currency to the dollar? Let’s look deeper into that group, and whether they’d be able to overtake the mighty dollar.

BRICS is an acronym for a group of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Together, these five countries make up more than 40% of the World’s population, and more than 25% of the World’s economy. At first, the term BRIC was just an idea formulated in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, in a study titled "Building Better Global Economic BRICs." It became a useful term to categorize the combined economic, financial, business and media influence of the four major countries of Brazil, Russia, China and India. In 2006, the concept began to be incorporated into the foreign policy of those four nations, and in 2011, on the occasion of the Third Summit, South Africa was installed as its fifth member, which completed the acronym as the current BRICS.

In the past few years, at the urging of both Russia and China, the BRICS countries have pushed to have a greater influence in world markets. Many other nations have expressed interest in joining the current group, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Ethiopia and Bolivia, among others. But there are problems within the founding five nations that need to be ironed out before any new members could be considered.

What are those problems? Well, first off, they’re significant. At the top of the list are the struggling economies of both Russia and China. 

Russia’s economy, after dealing with the sanctions resulting from its invasion of Ukraine, combined with the loss of upwards of 750,000 young men in the war and the emigration of more than a million young people after conscription was introduced, has brought on a labor shortage that has the economy teetering on the brink of collapse. The average Russian today is dealing with a staggering one-two punch of 19% inflation and a 21% prime lending rate, one of the two highest pairings in the world, after the near-freefall economies of Argentina and Turkey. 

There are reports that prices are so high on butter in Russia that they've had to place individual packages in plastic anti-theft boxes. Butter’s price has soared almost 26% in the past year, with prices on other staples like potatoes increasing even faster. And it gets worse. The value of the ruble has fallen so low that the Russian Central bank decided to stop purchasing foreign currency on the internal market until 2025, in an attempt to support the ruble. This move followed a slide in the ruble’s value of 113 to the U.S. dollar, down nearly a quarter since August of this year. 

As bad as Russia’s economy is, China’s is not doing much better. Where Russia can’t find enough workers for its jobs, causing higher wages and driving inflation skyward, China can’t find enough jobs for its workforce. Unemployment reached a sixth-month high in August at 5.3%, while the urban youth unemployment numbers rose to a staggering 17.1%, an increase of thirty percent since June’s 13% figure. 

But China’s economic woes don’t end there. They’re facing a massive problem in their real estate market, which has been propped up for years by investment from the Chinese Central Bank, but which is now either unwilling or unable to staunch the flow of massive real estate failures. Led by the catastrophic demise of the massive Evergrande corporation, China saw an evaporation of more than $300 billion in value in that company alone, much of it invested by the Chinese government, along with the life's savings of millions of average Chinese workers. 

Evergrande, however, was only the tip of the iceberg, as more large real estate corporations began to tumble, causing Goldman Sachs to ask publicly, “Has China’s Property Market Reached the Bottom?” The problem with that question is that no, the Chinese real estate market hasn't hit bottom yet, and seems to be sinking even further. This has driven down many other sectors of China’s economy, as there are more vacant homes in China than could be filled by the country’s 1.4 billion people. 

The problem is that China’s construction and housing markets are a staple of its economy. The real estate sector alone until 2021 accounted for 25 percent of China’s GDP, 20 percent of fiscal revenue, stored 70 percent of household wealth, and took in 25 percent of bank loans. As these sectors stagnate or even vanish almost overnight, as with Evergrande, so too does China’s once-vaunted economy begin to shrink. These reductions lead to the unemployment numbers mentioned above, and China so far has no answer to this growing problem.

Meanwhile, both China and Russia have upside down population pyramids, meaning a larger number of older pensioners being supported by a smaller number of younger wage-earners. In China, the economy is seeing an unprecedented era of ‘growing old before getting rich,’ while its falling birthrate and pension crisis, combined with its ongoing housing crisis, has many older workers and retirees clamoring for the government to rescue them from ever worsening conditions. 

If neither China nor Russia can be the economic leader of BRICS, who will step forward? Not Brazil, nor South Africa. Brazil’s economy is too small, and is based on the extraction of raw materials, not the strength of its economic production. And South Africa is itself dealing with numerous problems, from soaring crime rates to its extreme level of economic inequality. 

That leaves only one country: India. And in our next article, we’ll explore why India will not rise to the leadership that BRICS so desperately needs.