US DISCLOSURE: Why Do I Keep Publishing These Documents While Criticizing Them?

Following a comment posted under one of my recent articles, I thought it would be useful to clarify my approach for all of the blog’s readers.

Some readers are surprised to see me sharing videos, reports, and documents from the recent wave of U.S. “disclosure” while taking a particularly critical look at their content. To some, this may even seem contradictory: why publish documents that I myself consider unconvincing?

The answer is simple. My goal is not to promote a belief or defend a predetermined conclusion. On the contrary, I try to examine the material that is made public, archive it, put it into context, and, above all, assess its evidentiary value.

I consider this so-called “disclosure” an interesting phenomenon to document, not because it necessarily provides evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, but because it is having a profound influence on public debate and on the UFO community. Ignoring these publications would be a mistake. Accepting them without critical examination would be another.

The response below was originally intended for a reader of the blog, but it sums up my position on the subject fairly well. I am therefore reproducing it here in a more general form, since it addresses several questions I am regularly asked.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Mr. C, I take note of your opinions.

You may have noticed that I publish your comments when they are constructive, but I moderate them when you resort to ad hominem attacks against individuals (that is not acceptable).

I get the impression that you did not read my lengthy response to your first comment. It is possible that you are not notified when I reply to a post because, technically speaking, this blog is not exactly state-of-the-art—but it was the best affordable solution I could find.

You do not seem to realize how much work I put into publishing documents whose evidentiary value is extremely limited because of the lack of data, while you systematically criticize some of my posts without providing a shred of supporting evidence yourself.

Regarding [[R2] DOW-UAP-PR050], your arguments about speed do not take into account the distance to the object being tracked, the zoom level of the military sensor, or the movement of the platform filming it. You seem to overlook the effects of parallax. The problem is that these videos have extremely limited documentary value and do not allow us to establish the nature of the phenomenon being observed. When credible hypotheses can account for what we are seeing, that undermines the more extraordinary hypothesis you seem inclined to defend.

These documents have very little substance—redactions being what they are—and their level of strangeness is so low that they have generated more disappointment than excitement among a large part of the community. This “disclosure” has not lived up to the hype, at least so far.

You talk about skepticism as though it were a dirty word, whereas in my view, applying doubt and proposing reasonable hypotheses are the only ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. I am not skeptical for the sake of being skeptical. After twenty years of investigations, I have learned that conclusions drawn from incomplete data need to be treated with caution.

You do not seem to understand that giving credibility to redacted documents (in other words, documents whose underlying data have been withheld) does not help your case—not in the slightest. Faith may not need evidence, but science needs data. Cultivating doubt and critical thinking is not pointless, because the day a skeptic is able to provide evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation, that person will be infinitely more credible than a whistleblower believer who is simply offering their personal opinion.

Incidentally, that is precisely what is happening in the United States right now: what is being presented as “disclosure” is, in reality, little more than the partial release of private documents with the data needed to analyze them removed. This feeds belief far more than it advances knowledge. I do not wish to contribute to that confusion.

Pascal GUILLAUMES
[version française]