"In praise of shadows"

“It is not for anyone to understand how the world works. It is!” Harald Malmgren

“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense”.. Carl Sagan.

In life there are powerful forces at work seen and unseen. You may have survived a hurricane or a tornado and know its fury but one never really feels gravity under your feet. Welcome to a new day of curiosity Wakers and Bakers. Wake and Bake returned this year with “You can’t handle the truth”. The drone/orb/ ufo controversy had illuminated the headlines in the Northeast and the discussion was front page news. The new administration was making promises about releasing information about the history of the UAP encounters along with the mystery tapes of heroes and villains. The world did not fly off the axis after the JFK, MLK, RFK and Epstein files were released. Unfortunately there has not been much progress on the UAP front. The Wizard’s curtain has not fallen. The drones have not flown away.

Our cultural world, the world of American and European Liberalism, has vacillated emotionally for the last 75 years over this issue. Do we really want to explore the cosmic world in a scientific way? Or do we prefer an emotionally naive vision of an unexplainable expression of hope and horror? The messaging that cinema has presented since Roswell in 1947, is the reflection of that zeitgeist. The 1950’s were full of horror UFO movies. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tbe War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still provided messages of horror. It would not be a surprise to see CIA money behind those films. The CIA came shortly into being after Roswell and one Richard Bissell climbed on board as the deputy director for the next 15 years. He oversaw the creation of Area 51, our most secretive air base, and was the architect of the U-2 spy plane program. Ignominiously he oversaw the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 which eventually did cost him his position. However, there was no one more involved in all the clandestine, and still secret, advanced technology programs than Richard Bissell.

The 2023 movie “Oppenheimer” revealed the story behind the Manhattan project and our development of the hydrogen bomb. No one knew who Oppenheimer was except for one percent of the country. Most of our history has been directed by people we never knew like Richard Bissell. In 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission and President Eisenhower created DARPA , the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That agency is dedicated to space technology and ballistic missile defense. The first director was Lawrence Gise who is better know as Jeff Bezos grandfather. These secretive agencies are so compartmentalized that no one group knows what the other group is doing. Except for the unseen directors. Bissell and Gise worked side by side during the most tumultuous time of the Cold War era.

In 1962 we were building rockets to send astronauts into space at the same time we were attaching those rocket to 400 kiloton hydrogen bombs that we exploded 25 miles above the earth. We flew our first flight into space in May of 1961 and exploded nuclear warheads over the Pacific in the summer of 1962. Into all of this stepped Harald Malmgren, a protege of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for President Kennedy. He was only 27, a genius, and he became a trusted inner circle advisor to President Kennedy and many future presidents. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Ambassador Malmgren debated General Curtis Lemay about bombing Russia. He is widely credited with deescalating the internal conflicts inside the President’s cabinet meetings. He recently died in February 2025. He became a whistleblower on X of his extraordinary knowledge in the last years of his life.

The most striking revelation he offered was that he handled the debris of a UFO crash. He was given the debris by DARPA director Lawrence Gise. He revealed that the entire upper echelon of Kennedy’s cabinet was aware of the crash which resulted from the BlueGill nuclear test in 1962. That included Richard Bissell, General Lemay, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Allen Dulles and other cabinet officials. There was knowledge, in some parts of government, about the existence of these extra terrestrial objects. Malmgren wrote that JFK, through his time in Naval intelligence, was well aware of our UFO program before he took office. He presented the idea that JFK was assassinated because he wanted to work with the Soviets and disclose the UFO program. Ironically, his last X post was a repost of the trailer for Stephen Spielberg’s new film Disclosure. Malmgren confirmed what many suspected. There are people in the shadows who are running parts of our government without constraint.

There have been some startling revelations the last few months. None of them have been because the Trump team has opened the vault. Those revelations are coming from open science and respectable first hand reports. Those scientists and brave whistleblowers remind me of the hopeful messaging in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Contact and Arrival in 2016. Those stories presented the positive visions of scientists dedicated to finding the truth. We have created the technology to look into space and explore distant galaxies. Carl Sagan would be the archetype for that hero scientist and his words continue to inspire our curiosity.

Recently the James Webb telescope reported data from an exo planet, a mere 124 light years away, consistent with a biosignature. In short, there is a chemical fingerprint, that the telescope’s spectrometer detected, indicating the presence of chemical compounds that are consistent with the biological process of life. That is a complicated way of saying something is alive up there. Secondly there was a release of official US naval video of close encounters with transmedium craft. That means they can fly into and out of the water with apparent ease. This video was released from the 2023 incident with the USS JACKSON off the coast of California. The first hand reporting from a 23 year veteran confirmed what naval officers also saw from the USS Nimitz in 2004. There were no heat plumes. There were no exhaust fumes. There were objects in the sky that performed unexplainable movements. And lastly Harald Malmgren testified to his daughter that “Bissell told my Dad - “because you’ll need to pass it along in the future at the right time”. Richard Bissell confirmed to him that the biologics of extra terrestrials were found in the wreckage of the Roswell crash site.

A few months ago three young men waited with two old men for a gondola ride to the top of the ski mountain. They were asked what they did for a living and two explained they worked for the Air Force at Lackenheath Air Force Base in England. The US has an entire Air Force wing stationed there. The young men did not expect the stoned old man to say “ Hey, what about those fucking orbs you have at Lackenheath”. You would have thought they swallowed a Big Mac. Eyes bulged and voices uneasily said “we do not know what they are, they are not ours but we think we may have an idea of what they are”. It is 75 years since Roswell and we are still dealing with shadows and vaults. In Space Odyssey 2001 Kubrick suggested that one day the Monolith will reveal the truth. Can we handle the revelation that hope and horror are two sides of the same coin?

Peace to Everyone

Song of the Week: Space Oddity, the only single on the 1969 album by David Bowie. Same year we went to the moon. ….

There were hundreds of men who worked on rockets without knowledge of another group of working on nuclear bombs. But there were unelected leaders, deputy directors, who were the real architects of American power in the 1950’s. They were nameless bureaucrats ,with incredible power, who executed policy with money, research and engineers. They were sharpened by their World War Two experiences and were determined to remake the world in the American image. They guarded their knowledge ferociously.