Political Issues Have Lobbyists And Now UAP Disclosure Does Too!

politico  |  As calls in Congress for continued UFO research and disclosures from the federal government grow louder, a new group aims to harness and legitimize grassroots pressure from outside the halls of power to do the same. The effort is being led by Nick Gold, a Baltimore-based media and tech consultant who has worked with the Galileo Project, a Harvard-affiliated project searching for evidence of aliens, and the think tank Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

— Gold registered to lobby last week on behalf of Declassify UAP, which Gold said in an interview he hopes will bring the issue of UFO advocacy into the mainstream by tapping into traditional political grassroots strategies.

— “As I’ve been kind of involved with some of these more scientific approaches looking into the topic, I really started to perceive a hole in how this topic is kind of handled in our society,” he told PI.

— Part of that, he conceded, can be attributed to “a lot of strong and sometimes strange personalities that kind of suck a lot of the air out of the UFO/UAP issue.” But, Gold argued, there also hasn’t been enough coordination among the “millions of people who were very fascinated with this topic and wanted to see some kind of governmental congressional progress around it.”

— “It never really transformed in 75 years of this being a public issue into an actual quote-unquote issue that we address as citizens in the way through our representatives and our democracy and our government and the way that we attack other issues,” Gold added, arguing that for nearly every other policy issue imaginable, the launch of a group like his would typically be a no-brainer. For now, Declassify UAP is structured as an LLC, with Gold putting up all of the funding himself and mulling merch sales or support from interested donors down the line.

— Declassify UAP will aim to bridge that gap, by serving as a repository for various resources on the issue, from congressional testimony to recent government reports and presentations as well as information about relevant pending legislation and a voter engagement platform to send letters to lawmakers. Ideally, Gold said, that will create a nonpartisan grassroots army of “informed UFO-interested citizen[s]” — rather than just UFO enthusiasts, he said, which would then offer political cover for lawmakers pursuing the issue in Congress.

— “If there is a hump there, it’s hard to imagine us going over the hump without … a much louder and clearer and more unified and very specifically articulated way of coming together to make these asks,” he said.

— That’s why the group’s advocacy will be narrowly focused on “reasonable” set of declassifications from what is presumed to be classified information about UFOs, Gold said, which would pave the way for “real scientific progress” that’s currently hindered by a lack of funding, while trying to avoid alienating policymakers. “We need to be very open-minded, and simultaneously, we need to be very discerning,” he said.