John Burroughs, retired from the Air Force Reserves, presented CONFIRMATION TRUMPS DISCLOSURE at the 2016 Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. DVDs are available from Ozark Mountain Publishing: https://goo.gl/zNFfMq.

Confirmation of the existence and nature of the phenomenon, is a crucial and important conceptual distinction from ‘Disclosure’ of the facts, whatever they may be, as called for by Disclosure advocates. Confirmation trumps Disclosure. The former admits to a person having the ability to explain and to discourse with the Interviewer, and is active; Disclosure is a passive process and contains little intellectual content. While many in Industry and Government are witting…few are really honest…or give time willingly to the subject. I will be presenting the results of my active FOIA request program and my analysis of MOD Technical Memorandum 55/2/00.

Disclosure is a dead letter! There is an alternative paradigm to move forward An event needs to be seen as a non-threatening means to maintain the ”orderly functions of the body politic” while admitting that we are not alone. That event is described as Confirmation. First of all it is politically workable. Secondly, it has already occurred. What if a major world government decided to declassify and release its archive of UFO files and it turned out that some of this material was classified UK “secret”? Does all this sound too good to be true? Well, here’s the thing: it is true. All this has already happened. Project Condign a Secret report released by the British MOD in 2006.

To start with, the MOD admitted there is a real phenomenon, not a weather aberration at the root of the sightings reports data. The British Ministry of Defense is also withholding high-level UFO public policy papers, along with other key information, despite the public stance that all material has been transferred to the National Archives. According to the National Archives web page dated 21 June 2013 that stated they had today released its tenth and final tranche of UFO files, containing 4,400 pages of UFO policy, correspondence and UFO sighting reports covering the final two years of the Ministry of Defense’s UFO Desk (from late 2007 until November 2009). This seeming act of transparency was apparently a ruse, as FOIA requests by Burroughs have revealed two further versions of the truth.

In an initial response the MOD admitted the existence of 5 crucial UFO/UAP public policy papers which have NOT been released. According to that version UFO/UAP Policy papers dating from 1971 through 2004 have been held back. These papers contain the MOD public information policy for over three decades, including a change from the use of the term ‘UFO’ to ‘UAP’, in June of 2000. The change would allow the MOD to make the claim that no further information on the UFO is being held, while maintaining information on the UAP.