Stephen Bassett | Disclosure or Deep State Deception? | Part 1 of 2

Last year's gargantuan $2.3 trillion appropriations bill did a couple very obvious things: It provided millions of Americans badly needed coronavirus relief aid and it averted an impending government shutdown. It also dealt with ... UFOs. The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law, was a bureaucratic nesting doll that ran more than 5,500 pages and contained the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which itself carried an unusual provision in its "committee comment" section, beneath the understated heading "Advanced Aerial Threats." The stipulation mandates that the director of national intelligence work with the secretary of defense on a report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects -- known in agency lingo as "unidentified aerial phenomena" or "anomalous aerial vehicles." It must be made public, and when it is, it will be big, former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said in a recent interview. "Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public," Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Friday. The report must include "detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence" gathered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, the provision reads. When Trump approved the spending package on Dec. 27, a 180-day countdown began, giving intelligence officials until June to deliver lawmakers their write-up. "The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications," he said. "The American people deserve to be informed." The increasingly vocal crowd of space watchers is eagerly awaiting the forthcoming intelligence agency report. Some of them say that studying UFOs is essential to the country's security. In a July interview with Miami's CBS4 News, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said the prospect that something otherworldly is behind the flying objects does not concern him as much as the idea that a U.S. adversary could be making secret technological advances. "The bottom line is if there are things flying over your military bases and you don't know what they are because they aren't yours and they are exhibiting -- potentially -- technologies that you don't have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into," Rubio said. Others have argued that the research has been equated with claims of extraterrestrial life and unfairly written off as kooky science fiction. In the Fox News interview, Ratcliffe described the sightings this way: "We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom." "There's actually quite a few of those," he added. "And I think that that information is being gathered and will be put out in a way the American people can see." Is it Disclosure or is it the Deep State?