full disclosure, Steve Bassett, John Lear

December 7, 2003

John Lear Briefing Scenario Redux

The John Lear Briefing Scenario: Why the Answer is "Yes."

Stephen Bassett

Washington, DC - On November 12, 2003, researcher and accomplished aviator, John Lear, appeared on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. John Lear is a most interesting man, and it was a most interesting evening.

The son of the famous creator of the Lear Jet, William Lear, John is a former Lockheed L-1011 Captain. He has flown over 150 test aircraft and has received every certification granted by the Federal Aviation Administration. He also holds 18 world speed records and has worked for 28 different Aircraft Corporations. During the late 1960's, 1970's and early 1980's he was a contract pilot for the CIA.

From 1985 to 1992 John plunged into a personal investigation of extraterrestrial related phenomena. He was a friend of Robert Lazar and was on hand when Lazar broke with his Area 51 employer and began speaking out about extraordinary craft of possible extraterrestrial origin being worked on at that facility.

After seven years of research Lear stepped back from the fray admitting he was frustrated and burned out. He had paid a heavy price for his efforts, losing two jobs and receiving various intimidation. His research was conducted during the last years of the Cold War, when the United States government was fully intent on maintaining the "cover-up," and few insiders were breaking ranks. Lear went public with his overall findings and then withdrew from the field and the limelight. The legacy of Lear's work lived on in mail lists and websites. Eleven years passed. Then he turned up on Art Bell with a message.

The message was in the form of a question and has come to be referred to as the John Lear Briefing Scenario. It has been circulated extensively on the Internet. Lear asked Art to pretend the U.S. Government had selected Art Bell to make the disclosure decision after being fully briefed on the facts surrounding the extraterrestrial presence. As it happens, John had presented the same scenario to me the night before his appearance on Coast to Coast AM with Bell. If these are the facts, do you authorize disclosure to the people - yay or nay?

I answered, "yes." Bell answered, "no." Lear agreed with Bell.

Art's response was consistent with the position he has held on disclosure and repeated on his program over the years - the truth regarding the extraterrestrial presence is too disturbing and too dangerous for public consumption and should be withheld until such time as the government feels the public can deal with the facts. And to his credit, Art acknowledged some would find this position conflicted for a man who had devoted years developing a program dedicated to providing alternative information to its listeners. But that's the way he felt.

I requested an opportunity to come on Coast to Coast AM with Art or George Noory and offer the reasons why the answer to John Lear's Briefing Scenario must be "yes." In the meantime, here are the arguments for a "yes" response to the Lear Briefing Scenario.

First we need to consider the matter of "secondhand information" (or thirdhand, fourth-hand…). In criminal law it is referred to as "hearsay," and most of you know it is not admissible in court except under specific circumstances. What someone tells you may or may not be true - and that extends to extraterrestrials. Just because they have really, really hot vehicles and can pass through walls, doesn't mean they can't lie.

There are many scenarios. Just about every researcher has one - a well intentioned effort to describe the "big picture." It's irresistible. You draw on everything you have heard, read and seen, and much of it is secondhand.

To be fair, in John Lear's posited scenario you are asked to assume the information to be absolutely true, then make your decision. This is fine for the purpose of a thought experiment. In the non-experimental, real world it is not practical. In making a decision of such magnitude the truth or falsity of the information is of no small importance.

For those, then, who wish to use this scenario as a basis for making the real world argument against disclosure, consider this: after 56 years of research in the modern era of ufology, there are a few certainties you can take to the bank. Two of these are: 1) there is an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race, and 2) no one in the field of extraterrestrial related phenomena research/activism knows the big picture. No one has it right. If they are well intentioned and paying attention, they very likely have some of it right, a piece here and there. And if you took all the correct pieces from all the researchers, you might have a mosaic which came close to the truth.

And the reason this is so is that everyone's big picture, however awful or sanguine, is composed in large measure of secondhand information, hearsay, and much of it is simply not true. Not true because of government dispensed disinformation, well intentioned misinterpretation, outright hoaxes by private parties, simple mistake, delusion and even alien mendacity.

Thus it is that any decision to delay the truth process based upon any posited scenario has the profound deficiency of being based upon a substantial portion of false information. In other words, because of the cover-up it is not possible to establish a fully valid scenario. Without a valid scenario we cannot decide to end the cover-up. This is not a circular argument the human race can afford.

Without the comfort of a valid big picture scenario, it is necessary to fall back upon first principals. There are many, but one stands out. Does the human race wish to move forward in ignorance and fear driven by government imposed information embargoes or advance with as much truth as can be wrung from science, common sense and government files?

There have been many arguments put forth in many forums for disclosure. They would fill a dozen articles. Most of you have read or heard many over the years. Let's take another tack. For those who may feel this response has been begging the question, let's take the heart of John Lear's Briefing Scenario and answer it piece by piece.

[Lear] So here's what happened, Art. We'll use some videos and stills. Our first UFO recoveries were in the late '30s. We made a couple in the beginning of the '40s and then came Roswell, which the public found out about.

[Bassett] The Roswell case already approaches a 100% public awareness quotient in the U.S. and is considered a likely crashed UFO by a majority of Americans. Learning there were other crashed vehicles will be much like learning other U.S. corporations are cooking their books.

[Lear] We got 2 live aliens from Roswell. One died shortly there after and one lived till 1956. And we found out so far there are 18 different alien species that we know about monitoring Earth.

[Bassett] Fifty percent of the polled public already believes some UFOs are alien craft with aliens in them. Eighteen species? This is probably preferable to one species. It only confirms the galaxy to be teeming with life. The human race is one of eighteen (hundreds? thousands? millions?) of sentient life forms. They know about you, but you don't know about them, because a small cabal of men operating in secret believe they know what is best for the rest of humanity.

[Lear] Some are good and some are hostile, most are indifferent.

[Bassett] This describes every nation's tourists. No one would expect it to be otherwise.

[Lear] We found out that we are the experimental product, if you will, of an alien race who we never met and we don't know who they are.

[Bassett] The implication is genetic engineering and not the creation of life itself by aliens from inorganic matter, which if true, would be challenging, but in either case is not provable.

[Lear] All we know is that the Grays are cybernetic organisms, glorified robots if you will, who work here at the behest of their employers monitoring us through abductions.

[Bassett] A cybernetic organism was just elected the Governor of California. The issue of abductions is now in the public domain. A good case can me made that more damage will occur to abductees, if the truth process is delayed.

[Lear] We were never able to find out what the experiment is all about except that we have been externally corrected about 65 times. And they, the aliens, refer to us as "Containers." There's been speculation that the souls our bodies contain are the reason for the experiments. But nothing's been proven or determined.

[Bassett] The scenario itself states that soul "containers" are a matter of "speculation," and not "proven" or "determined." On such speculation is the most important information in human history to be withheld from 99.9999% of the human race? We have been corrected 65 times? Good. One can only imagine how bad human behavior might be if there had been no corrections.

[Lear] Since 1938 we've lost over 200 aircraft due to UFO hostilities and thousands of soldiers in all kinds of different actions with aliens. Since that time several hundred thousand civilians have disappeared with no trace.

[Bassett] We lost more aircraft in World War II, and at least the families knew why. Several hundred thousand civilians have disappeared in that time frame without alien assistance. Missing people, while tragic, is not new or shocking.

[Lear] Several thousand of those were eliminated by us because of their chance encounters with the aliens which we could ill afford to have publicized.

[Bassett] This would be a bitter pill. However, since "us" means that humans committed these atrocities and not "all powerful aliens," the disclosure process would open the way to ending such actions.

[Lear] A slightly more frightening phenomena known as "human mutilations" have occurred on a regular basis and are similar to "cattle mutilations". In that the human or humans are taken from the street, so to speak, and returned to the same area about 45 minutes to an hour later with their rectums cored out, their genitals removed, eyes removed from their sockets, and completely drained of blood. In all cases it appeared that the mutilation procedures occurred while the persons were still alive and conscious. One of our scientists speculates that apparently the human specimens had to be alive for the samples to be worth anything.

[Bassett] This is perhaps the least likely segment of the scenario to be valid. However, if true, it would be a challenge to the public perception of safety and create serious questions regarding the social contract. It is also true we can't stop terrorism and will likely live with it indefinitely. Who would advocate withholding all information of terrorist threats from the public in order to keep them calm? Thus, when large planes fly through office windows, the mess would be cleaned up and all would quickly dismiss the event as odd but unworthy of explanation? More importantly, who can truly estimate the defensive power of 260 million people focused on specific measures? Further, these kinds of "awful truth" examples are predicated on aliens as not simply "all powerful," but "godlike." If this were true, one might wonder why it is that such all powerful, godlike beings have a disconcerting habit of crashing to the ground, being picked up by military retrieval teams and hauled off to secret bases dead on arrival?

[Lear] Abductions occur on a daily basis throughout the United States to at least 10% of the population.

[Bassett] The 10% figure would raise some eyebrows, but the abduction phenomenon is being discussed on Oprah Winfrey. Again, it is assumed that total awareness of such a circumstance by an entire nation offers no relief. Such a case has not been made in this scenario.

[Lear] When we were first made aware this we protested to the little gray being we had held in captivity at the YY-2 facility in Los Alamos, but a deal was struck that in exchange for advanced technology from the aliens we would allow them to abduct a very small number of persons and we would periodically be given a list of those persons abducted. We got something less than the technology we bargained for and found the abductions exceeded by a million fold than what we had naively agreed to.

[Bassett] Sounds a little like the NAFTA deal. Thanks to the need to maintain the cover-up, much of the technology is being withheld from full public use. Thus, the public gets shortchanged twice. The people will be angry. They will want to replace some government personnel. It's about time.

[Lear] In 1954, President Eisenhower met with a representative of another alien species at Muroc Test Center, which is now called Edwards Air Force Base. This alien suggested that they could help us get rid of the Grays but Eisenhower turned down their offer because they offered no technology.

[Bassett] Perhaps a well informed public might persuade another president to take that deal.

[Lear] At this point it became apparent to all involved that there was no such thing as a God, at least how the public perceives God. Certainly some form of computer recorder stores information and an occasional miracle is displayed by the aliens to influence a religious event.

[Bassett] The implication here is that this information would cause people to turn away from God. It is more likely to turn people toward God "It became apparent" is not exactly a convincing measure of certitude. Many things will become apparent to many people, assuming, of course, they are included. The influencing of religion would be an interesting component. It would take far more specifics than what is presented here to sway committed members of formal religions. And alien miracles aside, unless these fine off-planet beings can explain their whereabouts prior to the big bang, those comfortable with a creator god will have no trouble incorporating these interfering imps into their faith.

[Lear] This so unnerved Eisenhower that he had "In God We Trust" put on paper money and coins and put in the Pledge of Allegiance to reaffirm the public belief in God. Shortly after this it was determined in meetings between the US and the Russians that the situation was serious enough that a cold war should be manufactured as a ruse to divert attention of the public away from UFOs towards some other scary threat like the H-bomb. It was also decided to keep the ruse secret from any elected or appointed officials within both the US and Russian governments as it took so long to vet these officials and the ruse was easier to manage if the top people didn't know about it.

[Bassett] A manufactured war? Has there been any other kind? One might consider a disclosure process aiming to put the government back into truth business and break down the walls of the secret empire, would be a good start toward preventing more "manufactured" wars and other edifices of government propaganda and manipulation. How does encouraging and expanding the "black world" decrease the disruption of the actions of the "black world?" This is akin to not telling someone they have cancer in order to spare them the anxiety, while a cure is available to save them.

[Lear] In the late 1950's NASA was formed to compartmentalize, containerize, and sanitize information from all space platforms and vehicles. We sold NASA to the public claiming that all information would belong to them but they got very little and even that was highly sanitized.

[Bassett] The dilemma and corruption of NASA is being dissected on several hundred websites. Again, only disclosure will open the door to reforming this agency.

[Lear] Our first efforts were to keep the public from learning about Venus. A very similar planet to Earth and it's population is very similar to us and just as technologically advanced. We have learned a lot from them. Starting with the Russian Venera 1 and US Mariner 2, we made Venus look like a lead melting, volcanic surface, spewing sulfuric acid into a pressurized atmosphere 90 times that of Earth. And as often the case we overdid it, and we wondered why nobody asked how a parachute survived a descent into 800-degree air.

[Bassett] Certainly, present life on another planet would be profoundly exciting. But given the 25-year public interest in Mars artifacts, a populated Venus might be anticlimactic. Again, the public has clearly shown its belief that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft piloted by extraterrestrials. If some are Venusians, this does not add much to their charisma. Should they be Venus bound and not space faring, they would just be our harmless neighbors.

[Lear] We set up operations in Pine Gap, Australia to preclude any prying eyes figuring out what we were up to. We regularly eliminated through extreme prejudice anybody who was part of the operation and made the least little tiny threat about disclosure or dissatisfaction with the operation.

[Bassett] Again, these are the actions of humans which disclosure might prevent in the future.

[Lear] Any space mission that included Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Mariner, Voyager, Clementine, and all the rest. All data initially came transmitted to Pine Gap then it was relayed to JPL or wherever after sanitizing. We had a little trouble with amateur radio operators but we figured out how they could intercept these signals but we managed to deal with that.

[Bassett] Sequestered transmissions and the treatment of space data as classified is generally known, and the public assumes the government operates this way.

[Lear] When the Russian threat began to fade we introduced Vietnam which kept the public occupied for over ten years. The cover up and personnel to run the operation began to get bigger and bigger and required more and more money. We were forced to inflate the defense budget, which soon not enough. Then we got into the drug business which was still not enough. We were the ones that looted the savings and loan industry and Wall Street to boot.

[Bassett] The tragedy of Vietnam, expanding black budget, growing defense expenditures, government involvement in drug smuggling and the savings and loan fiasco are all known to the public and were covered by the media. They are all outrageous in their own right. Learning they were tied in some way to alternative agendas such as the UFO cover-up may increase, but will not multiply, the outrage.

[Lear] It is so out of control now most people want immunity and want out.

[Bassett] Good. Grant them immunity and let them out.

[Lear] But there is so much secrecy and so many double and triple blinds in place that it's unlikely that this thing can ever be dismantled.

[Bassett] The question presented by the scenario was to disclose or not to disclose. It was not about how difficult the truth process would be. Life is difficult. Good government is difficult. Major change is difficult. Failure to rise to the difficult is how nations and empires fall. Abraham Lincoln believed America could only fall from the inside, not form outside forces. Such an outcome could only be accomplished with intense secrecy and systemic lying - exactly the circumstances evolving since 1947.

[Lear] And even if you give us the go ahead to spill the beans to the public it's unlikely they will get anything more than "yes, we recovered a flying saucer and yes, there was an occupant" but that's all we're gonna tell ya.

[Bassett] Ah, but this is exactly the definition of disclosure: the formal acknowledgment of the extraterrestrial presence. Whatever else is learned is between the people and the government. It is a political process. There are no guarantees, and the public might, contrary to the fundamental tenet of this scenario, go right back to sleep - hit the snooze button. But they must have that choice.

[Lear] So go ahead and roll the tape for Mr. Bell. What you see here is what human mutilations look like. That one was a male about 27 years old. That one is film of dead aliens being pulled from the wreckage of a craft that crashed in Olancha, California in the '50s. That craft you see over there was over 250ft. in diameter and had to be buried on the spot. That site is in Utah near Dugway Proving Grounds. The object you're looking at now is the as the Kecksburg Acorn which was brought to Wright Patt in the middle '60s. There's Frank Drake trying to force information out of a being tied down to a stretcher. He was supposedly from Tao Ceti.

[Bassett] Unless the production values are very good, this film is going straight to video. Most kids today will find the video record doesn't measure up to the special effects standards of last year's game cube.

[Lear] These pictures you're looking at now are structures on the Moon. That's the tower in Sinus Medii and it's over seven miles tall. And that thing over there is what we call the Colossus of Oguram(sp) in Mare Crisium. We don't know what it does but the machine itself is bigger than Brooklyn, New York. Now those are videos of the domes covering the craters. As you can see, some are in a very advanced state of decay.

[Bassett] This is old news. These issues have been in play for three decades. In general, artifacts on the Moon or Mars representing long past entities are the safest and least disruptive kind of information the public can learn.

[Lear] These are 5 second slides of the 18 different alien species we are looking at. That one there is the most gruesome looking. The guards at one facility are carefully indoctrinated over several months being shown pictures similar to but not exactly like the alien. Only when he'd been acclimatized, so to speak, of the horrible looking beings are they allowed to stand in security positions. Before these acclimatizations were done, we had two guards die of a heart attack as the aliens came down the hallway unexpectedly.

[Bassett] That's what happens when you don't tell people what is going on. The cover-up is scarier than the truth. Since the aliens can pretty much come and go as they please, it might be nice if the people knew they were here, just to keep those heart attacks to a minimum should they decide to drop in unannounced on the Larry King Show.

[Lear] And this last clip is of the Kennedy assassination. You've heard of the second gunman theory? Well, this is the second camera that recorded exactly what happened and we had 4 gunmen. And the bottom line was that Kennedy had to go. He insisted on releasing what little alien information we had told him about and he was trying to withdraw troops from Vietnam which we were using as a diversion for the public.

[Bassett] The only people upset about this will be the legion of authors with Kennedy conspiracy books in galleys with the wrong theory. The public will appreciate finally knowing the truth. Actually, multiply that appreciation by all the truths to be found, once the fear of looking is put aside.

[Lear] After Kennedy we never told any President anything. Nixon knew because he was briefed as VP in 1952. That's how we knew where to take Jackie Gleason to Homestead Air Force Base to see the alien bodies we had in storage there.

[Bassett] What an odd America the secrecy cabal wants - a place where the greatest scientists in the world must be kept in the dark for their own good, while a television comic gets to see alien bodies. While this is compatible with a paradigm where Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes governor of California and Dennis Miller has to ward off demands he run for the Senate, do you really want to say "no" to disclosure and maintain such a status quo?

There you have it. When you break it down, it doesn't seem so frightening, does it? Other scenarios are out there. Break them down as well. The answer will be the same.

No disrespect is aimed at John Lear. All of these responses are debatable. But at the core of the most profound transition in history is a question being asked of every living human, whether they are as yet aware or not: do you want to build your life and your nation with truths or lies?

History has been quite consistent on the outcomes. Those who choose lies are diminished or even destroyed. Those who choose truths persevere or even flourish.