"Why Are We Hiding It From The Public?" - Five Takeaways From Congressional UFO Hearing

 On Wednesday a bipartisan group of lawmakers hosted a congressional hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), where witnesses testified on potential threats to national security from incursions into US airspace.

Led by Nancy Mace (R-SC) and hosted by the House Oversight Committee, the hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth" featured former DoD official Luis Elizondo, former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships Michael Gold, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet.

The group discussed ongoing interest by congressional lawmakers into UAPs, as well as NASA's potential role in reporting sightings, the origins of the alleged aircraft, and the Pentagon's ongoing coverup into UAP documents and materials.

"One of Congress’s most important responsibilities is oversight of the executive branch in general and the military and intelligence community in particular," said Shellenberger, who think that the government is unconstitutionally usurping congressional authority by withholding the information.

According to the Epoch Times, here are five takeaways from the hearing:

1. Ongoing Bipartisan Interest From Congress

The bipartisan UAP caucus—Mace, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), Rep. Anna Paulina (R-Fla.), Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.)—were joined by other House members on Wednesday for the nearly two and a half hour hearing.

Mace, concerned that the U.S. government is withholding UAP materials it has officially compiled since the 1940s, said Congress and the public deserve to know what the government’s taxpayer-funded research on the topic has yielded, even if they are dead ends.

“If we’re spending money on something that doesn’t exist, why are we spending the money? And if it does exist, why are we hiding it from the public?” Mace asked. She said national security is at stake if those objects are the technology of foreign adversaries.

The possibility that some UAP, including those in videos released by the Pentagon, could be foreign technology, was echoed by Ogles.

“It is clear, from my experience and what I’ve seen, that there is something out there. The question is, ‘Is it ours, is it someone else’s, or is it otherworldly?’” Ogles asked.

Any attempts to restrict Congress from gaining access to that information would be criminal, he added.

The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is tasked with studying and cataloging UAP reports, has hundreds of sightings that remain “uncharacterized and unattributed” while displaying “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said.

“Now, we shouldn’t prejudge what they might be. I’m certainly not going to. We need evidence that we are detecting things, and we know that we don’t understand them, and this is worth investigating,” he added.

2. Elizondo Testifies

Elizondo, one of the key witnesses at the hearing, is famous for feeding the story of the Pentagon’s former UFO program to The New York Times in 2017.

That article resulted in a resurgence of public interest and media reporting on UFOs, and was accompanied by several Department of Defense fighter jet videos that purportedly showed unidentified craft.

One video, titled “GOFAST,” showed a tic-tac-shaped craft, which some have speculated to be an advanced drone. One of the pilots who followed the craft when it was spotted in 2004, Commander David Fravor, testified at last year’s congressional UAP hearing that he believed the craft was superior to both contemporary military tech and anything we are “looking to develop in the next 10-plus years.”

Elizondo said on Wednesday that some UAP are “advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government” but that both the United States and its adversaries are in possession of “UAP technologies.”

“I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies,” he said.

Elizondo has claimed since 2017 that he was previously the director of the Pentagon’s 2009 UFO program, which was officially called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program.

The Pentagon has said this program, sometimes referred to as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), officially ended in 2012, but that an unofficial group of Pentagon researchers used the AATIP name moving forward. Elizondo says he was the director of AATIP.

“Luis Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities for AATIP while assigned to OUSD(I) [Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence],” Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told The Epoch Times.

3. NASA’s Role in UAP Reporting

Gold, who was also a member of NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team, told Congress that commercial airline pilots need an official database to report potential UAP sightings. He suggested that his former employer’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) is a good place to start.

“This system, which is administered by NASA and funded by the FAA, provides a confidential means for reporting of safety violations in a voluntary and non-punitive manner,” Gold said. “Over 47 years, the ASRS has collected nearly 2 million reports. ASRS is the perfect tool to collect UAP data, which could then be collated by NASA and shared with the public at large.”

NASA is already one of the most respected U.S. agencies, Gold added, which gives it a unique position in reestablishing the public’s trust in the government and UAP.

“For relatively little cost and effort, NASA could create an AI [artificial intelligence] or ML [machine learning] algorithm that could search the agency’s archives for anomalous phenomena.”

4. Aliens, Drones, or Something Else?

While this year’s UAP hearing was lighter on speculations of non-human intelligence, the topic was still addressed.

Mace probed Elizondo about purported UAP crash retrieval programs in the U.S. government, a central topic of discussion in last year’s hearing. Elizondo answered in the affirmative when asked if those programs were “designed to identify and reverse engineer alien craft.”

“In regards to these aircraft being piloted by whatever they might be—non-human biologics—would you agree that it’s likely that they are being piloted by some mind-body connection?” Luna asked.

Elizondo, who emphasized that he was more interested in the objects’ flight characteristics than speculating on their origin, said it was safe to presume intelligent control of some kind because they “seem to anticipate [pilots’] maneuvers.”

Garcia asked all four witnesses what could be the source of UAP. Both Gallaudet and Elizondo said nonhuman, higher intelligence, but Shellenberger and Gold said they don’t know.

“I think we must be modest in our assumptions that we’re looking for intelligence that could be biological. It might not,” Gold said. “But I think the ultimate answer is going to surprise us all.”

The Pentagon said earlier this year, even among its unsolved cases, “if more and better quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena.” Those could be drones, satellites, or even meteorological events, it said.

5. The Pentagon’s Role in UFOs/UAP

The witnesses and lawmakers present agreed that the Pentagon has been “over-classifying” documents and materials related to UAP sightings, which sometimes get labeled “top secret” and are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“For what purpose is the federal government over-classifying? Because that’s what they’re doing. They’re over-classifying and forbidding the public from getting access to this.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said.

Elizondo offered two explanations. For one, it could be a holdover policy from the Cold War, when the United States didn’t want to reveal to the Soviets our awareness of foreign military technology or disclose our own. The Pentagon might also be uninterested in revealing information related to problems—including foreign incursions into U.S. airspace—they lack answers for, Elizondo added.

Shellenberger mentioned government researcher John Greenewald Jr., who runs The Black Vault, an online database of more than 3 million government documents obtained through FOIA requests.

Greenewald says that the government has often denied the existence of specific UAP records, only to admit they exist after he files a FOIA appeal. But in one case, the Navy responded that the videos contain sensitive information, are classified, and exempt from disclosure.

The Navy, for instance, falls back on its UAP Security Classification Guide for denying many FOIA requests, Greenewald told The Epoch Times. The guide says any UAP information obtained or developed through the use of classified sources or methods will receive the highest classification level applicable. The Pentagon has a similar policy.

When the Pentagon declined to release video footage from U.S. fighter jets shooting down suspected UFOs over Alaska in 2023, the Defense Department said the footage remained classified.

However, that same year the Pentagon released videos of a Russian fighter jet forcing down a U.S. MQ-9 reaper drone. Greenewald pointed out that all MQ-9 Reaper drone footage of UAP remains classified “so it doesn’t reveal drone capabilities.”

“When you get into over secrecy, over classification, them not wanting to be open and honest about things—whether it be about UAP or anything for that matter—the public trust erodes,” Greenewald said.

In response to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, the Department of Defense said it takes public interest in UAP seriously.

“The department is fully committed to openness and accountability to Congress and the American people, which it must balance with its obligation to protect sensitive information, sources, and methods,” Gough said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/five-takeaways-congressional-ufo-hearing

'Behind COVID Vaccines' Waning Benefit'

 The inability of COVID vaccines to reach the long-lived plasma cell compartment in the bone marrow may explain their waning protection compared with vaccines for influenza or tetanus, according to a recent study published in Nature Medicine

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In this exclusive MedPage Today video, study author Frances Eun-Hyung Lee, MD, of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, discusses the findings and the implications for future research.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

The COVID mRNA vaccines were introduced in 2021, and it's really made a game changer for us to get out of the pandemic. But the one question is how long did those responses last? So that was one of the major questions that we had. And we find out that the titers really fell quickly even after primary immunization, after boosting immunization and everything else.

So we study human plasma cells in the long-lived plasma cell compartment of the marrow, and if it makes it to that long-lived compartment, we find that those titers last for a very long time, decades. So we were very happy to say, "Oh, well we can find tetanus responses that last 10-year half-life of that vaccine, as well as if you get an influenza infection, it can last for a very long time in that long-lived compartment." So we could easily find those responses in what we call the "longest-lived" compartment of the bone marrow.

But what was really surprising in a stark finding was that the SARS-CoV-2 responses after vaccination in these individuals, they just did not make it into that longest-lived compartment that we're accustomed to seeing. With that being said, we just were trying to understand why are they different, and how are they different -- and are they different? So that was the question we asked and we find that they are really, really different and they're not making into that compartment. And what we really need to think about is trying to make sure we get vaccines that last for the long haul and make it into that compartment.

So I think one of the questions we could potentially address -- and we're trying to see if we can look at some of these questions -- is the mRNA vaccines, there's protein vaccines that are available now for the RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], so is it something unique to spike or SARS-CoV-2 or is it something unique to the mRNA platform?

We want to take a look at the RSV vaccine that Moderna has just put out on the mRNA platform compared to just the protein vaccines that I think Pfizer and GSK -- one of them is adjuvanted, one of them's not. And so I think that those will be some of the questions that we want to ask: Is it unique to the platform or is it unique to the protein that we're trying to stimulate in the body?

When you really think about it, the body's really, really smart because most of the time it works fairly well. Whereas we have autoimmunity and we have a whole other area where we study autoimmunity in terms of that. So there's something unique about the repetitive nature of the proteins on the surface of a B cell.

So the spike protein -- and we wrote about this in the discussion and you can read more about it in the paper -- is that the spike protein is very far apart. Normally a lot of viruses have repetitive protein epitopes on their surface. They're really close together, so they like to cross link that B-cell receptor that's coming across. So the B cell has all these receptors and they bring them close together. They aggregate the receptors fairly well and stimulate them. So if you have a lot of repetitive epitopes, it seems to do better. It's not a foolproof 100%, it needs that signal plus something else, plus something else. Multiple things that you need to make sure that the signal goes well.

So is there something unique about the spike protein that's really far apart? The virus and all the proteins just sit far apart as opposed to the flu antigens that sit closer together. Is it that, or is it something with the mRNA platform itself? Is it being stimulated at the right sites? Is there the right cytokines? Is there the right T-cell help and everything else that you need to make a long-lived response? So those are some of the questions that I think are really interesting and important. Is it unique to the platform or is it unique to the protein itself?

https://www.medpagetoday.com/video-coverage/covid-19-future-focus/112940

Are Doctors Costing Hospitals $300K Per Year?

 With hospitals now "subsidizing" their physician workforce to the tune of more than $300,000 per doctor each year, current models of physician employment aren't sustainable, a new report suggestedopens in a new tab or window

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In the third quarter of 2024, hospitals spent $304,312 per doctor on what the report refers to as a "subsidy," according to Matthew Bates, MPH, a managing director at Kaufman Hall, who was an author of the Physician Flash Report.

"When hospitals first started employing doctors ... it was to create more 'systemness' and improve population health and value-based care by creating a continuum of delivery," Bates told MedPage Today. "Right now, that cost model has become too lopsided. We need new models, new ways of thinking."

Physician costs calculated in the report include the surrounding practice expenses, including staff such as front desk receptionists and medical assistants, as well as real estate and utilities. However, Bates said labor accounts for 84% of the total cost. Physician compensation specifically accounts for about 60% of total expenses, he said.

Marisha Burden, MD, MBA, of the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine in Denver, a clinician-administrator who studies healthcare workforce issues and who wasn't involved in the report, agreed it was a good idea to "sound the alarm bells that current financial models in healthcare are probably not sustainable."

However, she called the report "a bit of a flawed narrative that overlooks the full reality of things." For instance, if the report focuses only on clinician billing, she said, it misses other revenue streams such as downstream services like diagnostics, specialty referrals, and admissions.

Bates acknowledged that downstream revenue wasn't accounted for in the report, and added that other items and services from an acquired practice -- such as x-ray machines -- get moved "to the hospital side of the ledger."

Hospitals "do strip the ancillary revenue out of most physician groups when [they] employ them," Bates said. "That's important to consider because that helps generate the subsidy and the downstream."

However, Bates noted that when analyzed by work Relative Value Units (wRVUs), which focus on compensation for labor only, doctors are doing more work but ultimately being paid less for that work.

For instance, doctors brought in 5,540 wRVUs in the third quarter of 2022, which jumped 12% to 6,195 in the same quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, compensation per wRVU fell from $65.32 to $62.26 during that time, according to the report.

"Their wages are struggling to keep up because the amount they're getting paid for the services they deliver is not keeping up with inflation," Bates said. "We've seen that this year, with Medicare proposing [cuts] for physician reimbursementopens in a new tab or window."

"You're working harder and your wages aren't keeping up with inflation," Bates said. "That's just frustrating for anybody."

Clinicians and business leaders need to come together to find a solution to health systems' financial woes, Burden and Bates said.

"To say that it's the physician or clinician group driving the problem is short-sighted," Burden said, noting that the report is focused on financials and "misses" the bigger picture of "thinking about optimal work design ... that drives not only the financial and operational outcomes that we want, but also the patient outcomes that we want."

"In U.S. healthcare, decisions often are made without looking at a critical element, the healthcare workforce, which makes all of this possible," she noted, adding that the patient perspective often is overlooked as well. "We have to start integrating those a bit better."

If staffing decisions are driven by a report that says, "this expense is only getting larger and threatening organizational viability ... you're going to get knee-jerk responses, like asking clinicians to do more," she said. "And clinicians are really tapped out."

She called for "a kinder culture of how we think about our workforce. Clinicians are core value drivers within our organization, not cost centers."

Bates agreed that healthcare "is at its best when physicians, or white coats, and administrators, or suit coats, partner on looking for ways to make the system more efficient and effective."

"Suit coats and white coats have to be talking together and partnering," he added. "Healthcare is a team sport, and if we can be more effective as a team together, we can move the needle."

The Physician Flash Reportopens in a new tab or window is based on data from more than 200,000 employed physicians and advanced practice providers -- including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified registered nurse anesthetists -- from a range of practices across the U.S., from single-physician practices to large academic groups. It has been produced quarterly since its first publication during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/112923

NYU Langone ignored in plea to Hochul to exempt congestion pricing for vulnerable patients, staff

 Leaders at NYU Langone Health urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to craft congestion pricing exemptions for burdened patients and staff — a searing plea that went unheeded days later when she announced the hated Manhattan toll program’s return.

The letter sent Monday — and exclusively obtained by The Post — warned Hochul that NYU Langone patients and health care workers were uniquely positioned to suffer under congestion pricing.

The academic medical center along First Avenue is “deeply” embedded in the toll zone below 60th Street, with 70% of its patients living outside it, wrote Joseph Lhota, the system’s executive vice president — who previously served as Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair.

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NY Langone leaders pleaded with Gov. Kathy Hochul to craft congestion pricing exemptions for their patients and staff.Matthew McDermott

“We have heard directly from patients who are concerned about how congestion pricing will impact their ability to access our facilities for care,” he wrote. “(Congestion pricing) tolls are an expense that many patients cannot afford.”

But the congestion pricing revamp unveiled Thursday by Hochul — which would impose a $9 daytime base toll starting in the New Year — offers no such exemption, meaning Langone patients who drive will have to pay to make their appointments.

Lhota noted that taking public transportation is simply not an option for many patients.

“Particularly for immunocompromised individuals, those with mobility challenges, or those in urgent need of medical attention, the use of a vehicle is not a matter of choice but of necessity,” he wrote.

Likewise, Lhota also pressed for a toll exemption for Langone employees, noting nearly 20,000 live outside the congestion pricing zone south of 60th Street in Manhattan.

“While the majority of NYU Langone employees utilize public transportation, some employees drive to work for a variety of reasons, including a lack of public transportation where they live, incompatible transit schedules (particularly around overnight shifts) or because they are responding to an emergency while on call,” the letter states.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul said congestion pricing will launch with $9 tolls in January.James Keivom

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NYU Langone patients and staff who drive will have to pay $9 to get to the medical center.New York Post

“As the only major academic medical center located in the heart of the Zone, Congestion Pricing could impact our ability to recruit and retain staff,” it continues. “This could exacerbate existing health care workforce challenges.”

A spokesperson for the governor said she “recognizes that many New Yorkers with health issues drive into Manhattan to see their doctor, which is one reason she insisted on making the toll 40% less expensive.”

“Recognizing the urgent need to provide transportation for those who need medical care, the governor recently deployed $52.1 million in funds that support transportation for senior citizens and people with disabilities,” the rep said in a statement Friday.

“Less congestion on Manhattan streets means ambulances will be able to quickly reach their destination, and anyone enrolled in Access-a-ride is exempt from paying this toll.”

https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/us-news/nyu-langone-pleaded-with-hochul-for-congestion-pricing-exemptions-for-vulnerable-patients-staff/

The Great Splainin' Cometh

 by James Howard Kunstler,

"The meltdown has gotten so heavy liberal bureaucrats are ready to form antigovernment militias and fretting about black helicopters"

- Max Blumenthal

“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda”

- The New York Times

In July 27, 1794, the non-insane members of the Convention, or national legislative body in Paris, suddenly turned on the rabid Jacobin leader Maximillian Robespierre and overthrew his ruling tyrannical bunch — who had killed 40,000 of their fellow countrymen in the paranoid orgy known as The Reign of Terror.

The next day, Robespierre rode the tumbrel to his own appointment with “the national razor” and the Thermidorian Reaction was on!

By the way, in one of their many acts disordering French society, the Jacobins had changed the calendar, renamed all the months, and changed the weeks from seven to ten days (to eliminate Sundays as a holy day of rest in their anti-church crusade). Thus, Thermidor, the month of mid-summer.

This was but a small part of their proto-communist agenda, but you see in it the flavor of their radical extremism.

The Woke Democrats of recent times were our Jacobins, and the election of November 5, 2024, marks the kick-off of America’s Thermidorian Reaction. The crazies have been overthrown and our country awaits a restoration of norms in culture and law. No more sexualizing of children, no more flood of criminal mutts across the US border, no more furtive censorship of public speech, no more creative lawfare, no more women on the battlefield, no more “anti-racist” racism in the workplace, no more intel takeover of everyone’s private life. . . you get the picture.

Many abiding mysteries about how this happened — even of what exactly did happen — remain to be sorted out by law and by history. That is probably because so much of the Woke Revolution was provoked by state-of-the-art mind-fuckery out of the giant intel blob’s psy-ops lab.

This blob, you understand, had grown to be a colossal racketeering operation with many branches and ever-spreading roots, and it cast its spells over the populace to protect these interests — which, of course, involved huge revenue streams.

Perhaps its most potent spell was the manipulation of women’s emotion, harnessing female psychodrama as the propellant for mass social discord. In a nation of absent fathers, damaged children, and broken male-female relations, Donald Trump was painted as the ultimate archetypal tyrant Daddy figure to deflect the public’s attention from the actual tyranny growing under the US intel blob and its Globalist sidekicks. Case in point: RussiaGate, a long-running hysteria of fabricated accusations, a fabulous medley of scurrilous gossip, engineered at the highest levels of our government for the express purpose of wrecking Mr. Trump’s first term in office. “Witch hunt” was exactly the right term.

Many more psychodramas followed, all of them artificially cooked up by various branches of the blob: impeachments #1 and #2; the FBI-induced J-6 riot and the fake House J-6 inquiry that followed; the roll-out of DOJ-inspired fake criminal and civil cases that tied-up Mr. Trump in courtrooms through the year, and most especially the hostile news media’s presentation of all these things as one great big everlasting frenzy of on-screen women shrieking at the Daddy-figure, Donald Trump, like thirteen-year-old girls in fugues of hormonal disruption.

The voters, subject to years of trips laid on them, were eventually able to see through all this induced psychodrama as to how they were being manipulated, and on November 5, they finally revolted. Their quandary was probably epitomized by the absurdity of watching men in women’s sports — spiking volleyballs on the girls’ heads, bashing them on the lacrosse field, humiliating them in the swim lanes — and, more to the point, being helpless to do anything about it, because the officials in-charge under “Joe Biden” said it must be, no matter what you think and feel about what you are seeing.

The New York Times, your field-guide to blob-think, is warning its dwindling readership of psychodrama addicts that Donald Trump will now take out his “grievances” on the noble, self-sacrificing bureaucracy that manages things so well in this land. As usual, The Times misleads and misinforms. These are the grievances of the nation that has seen its law and its culture twisted into new orders of wickedness that leave daily life in the USA perverted, dishonored, and grotesquefied.

So now Mr. Trump has picked a cabinet that scares the blob to death — for good reason. They are aiming to systematically disarm and disassemble the blob. They are a team of serious and intelligent warriors and they mean business, in particular Gaetz, Gabbard, Kennedy, Ratcliffe, and Homan, with Elon and Vivek riding shotgun. (A new FBI Director has not yet been named.) You must wonder how the blob is planning to defend itself, for it surely will resist.

Many of us believe that the two recent assassination attempts against the now-President-elect were blob-sponsored operations. Everybody expects they’ll try again. But it’s possible that the American system still has enough mojo to self-correct. A whole lot of public officials have a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do. It looks like they will be compelled to now, including the public health officers who brought us Covid-19 and the mandated, ineffective-and-harmful mRNA vaccines.

There’s every reason to believe that the ‘splainin’ can take place in correct proceedings according to law: hearings, grand juries, courts. We do have actual laws against racketeering, abuse of power, election fraud, bribery, malicious prosecution, sedition, treason, and conspiracy to commit all those crimes. Pay attention: all that is distinct from lawfare, which is making-up crimes, faking crimes, and faking procedure. You are going to see a demonstration of how law differs from lawfare. It ought to have a salutary effect on our national esprit. And that should motivate us to get on with the job of repairing the damage done to our country.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/great-splainin-cometh