IF YOU HEARD WHAT HE SAID BEFORE, THIS GETS CRAZIER

Peter Skafish is a Berkeley-trained anthropologist, co-founder of the Sol Foundation, and the anthropology seat of the new UAP Science Advisory Council, chaired by Harvard professor Abby Loeb. A few weeks ago on that UFO podcast, Skafish said disclosure needed to slow down. Now this caused a huge stir online. How could disclosure slow down? Is waiting 80 years not enough? And look, I hear you. So I brought him on to explain exactly what he meant and asked him to defend his position. Hey Ufologers, I'm Christina Gomez and this is your UFO News Update. So here is how Peter addressed it. Yeah, I stand by what I said, but let me qualify it and say that I think disclosure needs to go at a slow pace, but it still needs to happen soon. So, okay, what does that mean? Look, disclosure has really enormous and potentially grave ramifications depending on what is true about UAP and so-called non-human intelligence and depending on what's on the other side of the curtain, the curtain being the veil of UAP secrecy. And sure, the consequences might be light on some level, but we know geopolitically, possibly economically, and certainly for the U.S. government, which is already in a grave legitimacy crisis, you know, it's a pretty heavy thing to do. He didn't walk it back. His reasoning was that disclosure carries enormous and potentially serious consequences depending on what turns out to be true about UAP and what he calls non-human intelligence. He named four categories where that impact would land, social, cultural, geopolitical, and human, and said the U.S. government, already facing a credibility problem, has the most to lose if this is handled wrong. He didn't go any further than naming those four categories. What he was clear about is what should happen quickly, a basic public acknowledgement from the executive branch that the phenomenon itself is real. The trouble, in his words, is what follows that acknowledgement. He referenced a term coined by his colleague, retired army colonel Carl Nell, who served as the army liaison to the government's UAP task force from 2021 to 2022 and worked directly with David Grush on that task force. Nell calls what comes after a rushed acknowledgement uncontrolled disclosure, and Peter corrected how most people have interpreted that, especially Carl Nell's disclosure timeline. Carl wasn't making a prediction. I think people confused what he was saying with a kind of prophetic prediction. He was saying if you passed the UAP Disclosure Act in 2023 and you were implementing its review board and process in 2024, in around 2030, its findings and its final kind of say about the matter would come of the executive branch. So you might want to push that forward a couple of years by his timeline. Nell laid this out as a conditional outcome at the 2023 Sol Foundation Symposium, tied to legislation that has still not passed in that exact form, not as a fixed date on a calendar that we know of. But Peter said the actual window could move up given where things stand today. Then I asked him what a workable path looks like to him right now since he thinks disclosure is moving a bit too fast. Should we want President Trump to do a basic acknowledgement of, let's say, some UAP are non-anthropogenic technologies and vehicles and thus so-called NHI in or at least remotely present. Let's just say a minimal statement like that. If we want Trump to do that in 2028, which I think would be a likely time because it's end of term and it would be a legacy thing for Trump. I don't think you want to get to all sorts of the acknowledgement or release of certain facts about this for several years after, nor do I think you could get to them. He argued no administration weighs the mass left for a successor when making major decisions, pointing to the Bush administration entering the Iraq war in 2003 without knowing whether it would win the next election. If Trump made a statement like this as a legacy move, Peter said it would need to be decisive enough that no future administration could walk it back by calling it just a mistake. He was clear that this timeline in his own read of the political incentives, not information he claims to have from inside the government. Now, given what you've heard, do you think a legacy statement in 2028 would settle this question for the public? Because that's when Trump's term ends. I then asked him a bit about the newly created UAP council. A lot of us have questions and many of us are skeptical. He said it's very important to be skeptical, but then address something that I truly didn't expect. It's not funded by the federal government. It has no funding whatsoever. It's an advisory body and that's all it is right now. And so it can't be an arrow in that sense. I mean, I think at this point, Arrow staff numbers over 100 people and they have a multi-million dollar annual budget and they perform an official capacity on the part of the US government. So it's not even comparable. Every member, including Peter, Gary Nolan, Abby Loeb, Tim Gallaudet and Kevin Knuth is working without pay. And while the council interfaces directly with ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the country's top intelligence authorities are on this subject. And then Peter gave credits to the legislative side of this fight and he names the names. It's really important to the Sol Foundation and myself to support Luna Burleson, Jared Moskowitz, Tim Burchett. I mean, they're really the first people, and I want to be very clear about this, who have done the work necessary within their power to establish governance in the legislative branch of the UAP issue. That's never been done before. He contrasted the public record with Senator Harry Reid's classified program from decades earlier, which ran for nearly 10 years without anyone outside government knowing that it existed, here referring to AATIP. He said public hearings with named officials on the record represent a different level of accountability than a program only a handful of senators know about. And that Burleson's own push to codify a review process into law, since folded into this new year's defense authorization bill, builds directly on the accountability those hearings have established over the last few years. Now, the last question I asked him was about the Pursue Task Force, the presidential unsealed and reporting systems for UAP encounters, and what he believes is actually driving people inside government to cooperate with it. His answer was probably the most direct claim he made in this entire conversation. Take a listen. I'm saying this like very deliberately, and this is not speculation on my part, okay? I think people should be very open to the idea the Pursue team has a pretty good faith intent about getting UAP records and footage that would be highly significant declassified. It doesn't mean it will happen. That's a government process. But from what I've seen, you have people doing good faith work in government who may know that the legacy program is real, and they would like to see some acknowledgement of that to the public. I don't know exactly what their intent is. But from where I sit today, I have a real interest in what Pursue does. I'm very curious to see what happens there. So we will all be keeping track of what comes out of Pursue, what the Science Council does with any data it receives, along with their reports that will hopefully come out soon, and whether Carl Nell's 2030 window holds up against a political calendar that keeps moving faster than anyone might have planned for. Between a council member asking for caution and a government memo actively pushing disclosure forward, which do you think shapes what the public actually learns over the next few years? Leave your thoughts in the comments. I'm Christina Gomez. That is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow at 12 p.m. PST for another UFO news update. Be safe and remember, keep your eyes on the skies. If you enjoyed today's show, hit that like button. And if you're not subscribed, what are you waiting for? 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