Two Governments Just Admitted The Same Thing

The lawmakers are supposed to be the ones with clearance, and now they're the ones being kept in the dark. In an op-ed published in The Debrief, former Japanese Defense Minister Hamada, fellow Diet member Asakawa, and Congressman Eric Burleson of Missouri say that elected officials in both of their countries cannot get straight answers about the objects showing up over their own military bases and nuclear plants. The Diet is Japan's national legislator, and these are people who hold some of the highest clearances the government can even grant, which is what makes this claim really hard to just shrug off to the side. Their argument is that the normal channels have failed them, and that the only option left is for allied governments to start trading what they know directly with each other because their own agencies will not. Hey Ufologers, I'm Christina Gomez, and this is your UFO News Update. Hamada and Asakawa point to one case to show what they mean. In July of last year, security guards at the Genke Nuclear Power Station in Saga Prefecture watched three glowing objects sit in the sky above the plant. The lights stayed visible for close to two hours, long enough for local police to arrive and see them. The police reported an airplane, which didn't match what the guards even described. Cameras run by Kushio Electric Power recorded the objects, but that footage has not been shared even with the members of the Diet on the grounds that the case is still open. So a nuclear plant logs a two-hour event on video, and the country's own lawmakers still can't even see it. The lawmakers connect this to an American disclosure push, which runs through a program called PURSUE, short for the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting Systems for UAP Encounters. Two days ago, the Department of War, the current name for the Department of Defense, issued a legal waiver tied to that program. And we covered that waiver in full in its own show, which I will place that link in the description box below for you. So here is the short version of that from News Nation. The Department of War issued a legal waiver allowing whistleblowers to finally reveal what they know about UFOs without the threat of jail time. That's a major step forward toward full disclosure. The UFO community, as well as several members of Congress, have been pushing for these kinds of protections for some time now. Before anyone treats this as brand new, it helps to know that it is not at all. Since the 2023 defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act for that year, there's already been a legal channel that lets service members and contractors report UAP information to AERO, the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. And that protection already overrides their non-disclosure agreements, the contracts that bar them from speaking. It is the same 2023 provision that let David Grush and others testify to Congress in the first place. So this week's waiver mainly extends that existing route to the PURSU team. And Grush is exactly where these two stories meet, because the congressman behind the op-ed is the same one who put Grush on his own payroll. Burleson sits on the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets. And last year, he brought in David Grush, the former intelligence officer, onto his staff as a special advisor. The point he makes with the two Japanese lawmakers is the same on both sides of the Pacific, which is that when information does reach elected officials, it reaches them on the timing chosen by career officials rather than the public's representatives. As proof, they point out that Japan learned the details of two unresolved UAP cases near its own territory only after the U.S. released the files, and not through its own Japanese government. Now, the letter points to one case from those files. Drawn from firsthand reports by officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the office that sits above other agencies, teams were searching a classified missile testing site in the western U.S. for aerial activity. A ground team picked up an object on floor, which is a heated camera, and they described it as very hot, low to the ground, moving fast, and then splitting into two, and then changing direction. When the crew arrived and scanned with night vision, that heat camera, and their own eyes, the object reportedly rose off the ground, came within about 10 feet of their helicopter, dropped right below it, and then just sped off. The government posted photos it labeled as related to that account. But if your job had handed you firsthand knowledge of something like that, and the law just happened to change this week, would you report it to the government team behind closed doors, or would you wait until it could go straight to the public? Well, you tell me. Because that sort of thing is happening in Japan right now. A 2023 data release through Aero already named western and southern Japan among the busier regions in the world for these reports. And Japanese defense officials have had recent scares of their own, including drone incursions over military facilities. So when Hamada says Japan has fallen behind on this, he's not being modest for effort. He is pointing to a group his own ministry had already acknowledged. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who leads the UAP Science Advisory Council, spoke about all of this on News Nation, and he tied the waiver back to a July 31st memo from Aaron Lukes, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Loeb says he has met with Lukes twice in recent weeks, and he also went back to the claims at the center of all of it. David Grush, who said that the government not only had programs for retrieval and reverse engineering of materials, and they had a lot of information, they have intact spacecraft that are being held in some places, dozens of them. And whether this is real or not, whether the information represents reality depends on the facts on the ground. Those were claims made under oath in 2023, and they're not confirmed fact, but Loeb keeps that line very clear. He was direct about the footage the public has actually been shown. You know, we can resolve this matter relatively quickly and figure out if we know about non-human made technologies in possession of government. Otherwise, we have to rely on footage that so far the footage that was released was inconclusive. You know, you could still explain these orbs that are quite mysterious in terms of perhaps drones or some black projects that are being done in adversarial nations. And so in order to get to the bottom of it indirectly, we really need to collect new data. Loeb's answer is to gather better data, which is what all scientists actually say. And he described placing new sensors at the sites where sightings have happened and using a large telescope that could resolve one of these orbs and read its light to identify what it's made of. As for the lawmakers, though, this is a national security story before anything else. They point out that China runs a military effort to study what the People's Liberation Army calls unidentified air conditions. And per reporting from the South China Morning Post, Chinese analysts have leaned on artificial intelligence just to keep up with the volume of sightings. The logic in the op ed overall is actually pretty simple. If these objects rely on some unknown technology, the first country to understand it gains the advantage, which is why Burleson, Hamada and Asakawa say they have joined the Emerging Technologies Interparliamentary Caucus, a group of elected officials from several countries built to compare findings across borders. But step back from the urgency and the actual movement this week is probably smaller than what it might sound because lawmakers in two allied countries publicly agreed that the normal channels have failed and that the government widened a reporting route that already existed. Yet the destination has not changed at all. Disclosure still lands with a review team first, and none of it is guaranteed to ever reach the public. So the obvious question is whether a real wave of insiders is ever coming. And Lowe was actually asked about that. Then you might say, well, will there be a flood of whistleblowers? That remains to be seen. I actually asked Aaron Lucas about it. And, you know, it will take some weeks, but it's being implemented. So the paperwork is signed. Two governments are pushing at once and the next few weeks decide whether anyone actually comes forward. So do you think pressure from an ally like Japan is what finally forces real answers? Or does it end the usual way with the main parts staying classified? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. I'm Christina Gomez as 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? Hit the notification bell as I do daily UFO news and updates, fresh UAP stories, government disclosures and breaking developments land here every single day.