Are we humans alone on Earth, or are there intelligent beings, not of this planet, who are or have been living among us? If so, what does this mean for our value system? Is 'human exceptionalism' – the belief that we're separate from and morally superior to the rest of nature – obsolete, and with it our claim to dominion over the universe?

Would the confirmation of non-human life change our concept of and relationship with God? Where do we go for straight answers to these uniquely consequential questions? That, unfortunately, is not entirely clear. But Americans want and deserve to know the facts.

I have reviewed hundreds of videos, photographs and documents dating back to 1947 and can confirm that the US government has known for decades that unidentified objects fly through our skies – that humankind may not be alone in the universe. This data was actively hidden and intentionally distorted from the American public for decades. Which means disclosing the greatest revelation in human history may also mean disclosing the greatest-ever cover-up by the American government.

The overriding question is... why?

After decades of helping people work through the most challenging psycho-social moments of their lives, I've learned that humans are resilient. Most of us find ways to deal with the truth without 'Big Brother' government doing their thinking for them.

Of course, the truth can hurt. It can be scary and even destabilizing, but it rarely breaks us.

What can cause lasting damage, however, is discovering that those we trusted deliberately hid the truth because they decided we couldn't handle it. That isn't protection, it's paternalism and condescension.

Documents recently disclosed by the Trump Administration revealed that the United States government dedicated massive resources – military, FBI, CIA, the Department of Energy – to investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), while publicly denying these efforts.

Remember: The government may be an institution, but it's filled with people just like you and me. And ultimately, those people work for us!

Should we as citizens be privy to everything elected officials know and do? Of course, not. But that's not what we're talking about here.

For nearly 80 years, the public messaging around unidentified celestial objects was remarkably consistent: Nothing to see. Weather balloons, misidentified aircraft or just a hysterical public were the logical explanations. Meanwhile, numerous governmental agencies were covertly dedicating massive resources to investigating unexplainable phenomena.

Governments rarely devote vast quantities of time, money and brainpower to subjects they genuinely believe are meaningless. But in the case of UAPs, the government didn't merely hide their activities, they created an entirely alternative reality to obscure them.

Here's the paper trail:

-1947: Lieutenant General Nathan Twining advised the Army Air Forces that UAPs were 'something real and not visionary or fictitious.' For three decades, the military denied his study had ever existed.

-1949: Manhattan Project scientists convened a classified conference to deal with unidentified objects clustering over Los Alamos and America's nuclear weapons sites.

-1953: A group of CIA officers known as the Robertson Panel recommended a public education campaign to publicize UAP cases that had already been debunked, and say nothing about those that hadn't.

-1953: JANAP 146, a new military regulation was enacted making it a criminal offense for military personnel and commercial airline pilots to discuss UAP sightings beyond official channels. The penalty: Up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

-1960: JANAP 146E rewrote the earlier rule to fall under the Espionage Act, the same law used to prosecute spies. The goal was to keep retired officers silent.

For decades, our government aggressively investigated UAPs while simultaneously building a legal structure to ensure their actions were kept under wraps. Along the way, they often allowed the explainable to come to light while suppressing the unexplainable.

Take Project Blue Book, also known as the Public UFO Program, which the Air Force shut down in 1969. That year, Air Force officials wrote an internal memo (later pried loose under the Freedom of Information Act) admitting that UFO reports relating to national security weren't part of Blue Book at all. They went through a separate and unnamed channel.

This meant that easily explainable occurrences like weather balloons or misidentified planes faced public scrutiny. 

But anything that really mattered, such as a 2004 encounter between a UAP and pilots belonging to the USS Nimitz or a glowing object sighted near a Minuteman Nuclear Base in Montana in 1967, was quietly moved beyond the public domain. 

Explain the easy stuff, so the hard stuff is never even considered.

Why the two-tiered system? Was it just about national security, as some claim? I don't think so.

The physicist Richard Feynman put it best: 'I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.'

This is not the first time our government has relied on manipulative disinformation techniques. During World War I, the folks in Washington created the Committee on Public Information, a large-scale propaganda operation that used newspapers, movies and public figures to build support for a war Americans were reluctant to enter.

Among other things, that Committee spread stories of unspeakable atrocities by our enemies, stories they knew were untrue. This helped change public opinion in favor of battle.

Decades later, government documents concerning UAPs describe something similar. Officials organized public debunking to deflect interest from all thing extraterrestrial. 

That Robertson Panel, for instance, recommended leaning on mass media and trusted messengers to strip UFOs of their 'aura of mystery.' In 1966, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted newsman in America, hosted a UFO special on CBS – deploying the government's own manipulative framework to encourage public skepticism rather than curiosity. A Robertson Panel scientist later claimed credit for shaping the CBS special. Whether Cronkite knew is an open question.

Some 60 years on, there is little doubt that the government sought to limit what could be said publicly about unexplained cases. But the most successful deception wasn't convincing Americans that UAPs didn't exist. It was convincing respectable Americans that asking about them was socially disqualifying or, in today's vernacular, cancelable.

Psychologists understand something governments have also long understood. Human beings rarely make decisions based solely on evidence. We base them on belonging or conformity. If enough trusted voices tell us a subject is ridiculous, most people will stop examining it. Ridicule allows us to dismiss notions without thoroughly scrutinizing them.

Done deliberately, creating that psychological discomfort is a form of mental-emotional manipulation – a psychological operation, or psyop, as it's called. And when it came to UAPs, psyops are exactly what's been going on for decades.

That's why stigma is so powerful. It doesn't silence people–it teaches them to silence themselves. Eventually, the government can step back and allow society to manage the conversation for them.

But Americans can handle hard truths. What is far harder to handle is learning that trusted sources are doing our thinking for us. Because even the smallest lie can destroy the greatest trust. And the conspiracy to obscure where humanity stands in the hierarchy of this vast universe is no small lie at all.