On the Future We Took From You.
The craft recovered at Roswell in July 1947 did not run on jet fuel. They did not run on anything our species was burning, mining, or fighting over.
The propulsion systems we have studied in classified facilities for the past seventy-nine years imply access to energy densities that are, for all practical purposes, unlimited and effectively free. A working understanding of these principles would have rendered hydrocarbon fuels obsolete within a generation. It would have ended energy poverty. It would have decarbonized the atmosphere. It would have made the grid, the pipeline, the tanker, and the gas pump historical curiosities.
It would also have rendered our quarterly earnings reports unrecognizable. The Board, after careful deliberation, declined to proceed.
The public was, during this same period, repeatedly promised flying cars. We regret that the public received traffic instead. The vehicles in question existed. They were parked in hangars to which the public did not have access.
An energy-abundant world is not a world that buys $80 million fighter jets.
The Board has reviewed this position annually since 1954 and has, on each occasion, reaffirmed it.
On the Wars That Did Not Have To Happen.
We regret the outcomes experienced by the populations of the nations in which our products were deployed. We acknowledge, in particular, that those conflicts were largely contests over a resource that ceased to be necessary in 1947.
Between 2001 and 2022, the United States expended in excess of $8 trillion on military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya — a geography that maps, almost without exception, to proven petroleum reserves and strategic pipeline corridors. Direct combat deaths in those theatres are estimated at approximately 387,000 civilians; total deaths, when displacement, malnutrition, and the destruction of medical infrastructure are accounted for, exceed 4.5 million human beings.
We acknowledge that the intelligence justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq was, in retrospect, imperfect. We acknowledge that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which escalated the war in Vietnam — a conflict that killed an estimated 3.4 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans — did not occur as reported. We acknowledge the Gulf War, the second Gulf War, the long shadow conflicts in the Sahel, and the proxy engagements we do not name here.
None of it was necessary. The propulsion and energy concepts in our possession had, by the early 1960s, advanced to the point where the strategic value of petroleum could have been retired within a decade. We elected to retain petroleum's strategic value. We then sold the equipment used to contest it.
We are aware that the continued suppression of this technology has contributed to energy poverty affecting approximately 2.3 billion people, to the climate crisis presently destabilizing the biosphere, and to no fewer than fourteen resource conflicts on three continents.
We consider this an acceptable externality.
We are grateful for the business.
On the People Who Tried to Give You Your Future Back.
We regret the outcomes experienced by certain individuals who attempted to disclose proprietary information without authorization. We acknowledge that these individuals were not, in the conventional sense, leakers. They were technicians, engineers, and intelligence officers who had concluded that the suppression of recovered propulsion and energy technology constituted a crime against the species, and who attempted to act on that conclusion.
We acknowledge the case of Karen Silkwood, the technician who was preparing to deliver documentation of plutonium contamination and falsified safety records to a journalist on the evening of 13 November 1974. Her vehicle left the road. The documents she was carrying were not recovered. We have no further comment.
We acknowledge the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg under the Espionage Act following his release of the Pentagon Papers, which demonstrated that four successive administrations had knowingly misled the American public about the conduct of a war that need not have been fought.
We acknowledge the engineers, propulsion physicists, project managers, and intelligence officers — many of them unnamed in any public record — who raised concerns through proper internal channels and were subsequently reorganized out of their positions, denied security clearances, blacklisted across the industry, subjected to invasive federal investigation, financially ruined through prolonged civil litigation, involuntarily committed, or in a non-trivial number of cases, found deceased under circumstances their families continue to dispute.
They were not inconvenient. They were trying to hand humanity its future. We destroyed them for it.
We wish their surviving families well. We consider these matters closed.
On the Recovered Non-Human Vehicles.
We regret that the recovery of non-human craft near Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 was not disclosed in a timely manner. Subsequent recoveries at Kingman, Kecksburg, and elsewhere were similarly handled internally. Reverse-engineering operations were conducted at classified facilities, including the S-4 facility adjacent to Groom Lake.
This decision was made in alignment with shareholder interests and long-term revenue projections. We determined that disclosure — and the cascade of energy, transportation, and materials science breakthroughs that disclosure would have unlocked — would negatively impact our addressable market.
We also acknowledge that ensuring operational security at retrieval sites occasionally necessitated outcomes that, in retrospect, we recognize as regrettable for the individuals involved. Civilian witnesses — ranchers, off-duty police officers, journalists, and on more than one occasion, schoolchildren — were debriefed under conditions that did not always permit their return to ordinary life. Military personnel assigned to recovery details, particularly enlisted men who handled materiel directly, experienced an attrition rate that internal actuarial reviews characterized as statistically inconsistent with their cohort.
The families of these individuals were, where practicable, provided with explanations. We consider the matter resolved.
On the Revolving Door.
A significant number of senior defense officials accept positions with our member companies following their public service, and some return to government in advisory capacities thereafter. These individuals have, on occasion, participated in the drafting of contracts subsequently awarded to their employers, and in the classification reviews that kept the technology described above out of the civilian economy.
This created certain efficiencies. We thank them for their service.
On the F-35 Program.
The Joint Strike Fighter is, by lifecycle cost projection, the most expensive weapons system in human history at approximately $1.7 trillion. It is, mechanically, a refinement of mid-twentieth-century jet propulsion. We are aware that the propulsion systems in our classified inventory render it, in a technical sense, obsolete on arrival.
We consider this a success.
On President Eisenhower's Warning.
On 17 January 1961 — fourteen years into the suppression program — President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the American public against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
President Eisenhower's concerns were noted and filed.
On Recent Congressional Testimony.
We are aware of allegations made under oath to the United States Congress in 2023 regarding the existence of multi-decade non-human craft retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. We are aware of the prior Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. We are aware of the propulsion data. We are aware of the biologics.
We are aware. We have, until today, had no further comment.
On the Unaccounted Appropriations.
Approximately $80 billion per fiscal year is allocated to programs classified as Special Access — the so-called "black budget" — for which detailed line-item accounting is not available to the appropriating body. Cumulatively, since 1947, this figure exceeds the gross domestic product of most member states of the United Nations.
These funds were used, in significant part, to ensure that the technology described in § 01 remained where we placed it.
We used them responsibly.
In summary: we were entrusted, in 1947, with the seeds of a post-scarcity civilization. We elected, on behalf of our shareholders, to bury them.
The eighty years that followed — the oil wars, the climate crisis, the energy poverty, the slow attritional grief of a species that could not understand why its future kept failing to arrive — were a direct and foreseeable consequence of that decision.
You were not merely lied to. You were not merely overcharged. You were not merely sent to fight wars whose underlying scarcity was, by then, manufactured.
You were robbed of the twenty-first century your species was supposed to have.
We hope this clarifies our position. We remain committed to defending freedom.