As many regular readers here know, I've been advancing the idea that there is a hidden system of finance, beyond even that of the black budget, and that it has been used both as a political slush fund to finance covert activities, and that it has been used as a totally off-the-books source of finance for black research projects. In short, I am proposing the existence of a system beyond the "normal" black budget.

With that in mind, while trolling the internet recently, looking for more information, I came upon a few things that I thought were worth sharing by way of fleshing out the above high-octane speculation scenario a bit more fully. A number of these things bear upon assumptions being made in the ufology community, and some of them bear directly upon the hypothesis of a hidden system of finance, and some bear upon all at the same time.

Let's begin here, with a short (four minute) video from Russia Today about the size of the U.S. defense budget, and the fact that the Pentagram will not acknowledge where $8,500,000,000,000 has gone since the mid-1990s:

Now, it is entirely possible that the the Pentagram doesn't know where all this money went, at least, partially. And here we have to pause again, to understand why this might be so, and how the structure of the black budget is such that it would be comparatively easy for an entirely independent group to use the very system of security compartmentalization to create, in effect, a breakaway civilization, with hidden sources and avenues of funding, to do "covert research."

The reason is "cost-plus" financing of government defense contracts. What this means is simply that the government bears all costs of research, then tacks on an arbitrary figure for the "profit" of the company conducting contracted research for the military. Profits are built into the system, and thus, it would be a simple matter to hide items in the normal budget. Splitting sensitive projects up into components and parceling them out to various companies means that only those placing the contracts in the first place really know what the final goal of the project may be. All that is required is final assembly of parts(this 3d printing in this context too, folks). It could be feasible to piggyback secret research of one project known only to such a group on the back of another "legitimate" project of the black projects world being done for the government.

We can even perhaps envision how easily it might be accomplished: an officer or scientist with 'clearance' in a given project approaches a component research entity and asks it to "look into" an allied problem, and guarantees the financing, in a "while you're at it" situation. Orders are placed for "parts" and shipped to destinations: purpose unknown. My point here is that compartmentalization would actually be the fertile soil on which a rogue group, or breakaway civilization, could grow. And if one balks at the idea of such a group, it is worth recalling the strange words of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the downing of Francis Gary Powers' U-2: he blamed the act not on Eisenhower nor even on the US military, but precisely upon such a "rogue group."

Cost plus financing, in other words, is the tip of a very large iceberg (and it really isn't even yet into "black budget" territory), and its potentialities and implications for the type of exploitation are immense.

But what about that eight and a half trillion dollars the Pentagram cannot account for? What's going on? It is perhaps relevant that $8.5 trillion would be just about the amount of money represented in the Spanish and Italian bearer bonds scandals (6 and 2 trillion respectively, and some "loose change", which would be the mere "billions" part).

But what happens when, occasionally, an item does appear that shouldn't have appeared?

That will have to wait for tomorrow... see you on the flip side.