You know what sucks? When you lose your notebook, especially the one from the session featuring easily the most provocative and entertaining speaker at last month’s Scientific Coalition for Ufology’s Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference in Huntsville, Alabama. In fact, I wasted so much time turning my desk upside down trying to find the damn thing, SCU has since changed its name to the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies. Their thinking is that maybe a nomenclatural makeover can broaden the conversational circle by swapping out UFO for UAP, while still retaining its acronym, SCU.

Anyhow, hopefully in the not too distant future, SCU will post Travis Taylor’s presentation at their website so you can judge for yourself. The dude is a massive quotemonster, and his presentation posed a healthy challenge to those – including yours truly – who believe transparency should trump government secrecy when it comes to The Great Taboo.

Why Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama: In 2012, National Geographic conducted a survey that indicated 65 percent of Americans thought the latter “would be better suited … to handle an alien invasion” than the former./CREDIT: nationalgeographic.com/au

In a lecture he called “A Scientific Approach to Analyzing and Preparing for an Alien Invasion,” Taylor framed the dilemma this way: Imagine that scientists are beginning to study the remains of a mummy and they discover, in its dead clutches, what resembles a cellphone. This is obviously WTF news. But how do you handle it? Do you stage a press conference and announce you’ve just discovered full-tilt cray-cray? Or do you try to figure out what it is you’re dealing with first before you go public?

What if one of the worst-case possibilities running through your head is that whoever or whatever is or was responsible for that technology might be malevolent? Could your efforts to study the device actually jangle a tripwire back to the original source? Hm. Maybe. But if you told the whole world what you found, that would most definitely alert its creators – wouldn’t it? – and set unknown consequences into motion.

For Taylor, the risk is unacceptable and the solution is obvious: Think you have a right to know the truth? So what? How does knowing the truth of the mummy’s cellphone personally benefit you? Your so-called right to know could get us all killed. Sorry. Move along.

De Void would rather quote Taylor verbatim, but you’re probably familiar with his work. Maybe you read the 2006 book he co-authored, An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion. Or maybe you saw caught him on National Geographic Channel’s “When Aliens Attack” in 2011. Or maybe, same year, you watched NatGeo’s “Rocket City Rednecks.” That’s the one where Taylor and colleagues with multiple advanced degrees employ unorthodox engineering to great effect, producing episodes with titles like “Moonshine Rocket Fuel,” Bomb-Proof My Pickup,” and “20,000 Kegs Under the Sea.”

Understandably, SCU chose to omit the showbiz aspect of Taylor’s profile in its pre-conference bio. After all, those credits would’ve sucked the oxygen out of the Alabama native’s meritorious resume, which includes three masters degrees, two doctorates, research into advanced propulsion systems, lasers and astronomy, science textbook authorship as well as half a dozen sci-fi novels, and contract work for NASA and the Department of Defense. The profile did, however, allude to Taylor’s iconoclastic streak, which targets “Fermi’s Paradox,” “Cosmos” guru Carl Sagan, and conventional wisdom at large.

“You hear people say aerospace engineers can’t explain why bumblebees can fly,” he said during a Q&A session, from notes De Void actually did retain. “Well then those aerospace engineers are idiots. It means their model for the bumblebee sucks.” And this snippet underscoring his distaste for consensus reality: “The physics of the universe is whatever that is, it’s physics that we don’t know yet. I have to make the students unlearn that light isn’t a particle-wave duality nonsense. Light is whatever light is. Particles and waves is a tool that humans created to describe things they see.”

So it was a mark of SCU’s commitment to honest debate that it decided to schedule a speaker whose take on America’s relationship with The Great Taboo surely ran counter to the expectations of the majority of the audience. A huge proponent of projecting a military presence into the high frontier via Space Force or whatever you want to call it — mainly to defend U.S. satellites from traditional adversaries — Taylor advocated extending those protections to whatever info might be extrapolated from UFO hardware. In other words, if investigators recover the mummy’s cell phone, you sit on it.

This argument presupposes, of course, that ET, like us, labors under the anthropocentric burdens of ego and fear, a cynical if not unreasonable hypothesis. But the most conflicted SCU speaker was the one everybody came to hear — Luis Elizondo, the military intelligence officer who broke ranks with the Pentagon in 2017 in order to make forums like what happened in Huntsville last month possible. And in attempting to thread the conversational needle between national security and the public’s right to know, it’s not at all clear that the man at the center of the controversy knows how or where this thing is going to end.

Fortunately, De Void still has that notebook.