De Void’s occasional trolling of (largely) retired defense and intelligence officials drew goose eggs Monday when another target of opportunity swung through Sarasota to give a speech. This time, it was former White House Chief of Staff and USMC Gen. John Kelly. Kelly said he didn’t know squat about UFOs.

Retired Marine Corps General and former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly says he has not seen the F-18 UFO videos and knows nothing about The Great Taboo/CREDIT: Billy Cox

In this day and age, where we’re two-plus years into substantive conversations about The Great Taboo, there’s a tendency to believe – OK, no, my tendency to believe – that scuttlebutt about the phenomena inevitably makes its way to the upper levels of government. As director of Homeland Security from January to July 2017, not to mention Senior Military Assistant to two Secretaries of State, plus his years as a four-star with Southern Command, Kelly would certainly appear to have been in a position to have heard rumors about breaches of security, however fleeting, by intruders whose origin and intentions are unknown. Especially if it involved links to high technology.

Most of the local press corps gathered in the basement of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall for the warmup press conference were understandably a lot more curious about Kelly’s thoughts on the breaking news of John Bolton’s manuscript (“an honest guy,” Kelly told them, “with a lot of character”), and the General’s relationship with Trump. So the UFO question, as always, came out of left field.

I wanted to know if he agreed with other defense and intelligence officials that UFOs maneuvering in restricted airspace constituted a national security threat, and if so, what course of action the executive and legislative branches should pursue.

“When you say UFO to someone like me,” Kelly began, “you’re talking about aircraft that are not authorized to fly through the (restricted airspace), but they come somewhere from planet Earth and land on planet Earth … If you’re talking about a thing that may have started on another planet and came here, I know absolutely nothing about that. You would have to rely on people who do study that kind of thing, the Air Force, Space Command, that kind of thing. But I know nothing about UFOs, if they’re interplanetary …”

I asked if he was familiar with the now-famous incidents documented by Navy pilots aboard the USS Nimitz and the USS Roosevelt. Kelly said no, but added, “What is the U.S. government saying they are?”

“They’re not saying,” I replied. “They’re saying they reformed the pilot reporting rules, we want to know about this because (the UFOs) outperformed our front-line jet fighters on at least two occasions authenticated by videos. I was just wondering if you were familiar with –”

“I’m not,” he said. Next question.

Kelly retired from Southern Command in 2016, well before the Pentagon stamped its imprimatur on the Navy vids. Given the expanding notoriety of the Nimitz/Roosevelt incidents, and the strategic implications involved, it’s hard to believe that, going forward, active-duty American military commanders wouldn’t be up to snuff on the security gaps exposed by UFOs.

An “I can’t comment on that” would be more reassuring than ‘fessing up to knowing nothing. We need to know that our borders include airspace, and that somebody’s paying attention to that.