ScaRZ wrote:Do you guys believe that the Pickering brothers (Clay and Shawn) are just being used to push the Source A offerings?
I see them much like Victor and Bill were used in the whole Serpo saga.
Do you see the Source A offerings as a different group,or could it be the same group as the Anons of Serpo?
These so called "Insiders",are they [True Insiders] or are they inside nothing at all?
Not sure if I count as one of "you guys" but...
If you look at the people involved in what I sometimes refer to as the "A team" you can see something of the structure around this story.
The "A team" was originally comprised of:
Source "A"
Clay Pickering
Shawn Pickering
Robert Morningstar
Morningstar stopped making any kind of public statements about the case after the first few months. I suspect that if nothing else he tended to make a lot of "off message" assertions that contradicted some of the things Clay and Shawn were stating. I assume he is no longer actively involved.
Note that I would not position Michael Salla in the 'inner ring' of this story. Instead we have an 'outer ring' of Ufologists who have picked up on this story, and met up with Source A:
Robert VanDerClock
Michael Salla
Bruce Maccabee
Salla was engaged at the beginning, and linked the case with his existing Exopolitics framework. However, the pattern of communications strongly suggests that he is on the "outside" of the group, and is not likely to have been involved in the origin of the story.
Maccabee and VanDerClock have only engaged to the extent of verifying that "A" is a real person and active in the service.
So what can we say about the story to date? Very little.
* Source A is quite likely a real person, and a real Navy officer as Clay and Shawn have claimed; certainly Maccabee found no issue with his general credentials when he apparently visited him at a Navy facility.
* The identity of A says nothing one way or the other about the story, but it does at least mean that Clay and Shawn may very well be acting as honest brokers. I consider this the likeliest case, as "A" has had plenty of opportunity to correct any misrepresentation through contacts with other researchers.
* No evidence has been presented that either confirms the alleged UN meeting, or enables it to be checked out and possibly discredited. Robert Morningstar, perhaps unintentionally, alluded to this as a strength of the "A" story versus that of Lorant. If nothing else the attention to detail in ensuring the story cannot be validated has been consistent throughout. The careful lack of comment on the Lorant case is just one example (and where Morningstar drifted from the script).
* The additional "TDY" story despite its rather bonkers SF elements is no more or less verifiable than the original meetings. I.e., not at all.
So, ultimately the question is why a Navy officer is making these outlandish claims, and what ought one do about it? Dan Smith already lodged an enquiry/complaint with the Navy. What else? Certainly the effort needed to verify any aspect of the case is quite considerable and beyond the resources of any armchair UFO researcher.
