From curiosity cabinet to constitutional question

Exopolitics is usually defined as the study of the political, legal and societal implications of non-human intelligence existing and having touched humanity. The definition is harmless. The problem is that the field has split into two incompatible traditions.

One tradition works with what can be tested: legislation, classification decisions, budget lines, whistleblowers under oath, archival records and agencies' own admissions. The other works with what cannot be tested at all: channelled messages, named extraterrestrial federations, secret treaties and cosmic wars, delivered with the confidence of a court transcript.

My position is simple: the first tradition is politics, the second is faith. Both may exist, but only the first can ground a demand made on a state.

Daniel P. Sheehan is a US constitutional lawyer with a long record in cases about the state's right to keep secrets: the Pentagon Papers case, Watergate, the Karen Silkwood litigation and the Iran/Contra investigations. He now acts as counsel to whistleblowers on UAP matters and founded the New Paradigm Institute, which pursues the issue as a legal and civic project rather than a devotional one.

The core of that argument is not 'aliens exist'. The core is that parts of the US state apparatus have, for decades, built secrecy around a subject of the highest public interest without a clear congressional mandate — and that this is itself a constitutional problem.