Unacknowledged

Unacknowledged: An Exposé of the World's Greatest Secret is a 2017 "documentary" film starring Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project,Unacknowledged IMDb which claims to show "evidence of extraterrestrial contact, including top-secret testimonials, documents and never-before-seen UFO footage."Unacknowledged Rotten Tomatoes In reality, the movie is an hour-and-forty-minute long Gish Gallop of non-sequitur claims, quote mining, and deceit with the occasional interesting historical fact thrown in, all set to very dramatic music. 
Although it isn't particularly hard to dissect the outlandish claims made in it, the incoherent rapid fire nature of the exposition and the self-sealing nature of the arguments presented can overwhelm a viewer who isn't familiar with the topic. In addition, the pre-emptive poisoning of the well against pretty much everyone who disagrees with the film sets up a convenient escape hatch for the true believers; if their arguments starts going south, one can simply accuse the interlocutors of being on somebody's payroll.
It's pretty well made, though. And kinda entertaining, actually.
==Unacknowledged analysed: A Comedy in Three Acts==
In the following article, specific moments where grandiose claims are made will be analysed in depth. However, there are certain things that pop up over and over again, and pointing them out every time they crop up would get rather repetitive. So let's just deal with them once, here, for the sake of convenience.
===A note on quotes===
The first thing to keep in mind is that this film is a quote soup. Random quotes of famous people are given, often with no context or source, making it difficult to track down where they came from. But there is no need to, really. A random quote of a random famous person does not, in isolation, prove any of the things that are claimed in this film. Some famous (and presumably very intelligent) people believe that aliens are real, sure; but quite a few of these people might also believe that the Christian God is real, yet their word alone does not make it so. In addition, quotes can be made up. This one, for instance:
Given in the movie at 1:22:10 and attributed to General Douglas MacArthur in 1955 is a popular quote that occasionally does the rounds on the internet, but appears to be completely fake.Did General Douglas MacArthur Predict an Interplanetary War? Snopes 17 August 2005
===Interview editing===
The second thing to keep in mind is the way footage of people has been edited. Often the clip of a person saying something will be played with absolutely no context. What was the question asked? What topic is the person talking about? Did they give longer answers that were subsequently chopped up like the infamous interview where Homer Simpson admits to "grabbing her sweet can?" An example of suspicious editing occurs at 50:27 - 50:37, where Jonathan Weygandt (Lance Corporal, US Marine Corps) says:
What was the question asked by the interviewer? Did Weygandt give any caveats with his answer or contradict himself later in his testimony? There's no way to tell. Now contrast this with Richard Doty's clip at 1:24:00 - 1:24:35:
In this particular clip the audience knows exactly what the interviewer asked before the answer was given, thus making it a transparent piece of exposition. No one can accuse anyone of quote mining when the whole clip is played like this. Granted, doing this for everyone in the film would have increased the running time exponentially, so this is not an accusation that anything untoward has happened, but rather a reminder that the person who has access to the editing room has control over the narrative presented to the viewer.
===Random experts saying random things===
Lastly, a number of fairly high ranking, well-educated people make appearances to give their support for some of the things said in this film. Expertise is something to be respected, and merely hand waving away their claims would be rather flippant… were it not for the fact that some of these people have very bad track records when it comes to the paranormal. An example of such a man would be Dr. who appears at 1:09:40. Puthoff is not a fake doctor. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He also, unfortunately, has a history with the Church of Scientology and once claimed that Uri Geller has real psychic powers. Everyone is susceptible to acting irrationally. It's just human nature. One might have obtained the highest office in the land or won the most prestigious prize in academia, but that doesn't mean everything they say is objective truth. 
Now hit "play", dang it. We've got a movie to watch.
==Act I: An Embarrassment Of Riches==
In which a man who has been studying UFO phenomena for three decades presents "overwhelming evidence" - consisting of anecdotes, blurry recordings and stock film footage.
 
===A crash at Roswell, New Mexico===
8:20 - 11:50 minutes into the film: Within the space of three minutes five elderly gents (one a mortician and four who claim to be former members of the Armed Forces) speak of the mysterious Roswell crash. FBI documents, alien bodies, strange unearthly tech, goodness! There is a lot to unpack here and it's presented pretty chaotically, but replaying the segment a couple of times will allow us to wade through the info dump and summarise what claims are being made.
===Buzz Aldrin and his monolith===
17:40 - 18 minutes into the film: In this twenty second clip (taken from a longer C-SPAN interview) astronaut Buzz Aldrin is talking about an alien monolith on the moon of Mars… or is he? A longer version of the clip can be watched below:
This is the type of video editing trick that truly makes a person's blood boil and brings the makers of this film from "slightly misguided and naïve" territory into "outright liars" territory.
===Nukes in space===
thumb|right|200px|Ooooh, pretty lights!
21 - 23 minutes into the film: Two gentlemen (captioned as Col. Ross Dedrickson and Lt. Robert Jacobs, both formerly of the US Air Force) claim to have been present at when a missile was shot out of the sky by a laser beam fired from an unidentified flying object. Dedrickson then makes the claim that this was done by aliens, who were actively sabotaging human nuclear tests.
===Was Carl Sagan silenced by the CIA?===
thumb|right|150px|Carl Sagan is spinning so fast in his grave right now we might just be able to generate some free energy.
26:50 - 27:20 minutes into the film: The late Carl Sagan makes an appearance through short excerpts from his 1980 TV show, Cosmos. A quote of his is then briefly shown on the screen:
while Greer makes the assertion that Sagan was pro-UFO… before the spooks got to him.
===The body that is not of human origin===
27:30 minutes into the film: A tiny skeleton is shown very, very briefly on screen. One might think that he should surely spend some time on this - wouldn't this be his biggest piece of evidence by far? In fairness to the man, his previous project, dedicated more screen time to the specimen in question, so it's understandable that he flew past it. He would just be repeating what he already said in his previous film. Well, that, and he also happens to know that the body is not an alien's.
==Act II: Down The Rabbit Hole==
In which the real lack of transparency and accountability in US politics drives people to fake conspiracy theories.
===But what does Marilyn Monroe have to do with all of this?===
52:10 - 54:00 minutes into the film: Greer claims to know a Freemason who let him in on a little secret - that the glamourous Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe didn't, in fact die of an overdose - but was silenced by the deep state for threatening to air their dirty laundry.
===The mainstream media (which frequently makes the government look bad) is bought and paid for by the government===
54:30 - 1:02:45 minutes into the film: What hope do our fearless heroes have, when the odds are so stacked against them? The damn media-opoly is out to destroy the good name of everyone involved in bringing the truth to the public because the CIA wants to keep its secret stash of cool alien tech and free energy all to themselves!
Need proof? Just watch this banned Saturday Night Live cartoon!
Catchy tunes don't lie.
==Act III: The Lost Century==
In which the makers of this film have run out of ideas and proceed to steal the plot of 
===Stanley Meyer's water powered car (also, some free energy nonsense)===
1:13:30 - 1:15:00 into the film: The movie has made a jarring turn, pretty much abandoning all the UFO stuff to talk about free energy instead. According to Greer, Big Oil, in collusion with Big Government, has conspired to deprive average people of free energy, thereby forcing them to consume fossil fuels. Innocent inventors like Stanley Meyer were caught in the crossfire.
===Fun Fact TimeTM: The Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Northwoods and decades of Middle East shenanigans===
1:20:00 - 1:21:15 into the film: Within the space of one minute and fifteen seconds the movie takes decades of US foreign policy to town in a rant that threatens to put Noam Chomsky out of business. We start off with the Vietnam War, during which (in 1964) the US alleged that their ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin - a watershed moment which led to the escalation of the conflict, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars wasted. The Gulf of Tonkin incident consisted of one real and one fictitious event within a period of two days. On August 2, a skirmish occurred in the gulf between US and North Vietnamese forces within North Vietnamese territorial waters; this event did not lead to escalation. The second event on August 4 was fabricated by the National Security Agency, and was used as an excuse for escalation of the war.
The best conspiracy theories have an element of truth to them; that's what makes them compelling. The idea that the US government is hiding aliens from the public is rather far fetched, but the idea that the US military would plan a fake event and use it as an excuse to swing into action is somewhat more believable. As Sheehan points out there is historical precedent. was, as the documentary claims, a real proposal by the US Department of Defense to stage a false flag attack that could: The plans in this memo were turned down by the Kennedy administration, but the fact that this sort of thing was seriously considered is mind-boggling.
Well, it would be mind boggling if the Iraq War wasn't fought on the pretext of a tin-pot dictator's imaginary arsenal of nukes.There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq The Guardian 7 October 2004 And if the Afghanistan War hadn't been two decades worth of spectacular failures built upon verifiable falsehoods.At War With The Truth: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found. The Washington Post 9 December 2019
All this stuff is getting kind of boring though… can we get back to the fun stuff? Like, eh… flying pyramids maybe?
===I was promised flying pyramids and all I got was this lousy drawing===
1:26:05 - 1:27:10 into the film: Now we're talking! Never mind all that criticism of US foreign policy, there are more urgent matters at hand. Right now "Military Aerospace Historian" Michael Schratt is explaining to the viewers how the Air Force is going to smear the friendly aliens using their arsenal of mundane objects which they (somehow) turned into aircraft!
File:Boomerang.jpg|The boomerangs…
File:Saucer_with_yellow_and_white_design.jpg|…the saucers…
File:Four_cigars.jpg|…the cigars…
File:Harvard_food_pyramid.png|…the pyramids…
File:Basic_right_triangle_cba.png|…and the triangles!
 
===Hollywood is priming humanity for an alien invasion===
1:29:30 - 1:30:30 into the film: The myriad details of this sinister false flag operation are finally coming together—the US government, due to its need to be in a state of perpetual war, will use "back engineered alien reproduction vehicles to stage an invasion from outer space." This will presumably allow the US government to declare martial law and take away people's individual freedoms. In order to make sure the public panics when they see the alien spacecraft, society needs to be brainwashed into hating and fearing our friendly interstellar neighbors. Then, once the public is sufficiently duped into hating the ETs, they will hand over their liberty to the corrupt politicians like sheep. One of the prime vehicles for disseminating these opinions are Hollywood movies where aliens are vilified. 
==In conclusion==
A load of baloney. All true, all of it, the aliens, the false flags, the whole lot. RationalWiki is controlled and funded by George Soros and therefore can not be trusted!!!
==See also==
*Ancient aliens - With how convoluted this film is you'd think they'd mention them at least once.
*The Men Who Stare at Goats - Not only is the CIA hiding aliens from us, they are also staring at our goats!
==External links==
*Unacknowledged on IMDb
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:Films
Category:Schlockumentaries
Category:Side-by-side articles