The heart of the legal matter, which should be addressed by our courts, is whether or not government bureaucrats and elected officials have a justification strong enough to maintain this secrecy at the expense of our Constitutional rights. To my knowledge, our courts have not yet answered this question. To state this more precisely, a Court has not conducted a trial to examine the facts and then weighed the impact of their release against the loss of our Constitutional rights. If for example, the information showed UFOs were not of this earth, I would argue that a clear showing of extreme national security danger (not just some frightened citizens or market turmoil), that is in fact likely to materialize, must be demonstrated to maintain secrecy. If such a trial were to occur, experts on national security, sociology, psychology, and other relevant areas would be called by both sides to properly weigh the need for continued secrecy against the burden of our rights.

The current judicial review process virtually never (less than 1%) conducts a trial to determine if an agency is acting appropriately. The mere unchecked opinion of our government bureaucrats, that the release of the information might be a national security threat, is insufficient. Under the present system an agency is not required to prove that the national security risk is likely, just simply state it is a potential. This type of unsupervised government secrecy should not be allowed to continue. The right to know the truth is a fundamental civil right granted by our Constitution and essential to our democracy. The need for information is especially important in a democracy; citizens must know what their government knows in order to participate in the process. Only with real information can citizens actually take part in government. True participation, is the way accountability occurs in their name, and in that way they can hold authorities, elected and non-elected, accountable for their acts.

The distinguished former U.S. Senator William Proxmire once stated, "Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous." Our Constitution requires that the free exchange of opinions and ideas must never be unnecessarily restricted. It also states that all citizens must be equal before the law and that the Government exists to serve the people, because it derives its power from the people. If UFOs were in fact not of our earth, what could be more essential than knowledge that we are not alone in the universe? As an example, this knowledge would almost certainly change how we as a society allocate resources. Specifically, we might act through our elected officials and add additional funding to NASA´s budget to study the issue in more detail. Even if the hidden information was inconclusive on the origin of UFOs or proved they were of earth origin, it is still relevant and the public has the right to know.

It is easy to see how information can change our social and political workings. To insure our democracy functions appropriately and to address secrecy, citizens must have the ability to obtain information from the government. This is one of the essential elements needed to keep power in check and insure our democracy´s health. Congress understood this essential requirement and passed legislation to address it by setting up a legal framework called the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) also known as Title 5 of the United States Code, section 552. FOIA states that any person has the right to request access to federal agency records or information and provides rules for its use. FOIA requires all agencies of the U.S. Government to disclose records upon receiving a written request, except those records that are protected from disclosure pursuant to nine exemptions and three exclusions.

The current framework for administering UFO secrecy is through these exemptions. They allow the government to withhold certain information when they designate information to have national security importance. The most significant is Exemption 1, which allows agencies to withhold records in the interest of national defense or foreign policy. Also, Exemption 3 allows agencies to withhold records that are specifically exempted from disclosure by statute. Exemption 1 is however, the main national security exemption. The FOIA process has been used by thousands of citizens in their attempt to retrieve information about UFOs. The ongoing process to discover all of what our government knows has, however, proven exceedingly frustrating. Many of the documents that have been released are either irrelevant to the specific requests or are almost entirely redacted as mentioned above. When a government agency refuses or incompletely releases requested information, the requester goes through a prescribed administrative process to challenge the agency, after exhausting administrative remedies, a dissatisfied FOIA requester may contest agency decisions in federal district court.

When a court hears a requester´s FOIA complaint it is arguably fulfilling the judiciary´s Constitutional role of review. Nevertheless, in the 1982 case Gardels v. CIA, (See: 689 F.2d 1100, 1105 ) the Court stated that the standard for withholding records on national security grounds is very accommodating since courts only test an agencies national security claims for reasonableness, good faith, specificity, and plausibility. In other words, they do not assess whether the alleged risks of disclosure would be likely to materialize, or weigh those risks against other interests. The court´s main emphasis is to determine if the agency complied with administrative requirements such as filling out an affidavit indicating it searched for records and provided a legitimate reason information was exempted, such as national security.

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