The size of the conspiracy

I’ve thought about this a lot. I don’t think it would need to be thousands of people.

I genuinely think you’d only need about a hundred people in the know in order to keep it secret.

The UAP retrieval teams wouldn’t even need to know (“it’s secret Russian tech. It’s vital no one knows we have it. Hell, if anyone sees it pretend it’s aliens” would cover that).

The people reverse engineering the tech could be told the same story. If anyone started to suspect the truth you then know they’re actually the right people to be working on it, at which point you tell them the truth and warn them that if they try to tell anyone you’ll kill their family.

You could compartmentalise this so much that it becomes quite easy to keep it secret. Of course, you’d need to monitor the wider population to make sure no one is tipping them off. You’d have agents infiltrating UFO groups (but those agents themselves only need to know that they’re actually tracking Russian propaganda and infiltration.)

All of which we know has happened.

If the talking scientist doesn’t have family to threaten, they’ll die. It will be suicide, and it will look somewhat suspicious, but almost no one will question that.

If they can’t be killed (you don’t know what arrangements they’ve put in place for information to be released in the event of death) you destroy their reputation.

All of which we know has happened.

You obviously can’t kill too many of the Ross Coultharts of this world, so you monitor them very carefully. The moment they become too specific you can work out who their source is and neutralise them.

Most of this can even be carried out by agents who don’t know the truth. Sure, over time they’ll start to suspect, but by then it’s too late for them to warn anyone and they wouldn’t have proof to back their claims up. If they came forward they’d be dismissed as insane, or opportunistic grifters.

It’s been 80 years. The people who instigated this are all dead. We’re on to the third or fourth generation of the conspiracy now, which makes it even easier to maintain secrecy, because a lot of the people who knew the truth are dead.

In fact, I bet there’s no one now who knows everything. I bet there’s barely more than a handful of people behind all of this with any real awareness of the size of the conspiracy, because the different divisions have been so thoroughly compartmentalised over the years.

No wonder Disclosure is so hard. All of the different factions will know there are others, but not how many or where, or just what they’ve had to do to maintain secrecy. They’re all fighting to keep it quiet because they have no idea themselves what might come out, and they must be terrified.