Wisconsin volleyball team leaked nudes reddit

A lot of the news articles covering this are smaller for the moment, however there are a few notable exceptions. I'll link to various news articles I believe are notable (notable as in popularity, not individual credibility) as well as quotes/snippets from each one to give an idea of how this coverage is going for Reddit (these quotes do not contain the full articles, but I have given links to the ones I discuss). In short, it isn't good. To find more articles about this, search "Reddit AMA" and filter by news.
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The Verge:

In his AMA, Huffman seemed to shut the door on making amends with the apps that are closing their doors. “Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” Huffman said. “For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”
Based on what I’ve heard, that last sentence doesn’t ring entirely true. Tony Lupeski, the developer of ReddPlanet, tells The Verge that he has tried to contact Reddit three times since the initial announcement of changes but has been “ignored every time.” (Lupeski said something similar in a public reply to Huffman.) Selig says that the last time Reddit communicated with him “in any capacity” was a week ago and that Huffman had declined a request for a call (which he noted in his post about Apollo’s shutdown on Thursday).
Reddit has given some small concessions: the Blind subreddit protested the changes because they could mean that accessibility-focused apps necessary to browse the site would have to shut down, and on June 7th, Reddit said those apps would be exempt from the pricing updates. During the AMA, Huffman also committed to making the official Reddit apps “more accessible.”
But in a message to The Verge, Blind moderator MostlyBlindGamer wrote, “We are still concerned about the selection and limitations imposed on exempt third-party apps and about the financial pressure on the developers who must — to our best knowledge — effectively maintain them for free.” MostlyBlindGamer added, “I’m very disappointed that [Huffman] did not add any information to what we read on The Verge regarding accessibility, despite Reddit receiving multiple public and private requests for clarification.”
The developer of RedReader, one of the apps granted an exemption, said in a post, “I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned about Reddit’s current trajectory, and nobody can know for sure how long the exemption will last.”
The AMA is now over. Huffman ended up posting 14 comments, all of which received hundreds of downvotes. (The one asking about Selig’s claim has more than 2,000 downvotes.) Other Reddit admins posted seven comments of their own that were also heavily downvoted. A stickied comment has links to all of the posts. As of this writing, the AMA has more than 17,000 comments.
During the AMA, a Redditor asked how Huffman would address concerns that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Huffman wrote. “Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable.”

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The Verge article explains both Spez's side and the users' sides, links to the AMA and direct quotes of Spez's AMA responses. Overall, it does not paint a pretty picture of Reddit admin. At the time of me writing this it is also the 3rd most popular article on The Verge, and is clickable on The Verge's front page.
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Engadget:

In a series of mostly 1-2 sentence responses to detailed, multi-part questions, Huffman acknowledged some missteps in the company’s API rollout, but largely declined to tackle thornier questions about the company’s handling of its relationship with third-party developers. In one response, he conceded that the 30-day window given to developers for the new API was a “tight timeline” and said the company was “continuing to chat with many of the developers who still want to work with us.”
But other developers soon weighed in, noting that they had never heard back from the company, despite reaching out through the channels promoted by Reddit. “I have been trying to contact Reddit over the last 3 months and have been completely ignored,” one developer wrote. “I feel completely powerless to do anything right now and I want to try and save the app I've been working on for the last 10 years.” Huffman apologized and said the company would respond.
When asked about why the company accused Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, of threatening the company — a claim Selig denied and promptly debunked with an audio clip of a phone call with a Reddit rep — Huffman doubled down on the criticism. “His ‘joke’ is the least of our issues,” he said. “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different. I don’t know how we could do business with him.” (Huffman didn’t respond to a followup question from Selig asking for examples of such behavior.)
Notably, there were a number of topics Huffman didn't address, including why the company priced its API at a rate that developers say is prohibitively expensive. Huffman also didn’t address the upcoming blackout from thousands of subreddits protesting the API changes. More than 3,000 subreddits have pledged to “go dark” for two days beginning June 12th to protest the changes.
By the end of the AMA, Huffman had responded to 14 questions, while a few other executives answered a handful of their own. In perhaps the most telling sign that their answers were not well-received, every answer from the reddit team was downvoted so heavily they were almost impossible to view within the AMA thread itself. A moderator later linked all of their answers at the top of the thread. “We know answers are tough to find,” they said.

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The article is short, but in my opinion, scathing and effective for our cause. It is also currently on their front page but is unfortunately buried somewhat.
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TechCruch:

Reddit’s unpopular decision to revise its API pricing in a move that’s forcing third-party apps out of business has taken a weird turn. In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer behind the well-liked third-party app Apollo, which the company had previously accused of operating inefficiently and not being a good “API” user.
Selig had been among the first to highlight that Reddit’s new API pricing would effectively make it impossible to continue to operate the Apollo app. He explained that, under the new terms, it would cost him $20 million per year to do so — money the app doesn’t make. This week, Selig announced the app’s last day would be June 30, ahead of the July 1 implementation of the new API pricing.
Huffman seemingly has an ax to grind with Selig in particular, first accusing the developer of extortion, per Selig’s extensive post on the situation between himself and Reddit.
According to Selig’s interpretation of the situation, he raised the question as to why Reddit was choosing to change its API terms to put third-party apps out of business rather than just buying them out, as the company did with Alien Blue (an older Reddit client that it acquired in 2014). He said that if Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year, Reddit should cut him a check to put an end to the app. The remark doesn’t sound like a serious ask from his telling. In fact, he clarified on the call, “…this is mostly a joke.”
A Reddit representative on a call with Selig, however, first seemingly interpreted his comment as a “threat,” Selig said. But on the call, they cleared up the misunderstanding and the contact apologized. Selig came with receipts — he recorded the call (which is legal where he’s based in Canada).
But in a subsequent call with moderators, Huffman referred to this conversation as Selig “threatening” Reddit.
That stance hasn’t softened on Reddit’s side, Huffman made clear today.
In the AMA, one user asked Huffman to clarify, “what were you thinking with your attempt to discredit Apollo by claiming that Christian threatened and blackmailed you?”
The response was surprising. Unlike most companies, which try to soften their blows behind corporate PR speak, Huffman answered rather plainly.
“His ‘joke’ is the least of our issues,” the CEO wrote. “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
It’s an odd turn of events for Apollo, whose iOS-first and user-friendly design just this week saw it featured during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, ahead of Reddit’s API policy change that will now put it out of business.

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The article mostly covers the situation with Apollo and the AMA is not the focus (although it is mentioned and linked), but it does a good job of explaining the situation with Apollo and providing context to people out of the loop on that. The article is easily findable on the front page of TechCrunch.
Those are the largest news outlets covering the situation at the moment (although like I said many smaller ones are covering this as well), I'll edit my post if I see more in the future. But overall I think this popular news coverage paints reddit admins in a pretty damn bad light and won't be good for reddit if investors see the behavior these articles mention of Spez and the feelings of users towards the site as a whole.
I know I already made a post about news articles covering the blackouts, but I decided to make this a separate post as I wanted to include quotes and felt this was important to mention, as the coverage here is far more brutal compared to the more neutral coverage of the blackouts. If more popular news outlets cover the AMA I think we might have a fighting chance of Reddit feeling media pressure to compromise, lest they lose their investors before going public.

PART 1
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The moment Gray touches my head, static ripples across my skull. I froth at the mouth. Choke. For a little while, I think I’m probably dying, but then I lose all sense of awareness. I’m falling. I’m breaching the atmosphere of my mind and crashing into a dimension outside of myself, outside of everything.
Images flash. They’re like a film reel, playing across my consciousness from every direction. They’re everywhere. Inescapable. It’s as if I’m inhabiting them, as though they were moments in time and everything from sight, sound and smell are collapsing in on one another like a dying star.
Gray calls this ‘disorienting.’
But then, just when I tell myself I want out— that I can’t take it anymore because my disembodied ghost is about to explode… It slows. The whole process hits the brakes. The visual hurricane calms from a category 5 to a 3, and then settles into a 1.
Whew-ie!
Moments float to the surface. Others sink out of sight.
Like a sponge, my mind starts absorbing information– everything from quantum physics to the lyrical discography of Shania Twain. Knowledge becomes trivial. As soon as I want to know something, I reach out and take it.
It’s exhilarating.
But then, something catches my attention. It’s a series of shimmering lights in my lake of thought, gleaming jewels that seem to be drawing me toward them. Somehow, I know that these are why I’ve come here. These are what Gray meant for me to find, the so-called truth that would justify all of the abductions, all of the murders.
So I reach out.
Information bombards me. It carpet-bombs my mind, and in the overwhelming chaos of it all, the entire history of the cosmos is laid bare before me.
I see it. I see everything.
Gray and Teal? Not monsters. An alien species called the Vytar. Their technology eclipses humanity’s, and they’ve existed for billions of years. They’ve done remarkable things in that time, everything from mastering hyperlight travel to creating edible spray cheese. They’ve even charted the entirety of the cosmos.
What I’m saying is they've been busy.
But my revelations don’t stop there. No, they keep coming.
Tragedy.
I see tragedy.
I see it in the Vytar’s search for answers. In their quest to uncover every nook and cranny of the universe, they come across two devastating discoveries. Firstly, they learn that they are alone in the cosmos. Secondly, they discover their species is going extinct.
How?
It happens like this.
Near the edge of space, a Vytar ship discovers life. But it isn’t intelligent. Far from it. This life is microbial, viral, and it infects the explorers. They toss themselves into quarantine. They’re observed, and a shocking discovery is made– this virus?
Not so bad.
In fact, maybe it’s just what they've been looking for.
Soon, Vytarians across the cosmos are lining up to be infected with the virus. Within a century, their entire species are carriers. It jumps between them like the common cold, but they don’t mind. Not at all. Why? Easy. This virus comes with a satisfaction guarantee: biological immortality.
Now there’s a deal.
The trouble is, these Vytar don’t work like humans do. They don’t have sex and make babies and then sleep and then wake up and do it again. No, these Vytar lay eggs. And only certain members of their species lay eggs. And what’s more? They only lay eggs during a specific molting period at the end of their life cycles.
See what I’m getting at?
Biological immortality or laying eggs. Pick one. You can’t have both if you’re the Vytar. But by the time they figure this out, this virus has infected every last colony of their civilization. Unable to reproduce, their population enters freefall. It develops what’s known as an existential crisis, and if there’s one thing civil society hates, it’s dealing with an existential crisis.
Tempers flare.
Emotions run hot.
This brings us to the crux of the Vytarian dilemma. War.
And lots of it.
Worlds erupt into conflict. Galaxies become battlefields, and whole solar systems are laid to ash. If you thought nuclear weapons were bad, then consider what happens when a moon is kicked out of orbit into the surface of a planet. The bloodshed is immeasurable. As the fighting escalates, the stars themselves become weapons. The Vytar discover that if you can just push one toward instability…. Well, boom.
There goes the neighborhood.
These Vytar? Nothing if not creative.
But it’s just this penchant for outside the box problem solving that massacres their species into the low billions. Over a single millenia, the Vytar are swept from an inter-galactic species, to one inhabiting a single world on the edge of space.
Having met their downfall at the hands of their technology, the surviving Vytar turn toward spiritualism. Cults form. Different sects have different beliefs, but one eventually consumes the rest: The Way of the Chosen. The Way promises an end to Vytarian pain.
No more existential crisis.
No more killing.
All the Vytar need to do is open their hearts and minds to a simple three step program:

1. Show a little pride. We’re the only intelligent life in the universe, so start acting like it!
2. Persevere. Immortality is our final test. Keep your chin up!
3. Ascend. Just make it to the heat death of the universe, and you’ll be granted salvation!

Believe it or not, it’s a big hit.
The Vytarians flock to it in droves because it offers what they need– a sense of purpose, and a break from the emotional turmoil that’s consumed them for decades. In a matter of years, The Way becomes the dominant socio-political force across the Vytarian homeworld, bringing the last of the warring factions together.
It’s a beautiful thing.
But what’s the phrase?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah, that’s it.
Not everybody is a fan of how The Chosen conduct business. But The Chosen make it easy for them– all who disavow their belief system are exiled. It’s for the good of the Vytarians, they say. And maybe they’re right. After all, these are a species of aliens that have seen just what disagreements can lead to.
Fire. Fury. Mass graves and floating corpses in the vacuum of space.
No thank you.
That’s a risk they won’t take.
One of these exiled Vytarians is a scientist. He has no name in the shared memory save for ‘The Heretic,’ and he is both the architect of humanity and the genesis of our greatest threat. In his assessment, the Vytarian extinction is an inevitability. He perceives their current peace as fragile, held up by a corrupt theocracy whose foundations could crumble any moment. Once they do, boom. Back to war. Back to genocide.
It won’t be pretty.
Worse still, when the last of the Vytar perish, so too will the last form of complex intelligence. Their species won’t just die– it’ll be forgotten. The universe will become a barren void, an unconscious minefield of drifting cadavers.
That will be their legacy.
But the Heretic, he’s a mover-and-a-shaker. He’s the sort of individual who likes to solve problems, not create them, and so when he thinks of the Vytarian extinction, when he acknowledges it as a slow-motion inevitability, he isn’t giving up. No, he has a plan. It’s not a great plan, mind you. It’s not even a plan with a high-likelihood of success, and nor, for that matter, is it a plan that’s strictly legal.
But it is a plan.
It goes like this: if the Vytarians are dying out, then something must replace them. There must be intelligent life to take their place, to give warmth to this cold cosmos, and remember their legacy. Since no other intelligent life exists in all the universe, that leaves him a single option.
He’ll just have to make some.
And this Heretic? This mover-and-shaker?
Well, he succeeds.
And really, that’s where this nightmare begins.
_________________________________________________________________________
The helicopter touches down in a clearing that shouldn’t exist.
I step out to find a forest that’s broken, smoldering, one that’s cleaved in two with a cloud of cinders in its wake. This isn’t how I remember this place. Not at all. I remember a wooden bridge over a lazy creek, and tall trees that–
“Mitchell!”
Somebody’s calling my name. Running toward me.
My boss.
Lisa’s got her phone pressed to one ear and her other hand is frantically waving at me. All around us are government personnel, fellow men-in-black types looking equal parts panicked and terrified. Nice to know I’m not alone.
“Mitchell,” Lisa says, breathless. “Finally! Follow me.”
We take a stroll down the newest gully in America. Pieces of splintered metal scatter the ground, and here and there I see techs in hazmat suits brushing dust from the debris. Above us, the moon is being shrouded by a gigantic tarp. They’re extending it across the entire crash-site, likely hoping they can get it up before foreign satellites move into position and stick their noses into our business.
“Looks like a warzone out here,” I say, loosening my tie. Is it hot out, or is my anxiety just turning my body into a furnace? Tough to say.
Either way, Lisa’s not paying attention.
“Understood, sir. I’ll keep you posted with any and all updates as soon as we have them.” She hangs up her phone and turns to me. “Sorry, did you say something, Mitchell? Tonight’s been a nightmare.”
I can imagine.
As we make our way toward the UAP, Lisa tells me the government’s been hounding her for details.
What exactly did we shoot down?
Are we going to war?
She says we’ve probably got three hours until the media wakes up, and then we’ll need to start beating the journalists back with sticks. “This is a fucking disaster,” she tells me, and she reaches into her jacket and grabs a flask. “Whisky?”
I shake my head. “Haven’t touched the stuff for years.”
“Suit yourself.”
Bottom’s up.
She wipes her mouth and shoves the flask back into her jacket, taking the sort of breath you take when you’ve hit your limit. “I should’ve kept on as an accountant,” she says. “I’d still be in bed right now.”
The closer we get to the UAP, the easier it is to see through the haze of smoke. The craft is no longer just a smudge in the distance. Now I can make out its general shape. Its general size. It looks big enough to pass for a stadium, and round enough to sell the illusion.
“A flying saucer,” Lisa says, shaking her head. “You’d think these aliens never heard of a bad cliche.”
We get to the edge of the perimeter and flash our badges. Three soldiers let us through.
“Listen,” Lisa tells me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Before we go inside this thing, I want you to take a few deep breaths, okay? We’ve had a couple incidents already.”
“Incidents?” I ask.
“Sure. One guy pissed his pants. Another was taking photos of this… corpse in a vat, and he throws up all over the inside– of the vat, not the corpse. Whatever. Point is, he completely fucked the lab team trying to get a sample.” She runs a hand through her hair. Chuckles darkly. “Luckily, there are about a dozen other corpses where that came from, but still. The smell was awful.”
Vats. Corpses. My stomach does a front flip and I almost take a page out of the photographer’s playbook. “So this is the real deal,” I mutter, pretending this whole thing doesn’t feel uncomfortably familiar. “Aliens actually exist, huh?”
“Just wait,” Lisa says, stepping into the dark of the ship. “This next part is gonna blow your mind.”
_________________________________________________________________________
The Heretic creates life in his image, using Earth as his petri dish.
His first lifeforms are what you’d call prototypes. Rough drafts. They’re giant reptiles, dinosaurs, and a scattershot of various traits and biology. They’re a means to discover what works and what doesn’t on the path to evolving complex intelligence. He studies them closely. Then he studies them some more.
But what’s the phrase?
Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah, that’s it.
We’ve covered that the Vytarian are an advanced species. We know that they’re no strangers to space, and we’re well aware that their wars wiped out 99% of their population. But what we haven’t covered, is that some toys are still left-over from those wars.
And The Chosen? They possess almost all of them.
One of these is a fleet of surveillance drones, the sort that drift through the cosmos and ping headquarters if they see something suspect. One of these happens to drift by Earth. Can you guess what happens next?
Images of the Heretic’s well, heresy, are transmitted to The Chosen. Minutes later, he gets a collect call from 40 billion light years away.
What is this, the Chosen High Council asks.
Blasphemer, they condemn.
But the Heretic isn’t shocked by this. He knows that according to The Way, the creation of new lifeforms is the exclusive domain of their deity, The Distant One. He knows that what he’s done is criminal. That maybe it’s also considered an affront against all of existence, and that it’s maybe grounds for execution and inviting the wrath of god upon all Vytarians.
Relax, he tells them.
It’s you or us, they say.
I can explain, he tells them.
Don’t bother, they say.
The line goes dead. The Heretic figures he’s got about a handful of weeks before The Chosen arrive to dish out their justice, so he flees to a neighboring star system. While there, he realizes The Chosen were never aiming for him– only his life’s work. A meteor is propelled into the surface of the earth, and the moment it impacts the planet becomes fire. Six trillion lifeforms scream in momentary agony before turning to ash.
The Heretic weeps.
_________________________________________________________________________
Years pass.
Then centuries.
These turn to millenia, and millenia become eons, and the Heretic decides to risk returning to earth. He wants to find closure for the loss of his creation. He wants to pay his respects. But when he arrives, his sorrow becomes hope. Life, it seems, has survived.
More than that, it has thrived.
Yet this life isn’t the same that he set out to create. No, this life is the biological progeny of tiny balls of fur he created to feed his prototypes. They’re what you and I might call mammals. Except some of these mammals are impressive– they have large brains, opposable thumbs, and what’s more, they look a bit like you and I.
They’re humans. Among the first.
The Heretic is fascinated by these humans. He recognizes they possess complex intelligence, sentience, and a strong sense of adaptability. He observes them as they form social groups, watches as they create the ghosts of language.
Yes, he thinks. This is it. These lifeforms will inherit the universe, and in doing so, immortalize the Vytar in their memories.
But a problem remains. The Chosen.
If they discover the earth is teeming with life, then they’ll circle back and finish the job. This time, they won’t pull punches. The planet will become an asteroid field, and all of its life will be red mist upon the floating rocks.
But what to do?
How to keep humanity alive, to shield it from the overwhelming might of the Vytarian military? It seemed impossible. Equations run through the Heretic’s mind, scenarios infest his thoughts and in not a single one can he fathom succeeding. He has but one spacecraft. No weapons to speak of.
And it occurs to him.
Humans are hardy creatures– adaptable. Given time, they will evolve to reach parity with the Vytarians. Then, their superior numbers could compensate for any gaps in technology. But such a plan hinges upon them getting up to speed, ascending to an evolutionary singularity in which their gains become exponential. He cannot afford to wait millions of years when The Chosen could discover him any day.
No, he’ll need to interfere. Spike the gene pool. Rig the results. He’ll need to give humanity more than a push, he’ll need to throw it down the damn stairs if they have any hope of surviving.
But there’s a way.
Yes, there’s always a way.
He devises a solution called Project Runaway.
It starts by creating a new lifeform. It’s aesthetically identical to a human male, but it’s born from the genetic harvest of thousands of his peers. Each strand of his DNA will be carefully selected for, prioritizing the potential for runaway evolution. Then, these strands will be spliced with Vytarian genes. Not much, but enough to access fragments of the shared memory– the Collective Recall. This will allow the man to gain intuitive understanding of billions of years worth of wisdom. It’ll permit him to think faster. Adapt more quickly.
Then, as this man spreads his genes through the population, his progeny will inherit his DNA. They’ll evolve quicker. Think faster. This is how it works.
This is how humanity inherits the universe.
_________________________________________________________________________
“Watch your step,” Lisa says, stepping into the UAP.
I follow her inside. For a moment, I’m blinded by the glare of industrial work-lamps. Then my senses are assaulted by a cacophony of sound and movement. We’ve entered a hive of activity. Crowds of people buzz around us, some in biohazard suits, others in military camo.
Where we are is a large circular chamber, one surrounded by dark corridors leading to other locations of the ship. Right now, teams are taping those entrances up with plastic wrap. Other teams are setting up perimeters, hanging pieces of paper above archways labeled A through Z.
“You alright, Mitchell?”
“What?”
“Are you alright?” Lisa says, and she’s got her arms folded. She’s looking at me like she thinks I’m about to become her newest headache, maybe piss myself all over the deck.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, forcing a smile. “It’s just a lot to take in, you know? Never been in an alien spaceship before.”
“Sure,” she says, lifting an eyebrow. “Join the club. We’re heading down corridor D to find somebody named Major Luca– I was talking to her a few seconds before you showed up. She said she’s got something to show me. Something big.”
“Spare me the suspense, Lis. What are we after?”
“From the sounds of it? Bodies.”
“Bodies?” I say. “Like those corpses you mentioned, the ones in vats?”
“Not quite. According to Luca, these bodies aren’t exactly… Well, they’re not human. Probably.” She punches my arm, gives me a cheeky smirk. “Relax, Mitchell. The Major confirmed they’re already dead– nothing to be scared of. Let’s go.”
She leads us down the corridor labeled D, and every step I take is worse than the last.
My heart is flying. It’s pounding a million beats a minute. I put on my best poker face, nodding along as Lisa briefs me on the UAP, but internally I’m having a breakdown. It’s taking everything I have not to hyperventilate. The further we get into the spacecraft, the more I’m wondering how much of my dreams were dreams.
The more I wonder if all I am is just some clone with a badge.
“What did the bodies look like?” I ask, clearing my throat. “Did these aliens have scales, and tails…and sort of look like lizards?”
Lisa laughs. “No idea. Luca didn’t give me much of a description, but I’d bet money they were little green men. It’d go with the whole flying saucer motif, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” I swallow. “Suppose it would.”
She chatters on. This, that, something else. Apparently they’ve got an ironclad alibi to deal with the journalists, something banal enough to keep them far away from the crash site. But I’m too deep in my own thoughts to register what is. I’m too deep remembering all the awful aspects of the dream that wasn’t supposed to be real. I’m remembering him.
The Runaway.
And the more I remember, the more I wish I could forget.
____________________________________________________
The first time the Runway opens his eyes, he’s twenty years old.
He’s laying naked in the jungle, the sun scorching his skin with ultraviolet rays. He sits up. He has no instructions. No guidance. This world is entirely new to him, utterly foreign and in his stomach flutters the first ghosts of adrenaline.
From the outer ring of Saturn, the Heretic watches.
The Runaway rises to his feet. He takes his first shaking, trembling step and stumbles into the grass. He groans. Pain. A new sensation. He gets back up, tries again. It’s harder than it looks, walking when you’ve never done it before, but eventually he gets the picture. For him, it gets easier by the second.
After only an hour, he’s running through the ferns. Climbing trees. And his stomach is screaming.
Food.
He must find food.
But what to eat?
By his third hour alive, the Runaway has learned to forage. By his sixth, he’s consumed enough poisonous berries to floor an elephant, and is writhing on the ground. The poison burns his stomach. It makes his tongue swell and his skin glisten with sweat, but as the seconds become minutes, the agony fades to pain fades to healing.
His body is adapting. His digestive systems are hardening themselves against the poison, and soon, the Runaway rises back to his feet.
Evolution has begun.
As the sun sets, the Runaway collects wild game from crude traps. He has begun subconsciously tapping into the Collective Recall, intuitively teaching himself to skin animals, to make fires, to cook flesh for taste and health.
He is learning.
As the week comes to a close, the Runaway is surrounded. A pack of wolves has been hounding him for days, and now they’ve come to deal with this trespasser upon their territory. They circle him. Their teeth gnash, saliva leaking from their jaws. In their throats is a growl, a threat of death, but the Runaway has learned to handle his fear. Now, it serves him.
His muscles tense. His hands flex in and out of fists, and his eyes follow the beasts as they pad the ground. The large one, he thinks. The large wolf will engage, and the rest will follow. But he doesn’t give it time– he dashes forward, faster than even the wolves can react, and he brings his fist down upon the skull of the largest. The animal is stunned. Dazed. He follows up by grabbing its jaws, and pulling with all of his might.
The other wolves flee. They yelp and they scream as their champion falls to the dirt, dead.
The Runaway dresses himself in its hide.
At the end of the month, the Runaway has evolved to the point he barely needs to eat. Twenty calories a day serve him all that he needs. A handful of berries, and he can operate at peak mental and physical capability. By the close of his second month, he no longer needs to breathe. He fishes hundreds of meters below the surface, fighting off sharks for choice morsels swimming in the deep.
On the anniversary of his birth, the Heretic observes that the Runaway no longer ages. His DNA suffers no damage each time it splits. He has become biologically immortal.
After five years, he transcends humanity. The Runaway is now capable of perceiving individual atoms, and by the sixth year of his life, he can manipulate them. Matter becomes his plaything. The laws of physics become little more than suggestions, and so if he wants to fly, then he does. If he wants to reach into the minds of living creatures, he does that too.
The Runaway has become the most powerful lifeform to ever live. But the Heretic is not concerned.
No, he sees what his creation is. He sees that this anomaly, this Runaway is kind. Empathetic. With each passing year his interest in violence wanes. Before long, the Runaway cuts himself off from humanity altogether, unable to stomach their wonton savagery and thirst for blood. Some have taken to worshiping him. Others, reviling.
To him, they are all the same. Misguided, fearful, and ruled by instincts he has learned to see beyond. These humans may as well be a separate species.
To find respite from this chaos, he meditates. Sometimes he does this at the bottom of the sea. Other times he does this atop high, wind-swept peaks. Anywhere his senses are sufficiently assailed to block out the madness of the world around him.
And it’s while meditating on one of these peaks that the Runaway begins looking to the stars. He wonders if there may be more out there.
Is it possible, he thinks aloud, that there are others like me?
Could I find a companion of my own?
And it’s while he’s pondering these thoughts, while he’s gazing into the deepness of space, that he finds something looking back at him. A lizard. Housed within a strange capsule, floating in the outer rings of a celestial body we know as Saturn.
It is the first time he and his maker lock eyes.
Weeks later, the Runaway’s breached the atmosphere of Earth. A month after that, he’s traversed the solar system and made it to the Heretic’s ship. He’s tapping on the hull. The Heretic welcomes him inside.
“Hello,” the Heretic says, in the ancient tongue of man.
The Runaway peers at him. “Hello…” he says slowly, but it is not in the ancient tongue of man. It is in the low bass of Vytarian. “Your language is… strange… but I believe I can master it. Who are you? Why have you been watching… me?”
The Heretic doesn’t see the point of mincing words. He comes clean about everything– after all, the Runaway is capable of looking into his thoughts. What’s the use of playing coy? He starts with the extinction of the Vytarian people, and ends with humanity’s role as inheritors of the universe, and the Runaway’s role in leading them there.
“Have you any questions?” the Heretic asks.
“Many,” the Runaway tells him. “Above all, why do you fear me?”
“I don’t,” the Heretic says.
“You do. I see it reflected in your thoughts.”
“The fear you see reflected in my thoughts,” the Heretic begins, speaking with careful deliberation, “... it does not belong to me. You are viewing fragments of the Collective Recall, a shared knowledge passed down by my people. You are viewing the beliefs of those of us who remain from the Old War– followers of the Way of the Chosen.”
“These followers,” The Runaway says, his expression twisting with shock and horror. “They think of me as a monster– an abomination!”
“Not exactly,” the Heretic tells him. “Strictly, they do not think of you at all. In order to protect my work, I cut myself off from the Collective sometime ago, so all you’re seeing are faint echoes of their dogma. To them, my work is blasphemy. But yes… I believe that should they learn of you, your vast capabilities would indeed frighten them. They would think you a monster.”
“And to you?” The Runaway asks. “What am I to you?”
The Heretic reaches toward the Runaway, claps his shoulder. He smiles in the human way. “I am a barren lifeform, ravaged by a virus that has stolen the hope of my people. I am unable to achieve my biological imperative. Reproduction is beyond me. You ask me what you are to me? You are my legacy.” He slowly, awkwardly performs the human ritual of embrace, wrapping his arms around the Runaway.
You are my son.
_________________________________________________________________________
I take a breath. It’s brief. Gasping. Gray is standing in front of me, his pupils pulsing, and I’m suddenly aware that his name isn’t Gray it’s Wor. He’s 70 million years old. Not only that, but so is his friend– and his name isn’t Teal, but Kez. They’re both devotees of the Way of the Chosen.
“Did you see?” Wor asks, and he’s no longer using his digital translator. After the thought transference it seems I can understand the Vytarian language, make sense of the various vibrations that previously just seemed like low bass.
“Yes,” I say, leaning forward. “But not everything.” I look up at Wor, and hit him with an accusatory glare. “There’s more to this story, isn’t there? What aren’t you telling me?”
Kez twists his neck to look at us. His pupils are blowing up and shrinking in quick succession– a reaction I now understand to mean I’m pissed. “You have seen enough, human. Prepare for genetic deconstruction and we will be done with this.”
“No!” I exclaim, and I’m surprised to hear my voice rumbling throughout the ship. It’s thunderous. I clear my throat. “No,” I say, and this time my voice is appropriately subdued. Vytarian is apparently a powerful language. “If you want me to jump into a vat and turn into… corpse chili or whatever, then you have to show me it’s worth it.”
The Vytar exchange glances. Wor’s pupils shrink– he’s nervous. Concerned. “To show you more may invite excess unease,” he says. “It was my hope that a brief glance at the history, the origin of everything could provide necessary closure to commence the harvest of your DNA.”
“Look,” I say. “I’ve seen a lot. I know that whatever genetic material you’re grabbing off people is a lot more useful if we’re agreeable. It’s like hunting an animal. Kill it scared, and the meat is tough. It’s a chemical thing– I get that, and I’m telling you that if you show me the rest, I’ll let you do what you need. I’ll play my part.”
“Invalid request,” Kez says. “Such knowledge is beyond your capacity to bear.”
I frown. “It’s him, isn’t it? The Runaway. It’s obvious he’s the source of your fear and this so-called mission to save humanity. Yeah. I might not have all the details, but just looking at your reactions– it’s gotta be. More than that, I can guess you haven’t had much luck dealing with him either.”
Wor and Kez don’t speak a word. Their expressions say everything I need to know.
“The way I figure it,” I continue, getting to my feet and taking a deep breath. “Is that I’m a human too. On some level, I’m like The Runaway, just less… well, terrifying. But maybe there’s something in those visions, something in the Runaway’s actions or his behaviors that only a human could make sense of. Ever think of that? I mean, what if I can help you catch something you’re missing? Isn’t that chance worth taking?”
The Vytar are quiet. They stare at one another for a long while, and their pupils explode in waves of emotion. Kez turns away. He lets out a gruff warble and throws up his arms, cursing Wor and me both.
“What’s his problem?” I ask.
Wor steps forward. He gingerly looks back to his companion, but Kez’s back is turned, hunched over the console in clear disagreement.
“Kez does not wish to harm your mind,” Wor says quietly. “Your story of your sister… this expiring human you call Hope, well, it has moved him. He fears that if I show you the rest of The Runaway’s story it will cause your mind to fracture, shattering your consciousness in such a way that it may not be repaired. There will be no perfect clone. Your sister will find no solace in her dying moments.”
I look at Kez, watch him tap at the console’s controls and I can’t help but feel guilty for judging him so harshly. At the end of the day, he was just looking out for my sister.
But, on the other hand, he also wants to turn me into DNA soup.
“This feels important,” I say to Wor, balling my hands into fists. “If this is really about the fate of humanity, the fate of everything– well, I think Hope would want me to do anything I could to help.” I plaster a weak smile onto my face, trying to hype myself up with fake confidence. “Besides, I can’t imagine it’s that bad, is it?”
Wor places his hands on my temples. Closes his eyes. “You’re right,” he tells me. “You cannot begin to imagine how bad it is.”
MORE

This post is long, controversial people and ideas appear below, I speculate at points, and there's a lot of acronyms, so a summary up-front: The Wilson/Davis meeting was real, the program Admiral Wilson told Dr. Davis about was real. It is the same program--Zodiac--that Lue Elizondo and Harry Reid ran afoul of in 2009, pointed in its direction by Dr. Davis. The program is so powerful in the US DoD that it managed to do what all organizations do when they feel threatened by a competitor: it "consumed" the UAPTF (successor to Harry Reid et al's AAWSAP), and re-org'd it ultimately as "AARO", to serve a role once filled by Project Blue Book: a public UFO debunking group to make the subject appear mundane. AARO, unknown perhaps to some or all working for it, is the public relations wing of the control group behind the cover-up, or is itself now an active arm of it. AARO should not be trusted. The control group guards the gateway to a reality wilder than imagination.
Intro
In May 2022 the United States held hearings on UFOs (9-min highlights).
In those proceedings, representatives of AOIMSG (later re-designated "AARO"):

• Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense: Intelligence & Security
• Scott W. Bray, Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence

...appeared publicly representing the then-recently re-organized program, succeeding the UAP Task Force.
The two gentlemen claimed no knowledge of any UFO program/s within the US Government in the years between AAWSAP (which officially ran from 2008-2012, and continued in some fashion through 2017 before being succeeded by the UAPTF) and the USAF's Project Blue Book (which closed in 1969).
They claimed no knowledge of well-known UFO incidents (which would have been in the files they inherited from UAPTF), claimed no communications attempts had been sent to unknown fliers in US airspace (Implies that unknowns--including Russian or Chinese--can enter and exit US airspace without challenge), showed a short video of a 'dot' in the sky claiming it was all they had to go on, and so on. Christopher Mellon said at the time: https://i.redd.it/8kr2wz2859091.jpg

But Mr. Moultrie's and Mr. Bray's testimony did not match information previously released, not limited to but specifically by Luis Elizondo, who once ran AAWSAP/AATIP: the predecessor to UAPTF, the program AOIMSG/AARO re-org'd from and the papers and materials of which they had in their possession.
We know that AAWSAP/AATIP and UAPTF shared at least some personnel (Dr. Eric Davis was a consultant to both programs, for instance), it is reasonable to think there was a continuity of data between programs as well, meaning that AAWSAP's data became UAPTF's, and in turn: AOIMSG/AARO's. Which leads me to ask why the representatives of AOIMSG/AARO seemed ignorant of data they should have had. I don't expect the people at the top to know everything off the tops of their heads, but one would think they'd have their resident nerds brief them before going before Congress.

So what did AAWSAP/AATIP know?
Though former director Luis Elizondo has often asked us to "read between the lines", limited in what he can publicly say due to the Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) he's bound by, his message becomes clearer when events are laid out in order, dots between them connected.
When comparing information from AAWSAP and Elizondo to the Wilson/Davis notes, parallels emerge and details bolster each other.
This has implications for the legitimacy of AOIMSG/AARO.
Part 1: Admiral Thomas Wilson meets "the gatekeepers"
The notes of the 2002 meeting between Admiral Thomas Wilson and Dr. Eric Davis:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190609152124/https://imgur.com/a/ggIFTfQ

Uploaded in 2019 by UFO researcher Grant Cameron, the Wilson/Davis notes were found in the personal papers of late NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, after he passed in 2016.
The notes had been rumored to exist for over a decade prior. Edgar Mitchell discussed the story behind them on CNN's "Larry King Live" in 2008: https://youtu.be/unEzDmiHKic?t=80 (time-stamped)
The notes are one of the most controversial cases to appear in ufology in decades, with credible supporting and skeptical arguments alike. No less than John Greenewald Jr. (of The Black Vault) has speculated the notes were written for a film or TV show.
https://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-admiral-wilson-leak-an-analysis/
I ask your indulgence as I respectfully disagree with Mr. Greenewald below.

The Wilson/Davis notes contend that Admiral Thomas Wilson (US Navy, now retired) met Dr. Eric Davis (of Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, NIDS, AAWSAP, and a consultant for UAPTF) in Las Vegas in 2002 for a confidential meeting at Davis's request. Davis tooks notes during the meeting, and those notes are what Grant Cameron eventually published online.
Admiral Wilson allegedly told Dr. Davis in that meeting about the admiral's attempt circa 1997 to gain access to a reverse-engineering program managed by at least one large American private defense contractor, and controlled via an unusual governmental Special Access Program, or SAP.
SAPs can serve as "umbrellas" for USAPs: Unacknowledged Special Access programs, which can themselves be umbrellas for even more secretive programs, programs that ultimately even the SAP Oversight Commitee has little or no window into. Like a "Russian doll" of secrecy.

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Steven Greer (of CSETI) obtained a document dated 28 July 1991, said to be leaked from the Nellis Test & Training Range (NTTR) in Nevada:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230205091457/https://siriusdisclosure.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/NRO-Doc.pdf
This document listed a number of group code-names, warning each to suspend visible operations in light of an impending civilian UFO-researcher event in the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada, just to the north of the NTTR.

Dr. Greer, at that time in the mid-'90s working alongside Dr. Edgar Mitchell (Mitchell later distanced himself from Greer), met with Admiral Wilson around 1996, and showed him that allegedly leaked document from the NTTR.
Dr. Greer asked the admiral to see if he could, using his clearances and access, find anything about any of the code names on that list.
Two of the names on that list are MAJ and MAJI Ops. If legitimate, this would lend credence to the idea of some group with a name similar to "MAJIC" or "Majestic": extremely loaded terms.
Admiral Wilson searched the Pentagon Records Group, and found at least one of the names on that list (we don't know which): it was a Special Access Program within what was at that time the OUSDAT (at that time, the Office of the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology).
From the Wilson/Davis notes page 7, Wilson speaking to Davis in 2002:

They told me of a special projects record group not belonging to usual SAP - a special subset of the unacknowledged/carve-outs/waived programs - not belonging to usual SAP divisions as organized in '94 by Perry himself - set apart from rest but buried/covered by conventional SAPs

The admiral was concerned that the program he found should have been something he was aware of, if not in control of. But he had no prior knowledge of it at all.
He reached out to its leaders, and was grudgingly granted a meeting with three people who called themselves the gatekeepers, who reluctantly told him they represented a reverse-engineering program: that they had in their possession at least one intact vehicle "not made by human hands".
They were mostly concerned with how he found them and what he wanted. When he said he needed to be vetted in, they saw to it that the admiral was rebuffed and threatened--with loss of rank and pension--if he pursued the matter further.
Admiral Wilson has been contacted multiple times over the years since and has denied the Wilson/Davis notes each time, as he promised he would within the notes themselves.
In a 2020 interview with the NY Post's Steven Greenstreet, Dr. Eric Davis awkwardly refused to confirm or deny the meeting and notes. Judge for yourself, here is that clip, he reads to me as a man cornered:
https://np.reddit.com/UFOs/comments/pvwhsi/heres_the_deleted_video_of_eric_davis_talking/
Next I'm going to get into AAWSAP, and it's worth noting I feel that Dr. Davis was a consultant to that program. He reported to Dr. Hal Puthoff, who himself reported to Lue Elizondo.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211214190334/https://www.ufojoe.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/DavisHalLue.png (L to R: Puthoff, Elizondo, and Davis)
As all these people worked together and shared security clearances, they were freer to talk about certain topics than Dr. Davis appears in the video with Mr. Greenstreet above. This potentially has implications, for how and from where Elizondo might know where to look for "certain things".
Part 2: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the mysterious "other" UFO group
2008: AAWSAP's beginnings have been gone over many times, I'll summarize only. The New York Times article from December 2017 that revealed the program is here.
A brief summary of the origins of the program can be had here, in a somewhat neutral tone.
The program grew out of discussions between Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow and the late Senator Harry Reid, and initially was led by Dr. James Lacatski with a focus on studying unexplained phenomena, including UFOs.
When Dr. Lacatski left the group, former counter-intel officer Luis Elizondo was brought in to lead the program.

I'm going to put aside the fact Mr. Elizondo met the head of a US Government UFO program that ran in the 1980s, which already makes AOIMSG/AARO's assertion there was no program between Blue Book and AAWSAP false. Mr. Moultrie and Mr. Bray had only to ask Elizondo if he knew of any other groups, but they apparently were incurious.
2009: Mr. Elizondo, the fresh director of AAWSAP, bumped up against a different group (not the one from the 1980s) within the US Department of Defense--a Special Access Program of some kind--which he and Sen. Harry Reid had reason to believe held deep secrets about the same kinds of subjects AAWSAP was looking into, specifically non-human-created technologies.
Not being a Special Access Program themselves, AAWSAP had no access to this other group's personnel, data, or materials.
Senator Reid, who was at the time the US Senate Majority Leader and one of the trio of senators (along with Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye) who'd gotten AAWSAP initially funded, tried to get AAWSAP (as "AATIP") re-designated a Special Access Program itself:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220515090232/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Reid_letter_2009_1532565293943_49621615_ver1.0.pdf
This would have granted specific AAWSAP personnel (as AATIP) the appropriate clearances to be vetted into this strange SAP they'd run into.
Senator Reid was rebuffed, and he, along with AAWSAP/AATIP personnel--including Mr. Elizondo and Dr. Hal Puthoff--was denied access to the other group and its materials. They shut out not only Elizondo (a trusted and decorated military veteran who already held top-secret clearances), but the Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
https://youtu.be/FMBpthoATFk?t=779
George Knapp (investigative journalist: KLAS Las Vegas, MysteryWire, Weaponized):

What was the intention, with making it (AAWSAP) into a Special Access Program?

Sen. Reid:

Well there are certain things that we had learned in our work, that there were places that we needed to go, that people had certain things, equipment, and other stuff, that we needed to see, and you couldn't do it unless you got, clearance from the Pentagon, and they wouldn't give it to us.

Knapp:

It suggests that there are other studies or programs, that might shed light on this mystery?

Sen. Reid:

Other programs, that have been done, and information they have, including different um, pieces of evidence.

Knapp:

...Do you know what those pieces are?

Sen. Reid:

No... um, I've just only heard rumors, and I'm not going to get into rumors.

Part 3: UAPTF, to AOIMSG, to AARO -- Stealing back the narrative
In 2012, AAWSAP was refused additional funding and officially closed, though the program continued in some fashion until Elizondo's resignation from the US Government and his joining Tom DeLonge's To The Stars in 2017.
After Elizondo went public, the US Government effort that had been AAWSAP/AATIP was ultimately reborn as the UAP Task Force (UAPTF), which eventually counted among its members UFO whistleblower David Grusch.
Under To The Stars, the current public UFO disclosure advocacy effort began, with Christopher Mellon acquiring and leaking three now-famous videos of UFOs recorded by US Navy personnel, the release of History Channel's Unidentified series, and a steady stream of press: the tone of which began to take the subject more seriously.
This began to apply pressure from the outside to the subject: by re-framing it as an aerospace integrity, safety, and national security issue, credible people like Mellon poked the US Government asking, "Why won't you take this seriously?"
This led to increasing serious interest in the topic not only by the public but by vocal members of the US Congress like Mike Gallagher and Tim Burchett, by respected journalists like Ross Coulthart. Stigma was chipped away at, new reporting avenues were added for US military personnel; progress seemed to be being made.

In response, I think the group Elizondo and Reid, and before them I believe Admiral Wilson, had encountered, did what any organization that feels another could become a threat to it does: they bought out the competition, consuming the UAPTF and making it their own.
In a December 2021 article for The Hill, Elizondo and Mellon each voiced concern over the re-org and move of the now former-UAPTF to AOIMSG (later re-branded AARO) under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security (OUSD(I&S)):
https://web.archive.org/web/20230205090354/https://thehill.com/opinion/international/583575-a-pentagon-ufo-cover-up-ex-officials-speak-out/
Elizondo:

"...If we want 70 more years of secrecy on this topic, then OUSD(I&S) is the perfect place to put it. They’ve had four years so far, and we have little in the way of efforts serving the public interest."

Mellon:

"...the inability of OUSD(I&S) to engage effectively on the [UFO] issue is why so little has changed or been accomplished since 2004."

With the newly-branded AARO in their pocket, the control group regained the upper hand. Instead of doing away with a government UFO office entirely, they would control the one that existed and through it shape the public narrative, getting disinformation back on track.
Part 4: Who is this "other" UFO program?
For decades there has been talk of an organization operating behind the scenes within the US Government on the UFO problem, from Project Aquarius, to the "men in black", to the Majestic 12.
In May 2021 UFO researcher Project Unity tweeted this brief exchange between UFO researchehistorian Richard Dolan and Lue Elizondo.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211029230827/https://twitter.com/TheProjectUnity/status/1395692929151291397

Richard Dolan: "Have you ever come across evidence that supports the reality of an organization, whether we call it MJ-12 or Zodiac?"
Lue Elizondo: "Sure, absolutely"
Richard Dolan: "Okay so I want to ask about Zodiac, I've got reasons for asking, is this something you have come across?"
Lue Elizondo: "Yes"
Richard Dolan: "So can I ask you what you can say about that?"
Lue Elizondo: "I cannot".

Like the devil of Earth myths, they've "had so many names".
They may no longer go by "Zodiac", but they almost certainly did as recently as 2009, in order for Elizondo to know that name, unless he heard it from Dr. Eric Davis (possible, even likely).
Zodiac is almost certainly the program Sen. Harry Reid tried (and failed) to get his people vetted into. I believe it's the same group (or a related silo) which denied Admiral Wilson access to their reverse-engineering program in 1997.
This group is either the current version of whatever it was Admiral Wilson found via the Pentagon Records Group, or it sits beneath it in hierarchy. Dr. Davis is likely the person who pointed Lue Elizondo in its direction, when Elizondo took charge of AAWSAP and started snooping around internally.
Zodiac is either the umbrella group itself, or one of several sibling programs (Unacknowledged SAPs) nested within a master SAP.
If it's a sub-program, it might be the reverse-engineering wing, compartmentalized apart from other silos. The other big candidate in this case could be crash retrieval.
The reverse-engineering program places recovered non-human technologies in private corporations (exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests), access to which is limited to strict "bigot lists" and protected by extremely punishing NDAs.
Progress on reverse-engineering is glacial if anything, but we will be shocked to learn what things we use in daily life have come from or were influenced by alien technologies.
People have been ruined or buried in unmarked graves for breaking ranks with the program/s. Favored aerospace and technology corporations have benefited from the relationship while their competitors have been bought out or ruined.
Military application of technologies takes all precedence.
Crash retrieval sounds straight-forward but I bet it has a lot of nuances, a lot of special skills and equipment. A global quick-response infrastructure is implied (meaning groups ready to deploy across the globe at all times. We don't want people flying out of Wright-Pat to get to a crash in say Australia, we'd want a team with the right equipment already in say Guam, ready to activate), with skilled/trained personnel and equipment standing by at all hours. The field personnel may be military or ex-military. National borders would seem to mean little and essentially violating other countries' territories a required part of the job.

Reverse-engineering, and crash retrievals, are likely not the only silos of the group.
Joe Murgia ("UFO Joe") interviewed Commander Will Miller, who is referenced in the Wilson/Davis notes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221201140901/https://www.ufojoe.net/will-miller-complete/

Joe Murgia: When you say “Control Group” like you did in Leslie Kean’s book, do you mean an MJ-12-like group?
Will Miller: Yes, I’d opine that there are probably multiple “Control Groups”, each one covering certain aspects of the UFO/ETI issue; i.e. one probably covering crash retrievals & analysis, another covering collecting & analyzing reports of “encounters,” another related to overall oversight, etc. That’s just within DoD. Additionally, there are a limited # of DoD “contractors” who even have the technological capability to work this issue to include analysis, security, etc.

The other silos under the master umbrella program, compartmentalized apart from each other, could look like...
(This is me speculating wildly on what these other programs could contain information on, and should be taken with enormous grains of salt):

• Biological remains, and what can be gleaned from them on the environments the beings evolved in; cell-structure, nutritional requirements, reproduction, ancestry/evolutionary history. Weapons applications of non-terrestrial biology.
  
• Intelligence gathering on off-world organizations. Spying on those watching humanity, maybe even using stolen alien technology to do so. Implications of using ET tech to spy on terrestrial competitors, both corporate and national. Implications if any of our visitors turn out to be biologically human (meaning their ancestors were taken from Earth and a viable breeding population of humans is kept part of the alien society even now, identical to us, perfect spies).
  
• Organic/machine interfaces - anything from physical control consoles, to mind/machine interfaces, to biologically-integrated technologies, purpose-grown artificial/synthetic life-forms, genetic engineering.
  
• Xeno-linguistics and communications. Alien languages: spoken, written, computemachine language/s, and maybe things we don't have an analogue for (IE the oft-reported telepathy, either naturally evolved or technologically achieved).
  
• Exo-politics - the nature of alien command and social structures (or lack thereof) and initiatives; policies on dealing with native life-forms (like us).
  
• Terrestrial foreign power intelligence gathering - what do other countries know/have and what are they doing with it? Given the reasons for the cover-up (weaponization), this would seem of paramount importance to the overall program.
  
• Recovered craft: testing and potential use thereof. As astonished as I feel writing this... have we taken recovered or reverse-engineered craft off-world ourselves? Do we use them for terrestrial espionage? A single alien craft, if useable by humans at all, could be a game-changing military asset, so I doubt this... but I can't call it "off the table".
  
• New (to us) physics - imagine what someone capable of traversing the space between star systems (or "parallel realities" if one prefers) knows about the nature of reality, that we humans do not. As the late Carl Sagan once said, "To bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Weaponization of ideas learned from alien understanding of physics (IE microwave or beam weaponry, gravity manipulation to achieve force fields, time distortions, or targeted gravitational disruptions).
  
• Materials science - compounds or isotopes not found in the Sol system or even guessed at. Atomic or sub-atomic level engineering. Imagine trying to understand objects that came from industrial-sized fabricators with integrated particle acceleration capable of "3-D printing" anything from hand-held devices to entire starships in minutes using nothing but hydrogen and helium as building blocks, engineering from the sub-atomic on up with integrated quantum-computing in every atom of the device. The possibilities, as astounding as I find it, of 3-D printing custom-engineered living beings or exact duplicates of existing organisms.
  
• Exo-computational devices and databases - consider what might be gleaned from understanding the alien version of a "computer". Imagine the data stored within: star charts, maps back to the point of origin or colonies and to every other inhabited biosphere within thousands of light years (or on a multi-galactic scale), medical data, historical data, entertainment like music or visuals, 3-D data storage including imagery and sounds from Earth's own past and/or countless other worlds under their observation. Not to mention insights into the minds of the people who made the technology: how they think and process data, at what speed, etc.
  

...and god knows what else.
Imagine if there's a silo that holds alien medical technologies: treatments or cures for diseases. The ability to re-grow lost limbs, to repair spinal damage or lost eyesight/hearing. Even if not applicable (yet) to human biology, the ideas that could come from this if shared with the medical community across Earth... all brought here incidentally in a "first-aid kit" aboard someone else's spacecraft. In defense of Zodiac, imagine the terrible weaponization potential.
Could we ever forgive these people for keeping secrets like this? For the crimes they've committed to do so? Even if they did what they felt was needed to protect national interests, at some point the base fact that we're not alone should belong to everyone. Because it really feels like what started as an attempt to hide technologies that could be weaponized if a competitor figured them out first has turned into "hiding everything we've done to hide that technology, and we can't mention aliens because that begs the question how did they get here, which brings us back to the technology", tech they don't know how to make more of.
Conclusion: Following "Lue's Clues", thoughts on and fear of the control group, disinformation, and questions
There is implication in information from Elizondo and Dr. Davis that there's been a clandestine organization controlling the UFO issue operating within the US Department of Defense for decades, a group which has repeatedly shielded itself from prying eyes. What they can't shield they reduce through propaganda to ridicule. If not in name or historical fact, this may as well be the Majestic 12 of UFO lore.
I write that name with a heavy heart, and with fear. People on these forums always snipe, "That's just what you want to believe," or, "Nobody wants to believe more than me, but c'mon".
I read those replies and every time think, "Do you know what you're saying? Have you read the Majestic documents? They're terrifying. Of course I don't want it to be real! I want it to be fake, like Robert Hastings said!" The reality they suggest is horrifying to me.
I've recoiled from, fled from, the possibility of the Majestic 12 for more than 30 years, since I first read the initial papers in Timothy Good's Above Top Secret in late 1989.
I with great trepidation read Stanton Friedman's TOP SECRET/MAJIC, hoping for some fatal flaw. I've read with interest (and often unease) these past few years everything Harry_is_white_hot--probably the lead researcher currently working on the topic--has put out about MJ-12. I keep hoping for that fatal flaw in the basic concept of a shadowy "men in black"-type group like this. No conspiracy can be that big and remain hidden, surely.
But objective reality is not influenced by what we want or would find more comfortable to be true; it simply is what it is.
That's not to say everything in the Majestic documents is real (I still hope to god it's not; they literally contain a directive on when to execute stranded alien beings to preserve secrecy), but the fact of a real organization filling that role--whatever its real history is--is for me no longer escapable after David Grusch.

I've had suspicions about AARO since its inception as AOIMSG, since the warning from Elizondo and Mellon about OUSD(I&S) in The Hill.
The re-org of UAPTF into AARO seems to me an attempt to regain control of the narrative after people like Elizondo and Mellon began to apply public pressure on the US Government to disclose what it knows about UFOs. What they can't keep secret, they ridicule: a powerful social tool.
For two decades, the US Air Force used Project Blue Book to gaslight not only the American populace, but the news media and the world, into thinking there was no "there" there in UFOs. That those of us interested in the topic were insane, to be socially ostracized, shamed, and shunned.
Blue Book was, it was later revealed by its former scientific advisor Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a public relations and propaganda program.
AARO is in its purpose no different, and will be the first place the news media turns to explain to them what is going on with the unfolding David Grusch story. Well, AARO or Neil DeGrasse-Tyson. Maybe Bill Nye.
The Grusch story is already being attached to the sensational Las Vegas "aliens in the backyard" tale - see ABC News Chicago, complete with X-files music! - scroll down the article to see them mention Mr. Grusch. Zodiac's tendrils in the press are twitching, and not even that much: just poke the bias toward mundanity they've nurtured in us for decades.
As the infamous quote goes:

"There's nothing to hide?"
"There's nothing to hide at all."

I don't know everything above and I'm absolutely very obviously speculating in places, on things I would once never have considered possible and which looked absolutely wild to my eyes even as I wrote them. I may stumble in some places but I think I've headed in the direction Lue Elizondo, Chris Mellon, Dr. Eric Davis, and others have pointed us in.
Mr. Elizondo's information, passed in pieces due to his NDAs, has been widely mocked as "Lue's Clues": deliberately mysterious and obfuscated. He's been derided as a grifter and con-artist, he's been doxxed, he's provided what he can at enormous personal cost to himself and his family. Stringing the information and hints that he's put out together, the picture not only becomes more detailed, it implies a conspiracy which in and of itself will be an ontological shock, beyond which lies even more shock, after shock, after shock.
If a nobody like me can read what Elizondo's getting at, why can't Mr. Moultrie, or Mr. Bray, or Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick for that matter? Do they not at least have questions? Are they so incurious? This is literally their job, at least on paper.
David Grusch has briefed AARO personnel on his extraordinary findings, and AARO still says, "We have no credible/verifiable indication of non-human intelligence." Saying little, they speak volumes.
The implications make me feel, appropriately I think: "somber".
I'll end with some brief thoughts from Lue Elizondo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jythx89ym38
Thanks for reading.