Jensine Andresen, PhD, is an expert in religious studies and anthropology. She is an independent scholar whose areas of interest include demilitarizing space and related issues of importance to planet and space. In her most recent book, Hyperconflation: Recommending a Relational Alternative to the Datacentric Approach to UAP, Dr. Andresen takes readers through her research and resulting concerns about the exploitation of the UFO narrative for reasons ranging from financial gain to religious fanaticism. Those implicated include start-up corporations, their board members & funding entities. This writer recently spoke with the author and you may view the discussion below.
Andresen identified Kirsten Bartok Touw as previously listed as a source of pre-seed funding for Enigma Labs, Inc., a recently launched company outwardly dedicated to UAP investigation and transparency, yet seemingly much less forthcoming than their self-description suggests. As documented by Andresen, the role of Bartok Touw has since been removed from websites.
Bartok Touw is a “Special Government Employee” at the Office of Strategic Capital (under the Office of the Secretary of Defense), as well as a managing partner at New Vista Capital and AirFinance, among other roles of potential significance. If designated a “Special Government Employee,” or SGE, one may simultaneously represent the interests of big tech companies, banks, venture capital funds, military contractors, intelligence agencies, defense tech start-ups and, pretty much, anybody with skin in the game.
Ms. Bartok Touw did not immediately respond to a request for comment for potential inclusion in this article.
Andresen documents in her new book how ethics experts are voicing concern about SGEs, even if capitalists, start-ups, and intelligence officers are more than pleased with the arrangements. Working for private and public sectors simultaneously carries inherent conflicts of interest, some argue. “Outsourcing defense to a corporate adviser doesn't seem like an ideal way to put the public's interest first,” ethics official Walter Shaub, formerly of the Obama administration, is quoted by Andresen.
The circumstances evolved out of the activities of agencies such as the CIA, which utilized a venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, to both develop tech products and apparently make money. In-Q-Tel provided the CIA with a means to invest in start-ups. In years past, such arrangements were typically limited to more discreet use of shell corporations and nonprofits, acting as covert funding arms of intelligence agencies. The CIA and other agencies are now, in a manner of speaking, outsourcing research and development while investing in futures, and a whole lot of people are recognizing the wide and profitable coattails created in the wake.
In the UFO, or UAP, arena, however, it's not just about creating funding dollars for threat narratives or making cool apps to document UFO reports. It's about data collection. Decades of it. Then, Andresen suggests, artificial intelligence is subject to being used to conduct analysis and produce reports out of the mountains of data collected – and some of the data involves you and your phone. This, it is argued, gives rise to privacy concerns that result from less than transparent companies using anonymous and questionable characters to hoover up archives, obtain databases, and put software on your tech devices in the questionable name of UAP research.
The activities may be circumventing legislation that limits law enforcement and intelligence agency domestic surveillance of American citizens. Moreover, there is little that restricts the start-ups, which purport to use AI and machine learning to generate reports on data collected, from marketing those reports to a wide variety of customers. It may simply depend on what various potential customers want gleaned and projected from the data, regardless of the pretenses under which it was initially obtained.
Andresen presents herself as a humanitarian who is concerned about both the open, honest treatment of global citizens, as well as maximizing the functionality of opportunities to interact with potential extraterrestrials. She is clear in expressing her concerns that a data-driven approach to UAP investigation, conducted under layered veils of secrecy, is an ill-advised first step to embracing co-inhabitants of the universe. All the more so if the approach is a charade for other agendas.
Edited for update, August 13: Dr. Andresen informed Expanding Frontiers Research via email of the following information concerning the funding of Enigma Labs and advised that the passage below has been added to her book, Hyperconflation.
"Update of August 13, 2023 [to Hyperconflation]: This book was first published on July 25, 2023. At 4:09 AM EST today, Australian researcher Keith Basterfield emailed me to state that the financials tab was now appearing again on the Crunchbase site for Enigma Labs. I verified this at 5:43 AM. The site now appears precisely the way it did when I first viewed it in April 2023, with Kirsten Bartok Touw showing as one of the two investors for pre-seed funding on the Summary tab, and with the Financials tab restored, also showing her name.
"Furthermore, her own Crunchbase site has been restored to how it looked in April 2023, with Enigma Labs listed as the Organization name under the April 21, 2022 date (where the name of the Organization had been replaced by a hyphen in July 2023, right before I published the book originally). While I am glad that whoever is making these changes decided to put things right, this mysterious website change forgot to go back and fix the January 20, 2023 version of the Enigma Labs page on the Wayback Machine. Although it has a Financials tab, it does not list Kirsten Bartok Touw. In addition, the Summary tab on the Wayback Machine version is still the same as what I saw on the main Crunchbase cite in July 2023, namely only one pre-seed funder is listed, FJ Labs, with no mention of Kirsten Bartok Touw. I will check periodically to see if the Wayback Machine version is 'fixed,' too, since on logical grounds, by January 20, 2023, it was already known that Kirsten Bartok Touw had provided pre-seed funding on April 21, 2022.
"Furthermore, it strains credulity to suggest that the Wayback Machine version of January 20, 2023 simply was 'wrong' and now things have been fixed on the regular site for the company, given that in July 2023, right before I published this book, the regular site appeared the same way that the Wayback Machine version still appears this morning, August 13, 2023. Only the regular site has been rather 'magically' corrected, only two days since the blogpost on this book was published on the Expanding Frontiers Research site, and only five days since my YouTube interview on this book was posted. However, I do see that it would have been problematic to 'fix' the Wayback Machine version, since it would suggest an ability to manipulate websites that many people would like to think does not exist.
"I close by commending whoever for listing Kirsten Bartok Touw again as an Enigma Labs pre-seed funder."
Hyperconfation. I think that is a cool word for "What a tangled web we weave." Traditionally, I think of the way to identify an IC front company was its apparent lack of economic viability (Think of a cigar shop that gets three customers a month, or any kind of random company that runs badly for an unusually long period of time) Of course, this would be at an IC loss, not a big deal given nearly unlimited budgets in the Cold War era. Times, have changed and things are tremendously more sophisticated. Thinking of any government agency or the IC and investment in the same sentence should scream potential conflicts of interest. Thank you for bringing this to the attention…