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For years people have asked why would the
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For years people have asked why would the
While the National Security Agency claims that the deletions in its above top secret affidavit relate solely to the protection of its intelligence-gathering capabilities, this is most certainly only half the truth.
Since 1946 it must have been clear to defense intelligence chiefs studying the so-called GHOST AIRCRAFT wave in
So, by July 1947, when sightings proliferated throughout the United States, and a UFO crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, it must have become obvious, to some, that the FLYING SAUCERS were of extraterrestrial origin. Apart from the likely fact (it was believed by the "authorities") that an admission to this effect would generate public alarm, the military (one can reasonably speculate) needed to learn as much as possible about the construction and propulsion of the craft, in the event that another nation (primarily the Soviet Union) might acquire this knowledge first, providing an additional reason for having total secrecy attached to the investigations.
Independent researcher Wilbur Smith learned in 1950 from a Dr. Rob Sarbacher that the stories of recovered DISKS were true, and that a small group---most likely Majestic 12--- was headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush in order to learn as much as possible about the modus operandi of the so-called saucers, and only those with a "need to know" were to be informed of the findings.
It would seem logical to conclude that an intelligence matter classified two secrecy levels higher than the Hydrogen-bomb is unlikely to be revealed except to those with the very highest security clearances. Even at that level, the degree of information shared would be kept severely compartmentalized. In other words, those who learned the "truth" about UFOs did not necessarily know the WHOLE TRUTH, nor all of those who had the same level of saucer/alien knowledge as they did. The old fable of the blind men describing an elephant comes to mind.
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Why Did The Air Force |
Former Air Force pilot Lieutenant Colonel Donald Ware shares this opinion. He believes that by 1947 (following the
Although there have been at least forty accounts of UFOs alleged to have been recovered throughout the
To once again quote Stanton Friedman, "You might have handed Thomas Edison one of today's pocket calculator forty years ago, and there's no way in the world he could have figured out how it worked."
No government is happy to admit that alien vehicles invading the airspace can come and go as they please, and that our defense against them is inadequate. That some UFOs have been responsible for the destruction or disappearance of their aircraft is not something that could be admitted openly.
Nobody likes to look silly. Fear of ridicule can be a very compelling reason for the military and politicians to debunk UFOs, especially if they don't have access to all the facts. Very few politicians in the
In 1964 Ray Stanford discovered metal fragments at a site in
Later, Stanford and Robert McGarey had the opportunity of discussing reasons for the cover-up with a US Navy captain, who in rather over dramatic terms offered his opinions on the matter. "You had no right to that kind of dynamite," he said. "What do you want to do? Blow up the whole economy, the entire social structure, and every other institution worth keeping?" The captain continued: "Those in a position to know are under no delusion. They know the facts. People are not ready to know the facts, and they have no NEED to know them. They could, half of the people maybe, go off the deep end."
Stanford asked if those IN THE KNOW cracked up on learning the facts. "I doubt it," he was told. "But, those men are trained to accept and meet crisis. They are capable of rational judgment in the face of the unexpected...Their decisions are based on experience and discernment that the average man, even the UFO researcher, never has."
It is unlikely that the fabric of society would be destroyed if selected facts were released. Once the initial disbelief, there would certainly be widespread concern as to the alien visitor's motives, disturbances on the stock market, but also a great deal of excitement and perhaps a new look at of our role in the universal scheme of things. If such an announcement were made, Stanton Friedman believes, "the stock market would go down, mental hospital admissions and church attendance would go up, and there would be an immediate push on the part of the younger generation---never alive when there wasn't a space program---for a whole new view of ourselves; not as Americans, Chinese, Canadians, Israelis, etc., but as People of Earth. There isn't any government on this planet that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet, instead of an individual government. Nationalism is the only game in town."
Public reaction to an admission by one of the superpowers that some UFOs are extraterrestrial would hinge on how much we are told, and this would present our leaders with an major dilemma. Such an admission would lead to a an avalanche of questions, some of which simply can't be answered without disclosing vital defense interests; alarming cases of missing aircraft, abductions, genetic experiments; and bizarre cases that may remain beyond our collective comprehension for centuries to come. Like the "X-Files" says, "The Truth is Out There."
The effects on the economy and politics are worth considering. "Every nation is concerned about the effects on worldwide economies and political structures if the world were to be in touch with aliens with a different technology, " Stanton Friedman believes. "Is the oil in the ground now worthless?... Would the big shots of today be deposed tomorrow? The best policy is to hope that the aliens go away or that contacts and shaking up of earthly society happen during the next administration's reign."
Perhaps the most comprehensive summary of reasons for official secrecy on UFOs in general, and the Roswell crash in particular, is contained in the Majestic 12 briefing paper, allegedly prepared by Admiral Hillenkoetter for President-Elect Eisenhower in 1952:
"...Implications for the National Security are of continuing importance in that the motives and ultimate intentions of these visitors remain completely unknown.... It is for these reasons, as well as the obvious international and technological considerations and the ultimate need to avoid a public panic at all costs, that the Majestic-12 Group remains of the unanimous opinion that imposition of the strictest security precautions should continue without interruption into the new administration."
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Flying Saucers, Weirdness, and Pop Culture by Bruce Lanier Wright Let's open with a newsreel, "Citizen Kane"-style, at the beginning that wasn't the beginning, with the saucers that weren't saucers. June 24, 1947: Afternoon skies over the still-unspoiled Washington Cascades. Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot from Saucer Time! Of course, people have been seeing strange things in the skies for a long time, globes, cigar-shapes and saucers;old English accounts mention After And then there was the Roswell Incident. Another newsreel: The next day, Brazel reports his discovery to the sheriff, who contacts Roswell Army Air Field, headquarters for the 509th Bomb Group. Major Jesse Marcel, an air intelligence officer, visits Brazel's field to investigate. He quickly concludes that the material is literally unearthly. On Tuesday, July 8, the air base releases a story to the AP newswire that begins: "The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disc had been found." All hell breaks loose. Just what happened next will always remain murky. The air base is sealed off, and military police close some roads. The FBI squelches a radio station's report. Every scrap of the mysterious wreckage is removed. Flaps UFOs remained headline fodder throughout the late 40s, to the increasing irritation of the United States Air Force and at least some members of the scientific community. The 1947-49 sightings constituted what came to be called a "flap," an unusually active period for UFO activity. As in all flaps, a "me-too" factor was at work; a hard core of genuinely unusual sightings was surrounded by a great deal more misidentification, wishful thinking and general flakiness. For awhile it seemed as if flying saucers were crashing every week, judging from the regularity with which any shiny metal found in a field was put forward as a saucer remnant. Hastily prepared attempts to explain away the phenomena were two- a-penny. In July 1947, for instance, an Australian physiologist confidently stated that flying saucers were merely "the effect of red corpuscles in blood passing in front of the retina." Cloud formations, ball lightning, and the planet Venus were trotted out regularly as well. The Air Force mounted an official study effort that in 1949 grumpily concluded the investigation of UFOs should be curtailed. The UFOs may have felt snubbed as saucer reports seemed to taper off for awhile. Then came the extraordinary Saucer Summer of 1952, when for months, it seemed, you could scarcely leave your house without getting your hat knocked off by a gleaming messenger from beyond. UFO sightings piled up for months, with an impressive number of reports from airline and military pilots. The flap reached its peak in the Kooky Kontactee Kults Enter George Adamski, the Grand Old Man of saucer religion, who in 1953 published Flying Saucers Have Landed, an account of his meeting with a Venusian named Orthon (!) near Adamski's success spawned a series of copy-cat space gurus, each waving his own book of revelations from aliens whose names all sounded like new synthetic fibers. These included Aboard a Flying Saucer (1954), by Truman Bethurum, who chatted with UFO captain Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion; Secret of the Saucers (1955) by Orfeo Angelucci who once met a space-babe named Lyra in a bus station; and Howard Menger's From Outer Space to You (1959), which reveals, among other mysteries, the alien approach to organic farming. The kindly aliens of 1950s contactee literature came from a bewildering variety of planets, but the message of all these "space brothers," as they were dubbed by their followers, was essentially the same: our earth is a backwater, a dangerous slum on the outskirts of a benign sort of interplanetary U.N., and we must Get Our Act Together. Space Brotherism is a little starchy for my taste, but the movement produced at least one series of events I would have given a lot to attend, the Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions held each year in the Flicks Better saucer flicks were forthcoming. To make sense of what followed, it helps to remember just how paranoid things were at that time - and not just because of flying saucers. The McCarthy era was in bloom and Cold War jitters spilled over into saucer cinema. In 1951, two sci-fi classics helped to trigger the decade's science fiction movie boom while marking the opposite poles of a distinctly ambivalent attitude toward alien visitors. April 1951 brought Howard Hawk's "The Thing from Another World," the story of an Arctic military base under siege by an intelligent and hostile alien. "Classic" isn't too strong a label for this claustrophobic and genuinely scary movie, in which the hard- headed Average Joes of the Air Force successfully battle the beast despite the misguided notions of the base's head scientist, who thinks any spacefaring creature must be susceptible to sweet reason. Robert Wise's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," released in September, argues the opposite case with a conviction and forcefulness that seems fairly astonishing considering the nation's mood. "The Day" concerns Klaatu, a wise, saintly alien emissary who lands his saucer in the middle of The philosophies expressed in "The Thing" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" can be found at war throughout the era's saucer movies. Sometimes the viewpoints are embodied in opposing characters, often, as in 1959's "The Cosmic Man," a scientist and a hot-headed military officer. In terms of sheer volume, though, 1950s saucer cinema comes down firmly on the side of paranoia. In film after film, otherworldly life is simply a menace to be battled and stamped out. Sometimes the aliens arrive in force, like the flying-saucer fleet that ravages Movies weighing in on Klaatu's side were relatively rare during the 1950s. Space Brotherists weren't a big population segment, after all, and it just wasn't a trusting era. The mistreated alien in Edgar G. Ulmer's "The Man From Planet X" (1951) and the benign interplanetary castaways of "It Came From Outer Space" (1953) were exceptions to a rule of de facto antagonism between Us and Them. Saucer World! As the Populuxe years of the 50s and early 60s progressed, UFO sightings continued to pour in from around the world. On Inevitably, people began to consider the notion of building our own saucer-shaped flying craft. The December 1950 Science and Mechanics speculated that enormous prop-driven saucers might serve as public transport; "Will 'Flying Saucer' Buses Lick Traffic Congestion?" its cover asked (answer, as you may have noticed: no). In the late 1950s, the Air Force developed the Avro air car, a piloted flying disc lifted by large fans. Despite various hints that the Avro might be behind some saucer sightings, the thing could scarcely get off the ground. With a few tweaks, the Avro could have been the first hovercraft instead of a really large paperweight. In recent years, the Air Force has developed successful saucer-shaped drones, which may explain some recent sightings; but as far as we know, man-piloted saucers have remained in the realm of fiction, like the elegant star cruiser of "Forbidden Planet" and the Robinson's sturdy Jupiter-2 from "Lost In Space." Illegal Aliens... While a lot of people clearly were enjoying the UFO phenomenon, in their different ways, governments seem to have regarded it as a migraine. The 1952 flap prompted the Air Force to revive its UFO investigation. The new effort, Project Blue Book, began in March 1952 under the guidance of Captain Edward Ruppelt. Blue Book seems to have begun as a serious investigation, and by the time Ruppelt left the project in 1954, he was personally convinced that UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. The program he left behind, however, quickly degenerated into a public relations exercise whose "explanations" became a byword for idiocy among students of the subject. A typical case was one in which an Air Force wing commander was guided by radar to intercept a UFO over As Blue Book began, other efforts were going on behind the scenes. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency convened a secret scientific advisory body, the Robertson Panel, to examine the UFO question. The panel didn't break much new ground in researching the subject; a participant, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, later characterized the effort as cursory and close-minded. More interesting were the panel's conclusions about the effects of UFO belief. They took a dim damn view of saucer-heads, recommending that all UFO sightings be debunked to preserve public peace of mind, and suggesting that UFO groups be monitored by the government as potentially subversive elements. Subsequent events made it clear that Washington and some other national governments took this advice to heart. A cozy silence settled over the topic, at least on the official level. Lies The UFO story has been compared to an onionskin. Peel back a layer and you find another layer. One observation, however, is incontestable: many national governments, including our own, have consistently lied about UFOs for nearly 50 years. Much of what is known is due to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its counterparts in other countries. Since its July 1974 inception, patient investigators have used FOIA to sloowwllly pull documents out of the federal government's maw. It hasn't been quick or easy. Note that few of the folks who confidently assure you our government can't keep secrets have actually tried to obtain one. When the CIA was first approached for UFO-related documents, for instance, it claimed to have none at all. With continuing pressure, the agency squeezed out 400 pages; after some years, 40,000 pages of reports came to light. In 1973, then-FBI director Clarence Kelley stated that "the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects is not and never has been...within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI." Three years later, an FOIA request yielded some 1,100 pages of FBI documents on UFOs. And the Feds are allowed to hold back anything deemed vital to "national security." The plucky UFO researcher is quite likely to receive a juicy memo only to find everything blacked out except the words "To" and "From." Despite these hurdles, some have expressed disappointment that no smoking gun has emerged from the declassified records - no photo of Harry Truman with an ET at a White House smoker, say. This is missing the forest for the trees. Literally hundreds of compelling visual and radar sightings by military personnel have come to light, along with tantalizing hints of study efforts conducted behind the Blue Book window dressing. In all, the sheer weight of evidence points to an interesting conclusion Time magazine may feel there's nothing of interest in UFO sightings. You may feel that way. Governments don't seem to agree. Paranoia Strikes Deep Something was bubbling beneath the surface, all right. Stories abound of UFO witnesses being visited by government types and having film confiscated or "borrowed," never to be seen again. A lot of these tales may be fiction; some may not. The government rarely tipped its hand in any public way, other than in an interesting 1958 incident in which a live TV program was blacked out by the Feds "in the interests of national security," as Major Donald Keyhoe, a prominent UFO researcher, discussed the need for a Congressional investigation. Keyhoe, by the way, was a long-time director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the most widely respected private research organization of its kind. NICAP was founded in 1956 and operated until 1979, and at various times its board included the ClA's first director and the head of the CIA's psychological warfare staff. After Keyhoe left, he was succeeded by two former CIA agents in a row (although some say you never really quit that fine organization). Company fingerprints are all over NICAP. Why so many spy-boys? Beats the hell out of me. Maybe they all simply had a private interest in UFOs, although the CIA doesn't seem a Space Brotherish sort of place. The deepest plunge into paranoia was taken by saucer buffs who believed they'd run into the mysterious Men in Black. MlBs, as they came to be called, entered saucer mythology in October 1953, when Albert K. Bender, editor of a flying saucer rag called the Space Review, announced that he'd learned the secret of the UFOs - but couldn't tell anyone, because he'd been threatened. He warned others investigating saucers to be "very cautious" and folded his publication. Later, in an interview, Bender said "three men wearing dark suits had silenced him. Later still, he published a fairly incoherent book called Flying Saucers and the Three Men in Black describing his experience. Pretty soon, other people were encountering these strange men, and an elaborate series of folktales grew up around them: always traveling in twos and threes, driving dark cars and wearing impeccable dark suits; vaguely "foreign" in appearance, and closed-mouthed except when issuing cryptic warnings and threats to UFO witnesses. Sometimes they appeared to witnesses who'd told no one of their experiences, so the tales go. Reports of MlBs peaked in the 60s. Some saucerheads thought MIB stories were malarkey, and others just assumed they were J. Edgar's boys; but John Keel, a respected if gonzo paranormalist, had dealings with them and he thought they weren't even human. Swamp Gas Of course, little of this weirdness was making headlines. For decades, the American mainstream media have, with few exceptions, ignored the UFO phenomena or played it for laughs without investigation or follow-up. People like Gore Vidal have written far more eloquently than I could of the remarkable unanimity of opinion, shall we say, that exists within the This pattern of neglect was broken only infrequently, and never with more impact than in the great Swamp Gas Debacle of March 1966, which signaled the beginning of the end for Project Blue Book. In J. Allen Hynek, who was working with Blue Book from time to time, was approached for what we now call a sound bite. When pressed for an explanation, Hynek said some people might have seen glowing clouds of swamp gas. The press, surprisingly, greeted this notion with a loud and nearly unanimous hoot of derision. It was as if a dam had burst. Reporters who had slept peacefully through more than a decade of equally absurd stories from the Air Force became indignant and demanded "the real facts" about flying saucers. UFO reports began popping up in the mainstream press again. Suddenly, it was almost respectable to believe. Whitewash Within a few months, though, interest began to wane again. Klaatu didn't arrive on the White House lawn. A widely seen TV documentary reinforced the official line; scientists tut-tutted and a representative of the military said UFOs had never been tracked on radar, a lie pure and simple. Ufology was represented by the maddest-sounding Space Brotherist the producers could locate. Even so, the Air Force remained stung and embarrassed by the swamp gas fiasco and apparently resolved to wash its hands of the topic. In November 1966, a federally funded committee convened under the leadership of Dr. Edward Condon, a A few months later, an American Airlines flight from Onward to the Present And that's pretty much where things stand today. In The phenomenon rolls on, as various and puzzling as ever, and even after the usual easy misidentifications and lunatics are filtered out, hundreds of interesting new cases pop up each year. In the 90s, there have been spectacular flaps in Some scientists are researching the phenomena, but for obvious reasons they play their cards close to their chests. J. Allen Hynek, the world's most respected UFO researcher, liked to joke that the handful of scientists seriously studying saucers constitute an " Disinformation This void has left ufology almost entirely to self-taught researchers and the hardest-core saucer buffs, or, as they call themselves, the UFO "community." Although "barrelful of snarling hyenas" might be a more apt description, considering the comic-opera wars and vendettas that divide the field. (I won't single people out because they're a prickly bunch, and I don't remember John saying anything about a legal defense fund.) Their dispositions aren't improved by the fact that the Feds still seem to be up to their old tricks. At present, many members of the UFO community spend most of their time accusing each other of being CIA agents. In the 70s and early 80s, for instance - around the time that Steven Spielberg was updating Space Brotherism with "Close Encounters" and his treacly "E.T." - a number of prominent researchers, including Hynek and Vallee, were approached by bona fide U.S. military personnel and summoned to meetings, at which it was hinted that some earth- shaking revelation about UFOs would be forthcoming from the government, ah, soon. Hynek and Vallee soon smelled a rat and withdrew; others didn't. Most "ufologists" are semi-ordinary men and women, after all, with the espionage talents of furniture. Several prominent saucerheads were strung along for months, waiting for the Big Secret to be revealed, down primrose paths that led nowhere. Of course, their word proves little except to those already disposed to believe, and already a truly bizarre belief pattern has sprung up around Roswell and its surrounding mythology, a nasty world in which our government has already sold us out to two-timing, cattle-mutilatin', fetus-lookin' aliens popularly called greys. Oh, and take a gander at two of the biggest drumbeaters for this depressing new religion: one's ex-naval intelligence, the other flew planes for the CIA in Governments play a lot of nasty games. That's the nature of their business. And one of those games seems to involve UFOs. Why? Probably not because they've made a deal with aliens living in underground bases in Nevada, as the more loosely configured minds on the saucer scene think. Although you never can tell. Maybe toying with the public perception of UFOs is just something a handful of bored Yalies in the Company do for kicks. Maybe it's an ongoing class project at the CIA training academy. Or maybe they are tinkering with crashed UFOs out in High Strangeness Of course, most serious students of the UFO question don't really buy the idea that UFOs are spaceships from another world. (You don't hear that much on "The X-Files," do you?) The evidence for an inexplicable effect behind UFOs is out there, as Mulder likes to say. It's a mosaic of first-hand accounts, radar records, photos of varying reliability; of burns and radiation effects on soil, plants, animals, and people. But this evidence doesn't necessarily fit the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis any better than the notion that it's all misidentifications of Venus. The sheer number of sightings alone, as Vallee has pointed out, is far in excess of what would be needed to study us or our planet or to keep tabs on our activities. Furthermore, there's every reason to suspect that the phenomenon has always been with us. Close encounters and "abductions" occur everywhere in the world, throughout the historical record, as filtered through and interpreted by the moment's dominant cultural context. People saw plenty of dragons and fairies when people believed in dragons and fairies, and I don't think they were any more stupid than we are (go to the mall if you don't believe me). Polls indicate that, at present, half of us believe in space men. Property? So what is going on? I kind of like Vallee's take on it. Look at the whole saucer phenomenon in its entirety: an inexplicable technology that appears, at times, to contradict accepted laws of time and space. A phenomenon that appears intelligent and yet absurd, following the dictates of some dreamlogic. Tens of thousands of people, scattered all over the world, have an inexplicable experience that shatters their previous notions of reality. Representatives of ruling orthodoxies disapprove; enough ridicule is heaped on witnesses to ensure that most keep their mouths firmly shut. Committed saucerheads band together and some jockey for control of the subculture. New belief systems bloom. And maybe this has been going on for quite awhile, in different guises. What does the UFO phenomenon look like? It looks like a conditioning mechanism. Who's behind it? Conditioning us for what? No one knows. Charles Fort, the crotchety granddad of paranormal research, once delivered a glum assessment: "I think we're property." And maybe that's the answer skeptic's old question. Why don't "They" just land on the White House lawn? For the same reason that the chemists at Parke-Davis don't introduce themselves to their rats. Neat, huh?
Invaders from Elsewhere
I don't want to get all Freudian on you, but it's clear that flying saucers answered a deep need in a lot of lonely souls. People were in the market for reassurance. Nuclear terror was in the air. They wanted help. They wanted Space Brothers.
The movie business was quick to pick up on the cinematic potential of the UFO phenomenon, and the drive-in screens of the 1950s soon were flooded with a dazzling array of unearthly visitors. The first of these was a fully dressed 1950 turkey called "The Flying Saucer"; its "saucer" is a Russian secret weapon, and about its only other point of interest is that producer/director/"star" Mikel Conrad promoted the film by hinting that his lame saucer shots were actual top-secret government footage.
