Glimpses of Disclosure (X-Conference 2004 Paper)

Written by Grant Cameron
Thursday, 29 July 2004 23:00
Since the modern age of Ufology began in 1947 there have been a number of occasions when people representing various segments of the government have approached people in the media and in the UFO community. They have offered up clear glimpses of information that indicate the UFO phenomenon is and extraterrestrial phenomena and that the government has known it right from the beginning.

The importance of these government approaches is that the government was not required to do it. They simply could have continued to carry on as if nothing had happened.

I am not going to spend my time dwelling on the possible government motives for these glimpses. My intention is simply to list the examples and allow interested people to discuss it later. The possible reasons for what is going on include,

  • Steering investigators away from the truth.
  • Undermining the credibility of subject and researcher.
  • Controlling the researcher and the flow of leaks on UFOs, or a controlled way of releasing the truth behind the phenomena while keeping control.

Finally, before I begin I would like to mention that I think they are two different methods used by government to get the information out. The Democrats appeared to make direct efforts to force out the documents and stories. The republicans, on the other hand, appeared to use back door cloak and dagger methods to get out the word.

Now, let me move on to brief glimpses of disclosure that began to appear at the end of the Truman and beginning of the Eisenhower administration.

The first person to be closely tied into government for glimpses into what was going on was the famous contactee George Adamski. He claimed to have had a number of contacts inside government who helped “cooperate in the collection attempt to get photographs of the strange craft moving through space.” Adamski listed a group of government contacts and special government privileges he had been granted.

  • An association with 4 U.S government scientists from Point Loma Naval Electronic Laboratory.
  • An association with a similar group of scientists in Pasadena.
  • Adamski’s key contact outside the United States was a former intelligence officer with the British Army.
  • According to a source of Jacques Vallee’s – in Australia Adamski was traveling on a passport bearing special privileges.
  • Adamski claimed he had a pass to enter the White House.

Very clearly involved in this early disclosure initiative was movie producer Walt Disney. The story of the incident was told by one of his key animators Ward Kimball.

At the 1979 MUFON UFO symposium in San Francisco, Kimball told how the American government had approached Walt Disney, prior to the Soviet Sputnik launch, to make a UFO documentary. The reason given to Disney for the documentary was to help acclimatize the American people to the reality of extraterrestrials.

Kimball stated in the speech that around 1955 or 1956 the USAF contacted Walt Disney. They asked him to cooperate on a documentary about UFOs. As a part of the deal, the USAF offered to supply actual UFO footage, which Disney would be allowed to use in his film.

According to Kimball’s account of events Disney went along with the USAF plan, which was not that unusual. The use of Walt Disney cartoons, after all had been suggested by the 1953 CIA Robertson UFO panel as part of a public-education program involving the mass media to “strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminate the aura of mystery it has acquired.”

Once Walt Disney had finished his meetings with the USAF, he began to work on the requested UFO documentary for the public. He asked his animators to think up what an alien would look like. Meanwhile, he waited for the Air Force to deliver on the promised film.

After some period of time the Air Force re-contacted Disney and told him the film offer had to be withdrawn. There would be no UFO footage as promised.

Kimball told researcher Stanton Friedman that once he found out there would be no delivery of UFO film; he personally spoke with an Air Force Colonel who told him, “There indeed was plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Ward, nor anyone else, was going to get access to it.” This caused Disney to end the UFO documentary project.

Recent information indicates that Disney may actually have gotten some film and didn’t use it. This story comes from a prominent UK photographer Mike Maloney. Mike Maloney is the Group Chief Photographer at Mirror Group Newspapers, a fellow with both the Royal Photographic Society and the British Institute of Professional Photographers. Maloney has won many awards, 96 by one count, including Press Photographer of the Year three times.

In the 1970s, Maloney was dining with the head of Disney, and four of the original nine Disney animators while on a trip to the Disney Corporation in Los Angeles. While this was going on Maloney was introduced to another man, identified in one account a “well-known Disney employee.”

The man offered to show Maloney some unusual film footage at his house. When Maloney saw it he described it as “old footage of UFOs,” and “two beings that he was told were aliens.”

UFO investigator Georgina Bruni interviewed Mike Maloney about his early 1970s encounter at Disney. She described what Maloney told her about the aliens he had been shown on the film:

One, which appeared to be dead, was laid out on a table – or slab, the other was clearly alive and moving around on the floor. He was given no information as to the source of the footage, which he was told was “top secret”, but he was in no doubt that it was a genuine piece of old film. Mike described it as being similar to the alien autopsy footage that had been shown on television. At no time did he say it was the same, just similar. Of the footage he personally viewed, he said: ‘If the film that I saw was a fake, it was a brilliant fake.’

At exactly the same time as Disney was being offered his UFO film for a documentary the USAF was busy helping Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse to produce a 92-minute documentary titled “UFO” was released in May 1956.

Three top Air Force USAF officials Albert M. Chop, Major Dewey J. Fournet, Captain Edward Ruppelt, provided technical assistance to Greene and Rouse. The three key officials had many meeting with the producers. Greene told researcher Robert Barrow:

“Together we went into a lengthy and exhaustive study of reports, various documents and affidavits of UFO sightings and reports from radar experts which, with some heretofore top secret motion pictures, in color, of flying saucers, form the basis of the film.”

Most importantly Greene and Rouse obtained two key UFO films. The two films, both showing daytime UFOs in flight were the Great Falls (Montana film which showed two objects) and the Tremonton (Utah film which showed 12 objects). The films had been analyzed and presented to the CIA Robertson UFO Panel in January 1953 as the best photographic evidence held by the USAF related to UFOs. Following their appearance at the Robertson panel the Air Force chose to keep the two films classified. Just in time for the documentary the films were suddenly declassified.

Nixon Administration

Let me set the scene. In December 1969 the United States government officially pulled out of UFO investigation, by shutting down Project Blue Book. For the Air Force, who had run the investigation, it was the end to the worse public relations issue they had to deal with.

Every time the newspaper wrote a UFO story, an Air Force spokesman had been forced to go in front of the media microphones and make up some bizarre new natural phenomena to explain the reported UFO. IT was something that the Air Force dreaded.

Lt. Colonel Hector Quintanilla Jr., a former Chief of Project Blue Book, for example wrote a manuscript on his days investigating UFOs for the Air Force. He called it “UFOs: An Air Force Dilemma.” He had wanted to call it “UFOs: A $20,000,000 Fiasco.”

The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) had concerned itself with real technical problems dealing with real technical problems dealing with our national security. Their engineers and scientists are top shelf and a very proud group. Little did they know that a pseudo scientific project was about to be dropped in their laps…on a long term basis it turned out to be a monumental headache for all its Commanders…at times it was just pure hell…ATIC Commanders would cringe on hearing the term “Flying Saucers.”

When the project was shut down, this PR nightmare was over. Never again would the Air Forced be forced to explain UFOs by putting an officer in front of media microphones to explain the latest reported sighting. If they wanted to investigate UFOs, they could now do so in absolute secrecy without the unwanted publicity.

In Canada, the government officially shut down the military involvement with UFOs about the same time as in the United States. There has not been a peep from them on the subject since. A UFO researcher looking for UFO answers inside the Canadian government files wouldn’t even know where to start.

So it is extremely important to note that the Pentagon OFFICIALLY contacted producers Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler in 1973 to do a documentary on UFOs. I consider the Emenegger story to be perhaps the most important case in Ufology.

This approach by the Pentagon was extremely important because they didn’t have to do it. It is extremely important because by doing so they risked ending up in front of media microphones again explaining their interest and involvement into UFOs.

Why after getting out of the UFO nightmare in 1969, did the government jump back in with both feet in 1973?

The 1973 event began when Emenegger was working as the creative director for Grey Advertising in Los Angeles. He and his partner Allen Sandler were invited to Norton Air Force Base to discuss a series of documentaries film on advanced research projects. As the negotiations continued it became apparent that the two military officials wanted one to be a documentary on UFOs.

“We went to Norton Air Force Base to discuss other things, among them 3-D moving holography, laser and cancer all of the R&D advance research – ARPA kind of projects, and the UFO thing was brought up to us, which I just couldn’t believe, but said “Oh, we’ll just go along with it.” And one conversation led to another, a contact with the Pentagon. Everyone couldn’t have been more open about what we were doing. Anyone along the line could have questioned, and said – and I expected them to say, “Like – what the hell are you guys talking about.”

On the 1988 UFO documentary “UFO Cover-up Live” Emenegger said that Paul Shartle, Security Manager and Chief of Requirements for the Audio-Visual Program the base was the first to describe a film of a filmed encounter between aliens and base officials at Holloman Air Force base.

“While discussing several of the subjects, UFOs came up. Paul here told us about a film of an alien craft at Holloman Air Force Base three years earlier.”

Shartle described what was on the film during his appearance on the documentary,

Shartle: I saw footage of three disc shaped crafts. One of the crafts landed and two went away.

Question: Why did it land?

Shartle: It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods. A sliding door opened. A ramp was extended and out came three aliens.

Question: What did they look like?

Shartle: Well, they were human size, had an odd gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight fitting jump suits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communications devices, and in their hand they held a translator, I was told. A Holloman base commander and other Air Force officials went out to greet them.

Emenegger and Sandler were offered the film of the alien base encounter for the documentary that they had been asked to make for the Pentagon. Negotiations ensued and involved meetings right in the Pentagon where Emenegger and Sandler did not even have to sign in. Emenegger described the situation in a 1994 Texas presentation for the Electric Viewpoint.

We headed for the Pentagon and we walked into the building – I remember the two of us, and for some reason we were herded by two plain clothes men into a little narrow room with fluorescent lights over it and I just remember, and some man sitting behind a desk and he pointed at us and he said “We’re very concerned about you bringing up the subject of UFOs. He said it causes when people like you put these things on the air it causes the phone lines – it ties up our phone lines. It is not part of our duty, our national defense”, and on and on. I was under these fluorescent lights watching these three plain clothes men. I thought I was going to die there for a minute.

But again my partner had enough sense to say “Heh! We were invited by Mr. Hatch by Colonel Coleman,  and they said “Okay, well just a warning.” So we went of to meet Colonel Coleman. Now he’s the one that looks like Hemmingway with the beard walking through the E-ring at the Pentagon. The first thing he says to us was, “You know if you come across information or technology which is against the interest of our national defense- you can be fined and imprisoned.” So it was like warning #2.

Then we went into his inner office, and a strange thing happened. He said, “Come on boys. Sit down. Let me tell you something.”

Everyone in these Pentagon production meetings had a chance to protest the idea but no one did. Emenegger explained,

Well, they all had a chance. As a matter of fact, you know, one of our agreements was to go over the script at the Pentagon, and if there was any question about anything that they had the right to ask about it. Strangely enough, no one even questioned the whole thing about the landing at Holloman Air Force Base – like, “Well OK.”

It all unfolded. One would call another. For instance Coleman said, “Hold on” as we were sitting in his office. He would put a call into (General) George (Weinbrenner) and say. “Do you want to talk to these guys?” A day later I think we went down into the bunker, and there confronted George. We couldn’t have – I think I was pretty straightforward. My first question was, “What about the landing at Holloman Air Force Base.” He kind of said, “Well, I’ll tell you.”

The two men were told of a film that had been shot at Holloman Air Force Base we here an alien ship had landed. An alien got out of the crafts and met with officials at the base. The group then moved down the tarmac to a base building.

Emenegger was promised 3200 feet of film from this film that could be placed in his documentary to help make the people aware of that fact that UFOs did exist and there had been official contact between the government and the extraterrestrials.

Emenegger and Sandler were offered other UFO film for the documentary. One example was a Top Secret film involving a missile launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base that was tracked by UFOs.

We were given a film – Top Secret- it was still Top Secret on it – Quintanilla’s name was on it, of a launching at Vandenberg of which three cameras followed the one missile take-off. Behind it you saw two little white – looked like transparent moons sort of just trailing and following it their way but from every camera – no matter what position – so it wasn’t a reflection. We had Bob Baker who was the guy who did the 1952 Robertson Panel guy. Anyway Bob Baker was very well known at that time. So he came in and analyzed it and said it’s a million to one that it’s anything but – its not Venus – it’s not a reflection – it’s this – it’s unknown stuff.

The documentary and book went ahead but in a move that would become a pattern for all future glimpses of disclosure, the Holloman film was withdrawn at the last minute. Coleman recalled the film, and a man was forced to drive the film back across the country in his car. Emenegger and Sandler were forced to use recreations to talk about a possible encounter between the government and the aliens.

The Carter Administration

Carter as probably everyone in the room knows saw a UFO prior to becoming Governor of Georgia. In 1976 the National Enquirer interviewed Carter about the incident, and about what he would do about UFOs if elected to the White House. Carter made a promise to release all the sighting data.

Enquirer: Governor, when you once saw a UFO. If you were President, would you reopen inquiry into UFOs?

Carter: Well – No what I would make the information we have about those sightings available to the public, and let them decide. I never have tried to identify what I saw. It was – you know- a light in the western sky. It was very unique. I had never seen it before. There were about 20 of us who saw it. None of us could figure out what it was. Well, I don’t think it was anything solid. It looked just like a light. It was a very peculiar aberration. I don’t make fun of people who say they have seen unidentified objects in the sky.

Enquirer: The United States used to have a body that investigated UFOs. That was discontinued. Would you reopen that?

Carter: I don’t know yet.

Disclosure seemed only moments away. A President was in the White House who had experienced the phenomena, and who believed a well-informed public had the right to know. What many don’t realize is that Carter did place some conditions on his UFO promise.

I don’t see any reason to keep information like that secret but there may be some aspect of the UFO information with which I am not familiar that might be related to some secret experiments that we doing that might involve our national security –our new weapons systems. I certainly wouldn’t release that. But if it was something removed from our national security, in my opinion as President I would go ahead and release that. I see nothing wrong with that.

Many of the UFO accounts I have heard concerning the Carter administration state that Carter backed away from his promise to disclose and did nothing about UFOs while in the White House. This is not true at all. Carter did push hard on disclosure and did achieve a great deal.

Jimmy Carter started to push for the UFO answer even before he was president. During his president elect briefing given by President Ford’s Director of Central Intelligence George Bush, Carter demanded the files on UFOs.

Bush told Carter that he could not provide the requested documents. He stated Carter did not have a “need – to – know” and that curiosity on the part of the President was not sufficient reason to be told about UFOs.

Now Ronald Pandolfi, who is rumored to run the weird desk at the CIA, has  expressed his doubts that George Bush even denied UFO information to the president-elect because it would have gotten him fired. The fact of the matter is, however, that Carter removed Bush. In fact Bush never served a single day as DCI under President Carter.

Once in office Carter continued to push for UFO disclosure. Those who elected him did not forget the UFO promise because the White House received 9,000 UFO letters.

Carter’s promise to release was stalled by more than just the pledge Carter had made not to release information tied into the national security. It was limited by who Carter was. Carter had run as a Washington insider. He had campaigned in short sleeves to put across the idea that he was a common man running for the nation’s highest office.

Carter was a Washington outsider running against the Washington insiders who controlled the UFO secret. He should not have been surprised that they didn’t run to support his UFO disclosure initiative.

He came in at the time of the CIA scandal revelations was exposed by the church committee in 1976. The CIA was in a bad way, and when Carter came in he fired hundreds of CIA agents. Now they didn’t trust him, and any chance he had to get them to reveal their closest guarded secret was gone.

Carter also got into trouble with the military industrial complex, often rumored to be a controlling factor in the UFO cover-up, by cutting $5 billion from the defense budget. He also cancelled the B-1 bomber, shelved the neutron bomb, vetoed a nuclear aircraft carrier, and disassembled the draft machinery. In the end he was run over.

Carter made a number of efforts to shake the federal agencies for any information they might have on UFOs, or for any secret system that existed for coordinating information on UFOs. His trusted Press Secretary Jody Powell took on this task. Powell contacted agencies such as the FBI and NASA.

The FBI said they “had no authorization or reason for conducting any inquiries on this subject” and that they turned everything over to the Air Force “without taking any action on it.”

NASA knew that the UFO issue was a no-win situation, and would be a severe strain on their budget, which Carter had just cut. They agreed to answer UFO mail sent to the White House and investigate any “bona fide physical evidence from credible sources”.

The Carter administration did much more towards UFO disclosure than it has been given credit for. A good number of the declassified government UFO documents we have today were released under the Carter administration. During the four Carter years approximately 3,000 pages were released including big collections from the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

Carter met openly with UFO personalities such as Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gary. They met in the Oval Office, and according to NRC notes UFOs were discussed in the meeting.

Stories told by attorney Daniel Sheehan clearly showed that Jimmy Carter did call for a collection of UFO information once he became president. Sheehan, a prominent civil rights attorney had been called as a consultant to two studies being done for the president. One of the studies was on UFOs, and one was on extraterrestrial intelligence. Sheehan described how he was contacted to obtain the Vatican library UFO files for the reports.

I was contacted by Marcia Smith, the head of the Science and Technology Division of the Congressional Research Service, to see if I as chief counsel for the United States Jesuit Headquarters in Washington D.C.  International Social Ministry Office could obtain access to the Vatican Library section that had the information about extraterrestrial intelligence and the UFOs in the Vatican Library in Rome. I agreed to do that as a special consultant to the Congressional Research Service.

As part of his work, Sheehan asked Marcia Smith to see the classified sections of Project Blue Book. Someone up high aided Marcia Smith, the author of the reports from the Library of Congress, and Sheehan was asked to go to the Madison Building to view the records. Sheehan described what happened,

Back in 1977, when I was asked to participate as a special consultant to the Library of Congress research group analysis for President Carter, I was given access to the Project Blue Book files – the classified sections of them during the preparation for a seminar which I was asked to present to the top 50 scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in the SETI program. In that context I was allowed to review the classified sections of the Blue Book Project. In that section I came across absolutely clear pictures – photographs -of a UFO that was on the ground. It had apparently crashed. It was stuck in the stuck in the side of an embankment. There was snow all around in the photographs, and there were United States Air Force personnel in the photograph measuring this particular craft – taking photographs of it.

You could see them in a number of these photographs. Then there were actual close up photos from different perspectives of the vehicle, and they actually had insignia on the side of the vehicle that they had taken close up pictures of. So when I saw this, in the context, where I had been allowed into this room downstairs in the new building of the Library of Congress that had not even been opened yet. This was a brand new building. They had a big special room downstairs. There were Air Force guards at the doors. When I actually saw these photographs in the files I said “Well, Now that I have seen this, and I know that the United States Air Force has these photographs – that they’ve got this vehicle. They’ve obviously got it. Here are these photographs.

Sheehan further reported that Carter did get the two reports and that they had stunning information in them.

She went forward and supervised two of the final studies. The first study reached the conclusion – this was an official United States government Congressional Research Service report that was prepared by the Congressional Research Service Science and Technology Division and sent to the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Representatives, who in turn sent it to the President. In this report they concluded that there were from two to six – at least- from two to six highly technological intelligent civilizations other than on our planet here in our galaxy.

And secondly, they prepared a full report on the UFO phenomena. It actually had diagrams of all the different shaped UFO craft that were there, and in fact projected that it appeared to be that in a certain number of cases, and they indicated that from 5% to 6% of these cases – of these sightings – that there was absolutely no other rational explanation for these phenomena, given the caliber of the witnesses, the caliber of the collaboration of the sightings, to lead to any other conclusion than the fact that they appeared to be coming from one or more of these two to six extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

Another indication that Carter did gain knowledge about the true nature of the UFO phenomena and tried to disclose it came from a story told by actress Shirley MacLean. MacLaine was responding to a question put to her by UFO researcher Art Greenfield on the Larry King Show. The question was based on what actor Nicholas Cage had stated a couple weeks earlier during an appearance on the David Letterman show.

Question: Hello, Good evening Larry and Shirley, About two weeks ago, Nicholas Cage was on the Letterman Show and said Shirley had told him that President Carter had told her he had seen recovered alien spacecraft and aliens in a hanger. Can you tell me exactly what President Carter said?

Shirley: “He didn’t tell me that, but he told me many times that when I first wrote “Out On A Limb” that he would support me, that it was true, that there were occupants. Why should we be the only people in the universe? He wanted to shine the sunshine laws on intelligence, to expose it, to see how the people would react, but he didn’t and wouldn’t and couldn’t, as he explained to me.”

Reagan Administration

The first disclosure initiative within the Reagan administration came only days after Ronald Reagan came into office. The offer to provide pieces of the UFO mystery was made to researcher Bill Moore. Moore had made a name for himself in the UFO community with co-authorships in two best selling books “The Philadelphia Experience” and “The Roswell Incident.”

During a book tour for “The Roswell Incident” Moore was contacted twice with an offer “to help.” It was a story that went on for ten years. Greg Bishop, a researcher and close friend of Moore, described how the story began,

As a result of these books, and him going on some kind of publicity tour for them, he was called at a couple places on his trip by somebody at a nearby Air Force Base. Once in Omaha Nebraska, and once when he was in Albuquerque. And it turns out that the person who called him when he was in Albuquerque and said “You know we think you really know what you are talking about and we would like to talk to you.” -that person was Richard Doty it turns out to be. He set up a meeting with Bill Moore. What a lot of people don’t know is that the first time they met. He met in an Albuquerque restaurant with this guy that became known as the Falcon, and he will still not divulge this person’s real name. Neither will Richard Doty or anyone else.

This guy (Falcon) who turns out to have worked for the DIA – Defense Intelligence Agency which is like the military CIA. He presented Moore with a deal. He said, “If you will cooperate with us,” (and he didn’t tell him what that cooperation was- the nature of it) “then we will give you what you are looking for which is UFO information from the government – as much as we can release to you, and we will do that over a period of years if you cooperate with us.”

And he (Moore) said “well OK, I guess so – it sounds good – sure.”

For the next 10 years Moore ran around meeting intelligence and military people. They offered him information that sometimes, in the end, appeared to be a mixture of good and bad information. It became almost impossible to distinguish what was the truth. Moore left the field figuring he had gotten as far towards solving the mystery as anyone would get.

Some researchers rejected Moore and everything he said after he admitted in a July 1989 speech that he had helped the Air Force Office of Special Investigation provide disinformation to Dr. Paul Bennewitz, a physicist who lived just outside of Kirkland Air Force Base. Bennewitz believed that he had made contact with aliens and had detected an underground base they were using at Dulce, New Mexico.

Moore introduced a number of new concepts into the UFO community, such as the idea that a live alien had been recovered in a crash and held by the American government, that there had been an interaction between the government and the aliens, that the Air Force was only a pawn in the UFO game and that the real players were in the NSA and DIA. The most important concept that was introduced by Moore was the concept of a group known as MJ-12 that controlled everything to do with UFOs.

This Moore did by releasing the MJ-12 document that had been mailed to his partner Jamie Shandera in December 1984. In the end the document was generally rejected within the UFO community as flawed, but the concept of MJ-12 and almost everything else in the document became a part of the ufological interpretations of historical events.

It is my interpretation that this is what was supposed to happen. Liberals within the control group in 1973 decided that they wanted material released in order to acclimatize the UFO community and the public to an alien presence. They however, realized that the information could quickly get out of hand, and therefore chose the method of mixing chaff with the wheat so it would not be taken seriously by media or congressional sources who could force the entire story out into the open.

The MJ-12 document was a major piece of the disclosure puzzle, and its release was done perfectly. Many UFO researchers have come forward with evidence supporting the existence of the group, but none have found the piece to start the avalanche of knowledge demanded by the UFO community. The MJ-12 concept got out, and the cover-up remained intact. That was the plan, and it worked.

In 1985, during the same time as Moore was receiving information from Falcon about the inner working of the UFO cover-up, Robert Emenegger was again being contacted by Bill Coleman, now retired, about doing another UFO documentary for the government.

Two key officials at the Defense Audiovisual Agency (DAVA) unit at Norton Air Force Base fronted for the project this time. They were quite eager to get some classified UFO film into the public. Strangely, according to Emenegger, the UFO films being offered did not include the Holloman film that was being pushed during the Nixon administration. Emenegger recounted the encounter,

You do now – I don’t know if it was in the book maybe not – that during the Reagan administration I met with Bob Scott and Miller. At Norton, and they wanted another program like we had done, and we spent a lot of time discussing it. Bob Scott was a Reagan appointee. He was the head of USIA when I first met him – Bruce Hershenson – I don’t know if you know who Bruce was in Washington. That’s how I knew him. Then he popped up as the head of DAVA – that film repository. He had a Glen E. Millar retired General as his aide, or second in command. We spent a lot of discussion. There was a lot of stuff in the vault that he wanted to get out. I even had General Miller come to our house to meet Hynek and his group to take them out to Norton so they could look around. Miller was, interestingly enough, was head of one of the first studios in Hollywood – one of the old ones, and got Reagan his first contract.

Anyway, after Hynek came here, and he wanted to see UFO footage, and I think they started pulling it out, and Shartle came in stepped in – now I hope you have the characters correct. Miller said to him, “I want you to show Hynek all the UFO footage.”

Shartle told me that he said, “I’m sorry, Sir, you know – you will have to give me a written request for that.

The answer came back, “Listen, I’ll have your ass. You’re going to do it.”

I was not there to know all the craziness that went on, but I do know that three months later Casper Weinberger sent a telegram relieving both Scott and Miller of their posts. Why I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was related.

Just after Emenegger, Jacques Vallee, and Hynek were contacted, a source inside the NSA was leaking another UFO story to a key investigative reporter at the New York Times. Howard Blum, who was working on a book about the Walker spy case, related how his NSA contact was very concerned that he look into UFOs. While on the Larry King show Blum described the NSA leak.

I stumbled on to this really by accident. I am a reporter as you said by training, and by personality I am a skeptic and a cynic. I was working on the Walker spy case – a book on that – and I was meeting with a man from the National Security Agency and I was trying to  interview him and he was trying not to talk too much, trying to distract me and say “What you really should look into is this hot shot group of experts who are looking into UFOs. The government is back in the UFO business.”

Blum did investigate the UFO lead and produced a book called “Out There.” In the book Blum said told about a group known as the UFO Working Group, who had been brought in to try and get to the bottom of the UFO mystery.

Actually the group was known as the Advanced Theoretical Physics Conference. It was held at the EDM McLean Secure Facility in May 1985. It was classified Top Secret. A number of prominent scientists and intelligence people were involved.

The story created a great stir when it came out. However, like every other glimpse of disclosure, it lacked the concrete proof that was needed for an open disclosure. Like all efforts that preceded it, the story died when some inconsistencies where discovered in Blum’s facts. As had happened with other UFO glimpses of the past, new facts about the cover-up were released, and the cover-up remained intact.

In April, 1983, Linda Moulton Howe, who had just produced an excellent documentary about cattle mutilations called Strange Harvest, was contacted. At the time she was working on a new script for Home Box Office on UFOs.

The night before the contact she met with researcher and attorney Peter Gersten. Gersten, who had played a prominent role as an attorney forcing out UFO documents using the Freedom of Information Act, told Howe that he had met with the same person that she would meet with – Richard C. Doty, an AFOSI agent at Kirtland AFB.

When Howe got to Kirtland, Doty took her to a small office where he handed her a brown envelope and said, “My superiors have asked me to show you this.” He withdrew several sheets of white paper from an envelope, and handed them to her. She could not keep them or take notes, but she could read the pages and ask questions.

The document was titled Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America. It described UFO crashes, alien bodies, and an alien who survived one of the crashes. The paper listed several government UFO projects. Linda described being given the document to read,

He (Doty) said my superiors have asked me to show you a document that you can read. You cannot take notes, and I want you to move from the chair you are sitting in – I want you to move to the chair in the center of the room…but as I look at that page which was dramatically all caps, typing where the type is in the paper. It said – each line was centered on the page- “BRIEFING FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON THE SUBJECT OF UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL VEHICLES.”

In addition to showing her the document, Doty said he and his superiors were willing to release several thousand feet of government held UFO footage for the HBO UFO documentary she was working on. Included with the footage was the Holloman Air Force Base film where the aliens had landed and met with base officials. In the late 1980s Linda told me,

The government intended to release to me several thousand feet of color and black and white film taken between 1947 and 1964 showing crashed UFO discs and extraterrestrial bodies in historic footage to be included in the HBO documentary supported with official government confirmation.

Linda, like Bill Moore had made a name for herself in Ufology with a documentary called “A Strange Harvest.” It had won a local Emmy in Denver, and dealt with the large rash of cattle mutilations that had been occurring for years in Colorado and other western states. It was partly for this reason that I believe the government chose to talk to Linda.

Like all the other glimpses of disclosure Linda never did get the UFO footage from Richard Doty and the others she dealt with. There were many excuses for the delays and in the end no film was turned over. The HBO documentary she was working on shut down.

As soon as the HBO documentary was put on hold, Doty and his superiors made a new offer to Linda. They stated that they wanted a documentary through PBS rather than HBO because they had more control over PBS. Linda described part of what was involved in this offer.

They don’t want me to go forward with HBO. They want me to go forward with PBS. Well in this process he is saying how much would you take, and would you be willing to work exclusively on a military base?

And I remember saying, “Look, if you guys want to hire me to edit film and be part of a production that says this is a production of the United States government, I’m happy to do that. But I’m not going to put my name on a film that I have done if everything about it is 100% controlled by the United States government. I can’t do that.

Not only was Linda Howe offered movie footage for public documentaries, she was even offered an interview with Jerome Hunsacker, the last living member of the MJ-12 committee, a group rumored to be in control of the UFO situation.

Well I think he was an original MJ-12er, and I believe he would have been the last on the list of the original twelve. That is my understanding of who somebody was trying to get me to meet with. I am saying I was supposed to have had a dialogue with one of the original MJ-12.

In addition to this historic invitation, Linda was offered a chance to interview a U.S.A.F. Captain who had lived with a captured live alien. The alien had supposedly been captured in a 1949 crash, and the Captain lived with the alien, (known as an extraterrestrial biological entity (EBE), until 1952 when the alien died. Linda recalled the event,

It was in all these discussions about my being able to go to where this man was in a hospital in Texas with prostrate cancer to talk with him directly, because I said even if I could tape record him, this is too valuable. Those were real discussions. In that process this man was identified as one of people so valuable because he was able to get these telepathic thoughts.

Q: This was an offer made to you. Is Richard Doty making you this offer?

No it came in a completely different way. It came in a Fedex proposal to me – where I would go – who would meet me – How I would be able to interview a man who was dying and who had stayed with the Eben at Los Alamos.

I got an airline ticket! I had an airline ticket!

Q: You bought it, or they bought it?

I bought it. He was dying of prostrate cancer in a hospital in Texas, and I was so serious from this communication that I got an airline ticket – paid for it to go. It was I think the night before the morning I was to leave I got a call that said “We’re sorry – he says it’s off.”

And I said “Why?”

And he says “He just says it’s off.”

Another prominent UFO researcher who was approached and given a glimpse of disclosure was Whitley Stieber, a prominent novelist, who had entered the UFO field after having abduction types experiences which led him to write the book Communion in 1988. He like Howe, Moore, Emenegger, Vallee, and Hynek was offered a whole rage of UFO disclosure offers.

I was approached by a retired officer from the Air Force Office of Secret Intelligence with all kinds of stories, about how the government had taken 16mm film of an alien that they had done an operation on in 1952 which enabled it to talk through otherwise atrophied vocal cords. A story that struck me as . . . I wouldn’t have written it as fiction because it was too ridiculous. They tried to make me believe that aliens had claimed that they had something to do with creation of Jesus Christ and all sorts of ridiculous things which if I had gone out into the public with would have make me look like a fool.

Strieber’s story paralleled the offer that Linda Howe had described about getting an interview with the captured alien’s keeper. It also paralleled an offer that had been made to him by Paul Shartle who had been the keeper of the Holloman and other UFO films at Norton Air Force Base. In a phone interview Emenegger told me  about the offer made to him by Shartle to actually meet the alien himself.

That’s not right. You’re right. Someone did say you can meet an alien down in New Mexico.

Paul Shartle once asked me if I would be interested in going down to like New Mexico, to meet with you know some alien. This sounds like what you are talking about, although it never came about.

Bill Moore was also talking about the alien, and a videotape was being sold purporting to be an interview with the alien. Just before Reagan left office a leak surfaced stating Reagan was going to make the big disclosure in a live TV broadcast. The rumor went on to say that the live alien would appear with him. It was a wild time in the UFO community.

The Alien Invasion

Some have interpreted President Reagan’s constant statements about the alien invasion as an attempt to disclose by Reagan. I feel that these statements were simply statements made by a president who was fascinated with the paranormal, and who loved to tell stories. They are interesting and numerous so I will quickly review them.

The Reagan presidential records show many times when the Reagan talked about UFOs and other paranormal items. For example, Steven Spielberg gave a White House screening of “E.T. –The Extraterrestrial” in late June 1982. Near the end of the movie Reagan leaned over to Steven Spielberg and shocked him by saying, “I bet there aren’t six people in this whole room who know how true this whole thing is.”

A few months Reagan appeared at the old Roswell Army Air Base, and there outside the famous west hanger, where it is rumored the 1947 alien bodies were stored prior to the flight out, gave a speech in which he made a joking reference to E.T.

As well as talking about aliens Reagan often talked about the White House ghost and Armageddon. Judi Buckalew, a White House aid actually stated that there were people whose job it was to keep the president away from school kids who would ask the president all manner of questions following speeches to schools.

The staff was very afraid of what the president would say in answers to questions directed his way. As Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan’s Press Secretary stated, “The goddamndest things would come out of his mouth.”

Lt. Gen. Colin Powell was Reagan’s last National Security advisor. He told presidential biographer Lou Cannon that it was his job to keep the alien invasion remarks out of Reagan’s speech.

Despite this many alien remarks got into speeches, starting with a toast in Geneva during the November 1985 Summit. Reagan raised his glass and said,

“If the people of the world were to find out that there was some alien life form that was going to attack the Earth approaching on Halley’s Comet, then that knowledge would unite all the peoples of the world.”

Reagan adlibbed the same remark at the end of a speech to Fallston High School in Fallston, Maryland just after returning home from Geneva.

In 1987, Reagan added the alien invasion remark to a speech that was being made to the United Nations General Assembly. Possibly embarrassed by aliens at the U.N. Reagan speech writers took it out of the speech, only to have Reagan request that it be put back in.

The writers complied. The line was put back in with only a couple changes. The stage was set for the President of the United States to stand up in front of the United Nations and say,

“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world. And yet I ask – is not an alien force already among us? “

Lastly in 1988, Reagan took a question at a speech in Chicago and again adlibbed the alien invasion remark. It was a concept that Reagan believed in strongly, and was not afraid to talk about. The Chicago alien invasion remark, for example, was made the day after the story broke in the Washington Post about the Reagan White House using astrology to set up the president’s schedule.

Clinton Administration Effort

Like Jimmy Carter before him Bill Clinton ran for president as a Washington outsider. His campaign was established him as running against the Washington insiders who had caused all the evils within government.

Bill and Hillary did not even hide the fact that they were standing up against the insiders. If you read “Inventing Al Gore” you will see that Clinton referred to them as the ”Fucking Washington Crowd”. It may have been the same crowd that Hillary referred to as the right wing conspiracy.

Like Jimmy Carter both Bill and Hillary were interested in UFOs. The word inside the CIA was that they “were looking.

The Clinton administration role in disclosure was not one of leaking elements of the UFO story into the UFO community as had been done in the Nixon and Reagan administration. This was because the Clinton administration was cut off just like the UFO community.

A prime example of this came when White House reporter Sarah McClendon asked Bill Clinton why he didn’t do something about the UFO phenomena. Steven Greer gave Clinton’s reply in a conversation with radio host Art Bell.

You know Bill Clinton leaned over and told Sarah McClendon, who hosted up at the National Press Club on May 9th – this is a story I haven’t told, and I’m going to tell you now. She told me this. Bill Clinton leaned over to her and said, because she brought up this issue to Bill Clinton saying “Why don’t you do something about what Dr. Greer and this group are trying to do?” He bent over and he said, “Sarah, there’s a secret government within the government, and I don’t control it.

The way the Clinton administration approached UFO disclosure was to open up all government files to disclosure. His chief of staff John Podesta, known while he was in the White House as the X-files man, led the fight.

The effort was extremely successful for document disclosure and not so successful for UFO disclosure. Over the five years the Clinton Executive Order was in place, 800 million pages of classified documents were released. This was compared to 150 million pages of documents declassified in the 15 years previous. No significant UFO documents however were part of the 800 million pages of declassified files.

There were examples where Clinton officials did attempt to specifically shake loose UFOs documents. According to 1,000 pages of documents that were released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy inside the Clinton White House Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense under President Nixon, was called in to brief Clinton’s first Secretary of Defense Les Aspin on
UFOs.

One of these was an effort by his first CIA director James Woolsey to get some answers on UFOs. Woolsey and his wife Suzanne (at the time a ranking official at the National Academy of Sciences)
had in the late 1960s reportedly had a daylight UFO sighting in New Hampshire. If true, they were naturally interested.

In December 1993, only months after Clinton took office, Dr. Steven Greer sat with the CIA director, his wife, and another couple and discussed UFO and disclosure. According to Greer John Petersen, a close friend of Woolsey’s had followed Greer for four lectures listening to his presentation. This, according to Greer, had been done at Woolsey’s request.

Finally, at a presentation in Fort Collins, Colorado, Petersen approached Greer and said, “I know a few folks in Washington who I think you need to meet with.” When Greer asked whom in particular, Petersen mentioned Woolsey.

Greer was asked to provide information to Woolsey that would help Woolsey on a search through the CIA files looking for UFO documents. He also got the opportunity to talk to Woolsey on December 13th for three hours.

Most people know the story of how Woolsey and Petersen denied Greer’s version of events. This denial, however, didn’t come until almost 5 years after the event when Greer published a book which referred to the event.

Rather than rehashing the story and reviewing the definition of briefing let me mention a couple points that clearly show that an attempt was being made from within to get UFO information out.

  1. Greer did meet with James Woolsey and John Petersen, and it probably was for three hours as no one has denied the length of the meeting. Meeting privately with the Director of  all of the United States Intelligence agencies is no small feat. Most people, no matter how powerful, would be lucky to get the DCI to answer a letter. If the CIA Director meets with a member of the public it is at the bequest of the director and not the member of the public. The tail does not wag the dog when it comes to the CIA Director.
  2. Woolsey did order a study of all UFO files. This supports Greer’s story that he was asked to provide information to aid in a search. I have unquestionable evidence that both the classified
    and unclassified records were checked. Once Woolsey left the CIA did put out a new report on their involvement in the UFO mystery.
  3. Greer was not the only member of the public who was contacted  by Petersen and Woolsey in connection with an attempt to get information moved into the public forum. C. Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush administration has also come forward claiming that she had contacts with Petersen and Woolsey. She was to aid with a project set up “to help the Navy adjust their operations for a world in which it was commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.”

Petersen denied the Fitts story when he learned that I might put it on my website. Months later I sent the denial to Fitts for her comment and she replied in length that she stood behind her story on every point. It appeared to be one of those Holloman stories that seemed to disappear when you tried to grab it.

The first of the attempts to disclose UFO documents came when Laurance Rockefeller approached the Clinton White House to get all UFO documents declassified. Laurance, who had graduated with a philosophy degree from Princeton became very interested in UFOs after seeing a documentary on the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell New Mexico.

Rockefeller’s attempt to bring the issue to the President was handled by Clinton’s Science Advisor and by Hillary Clinton.

Gibbons told Rockefeller that the request to declassify all UFO files would be impossible if the cover-up was as widespread as Rockefeller was claiming. Gibbons proposed taking one case and trying to get it declassified. They would then have a pattern to follow.

Rockefeller thought about it and said that this idea would be fine. He told Gibbons that he was choosing the Roswell case as the test case. Thus began a move to get the facts on Roswell. Gibbons passed on the request and the USAF began their study on what really happened in 1947.

When the Air Force was done they were unable to come up with anything new except to discover that a bunch of the original Roswell documents were missing. They filed their report “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” with the White House stating that there was nothing to the alien spaceship theory.

President Clinton was not amused. In a speech on November 30, 1995 he answered back to the USAF. It was a speech given in Belfast Northern Ireland in front of 80,000 people, and I can assure you after a couple weeks at the Reagan Library studying how presidential speeches are put together, the reference to Roswell was intentional. Nothing gets in a presidential speech that is not there for a specific reason.

There had been a letter writing competition in Northern Ireland. School children wrote letters to the visiting U.S. president and the two winning letter writers were on the stage with Clinton during his speech. Neither of their letters, however, was read. Instead, Clinton answered a letter from Ryan who was asking about Roswell. This is what Clinton stated,

I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you’re out in the crowd tonight, here’s the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

With his public rebuke, Clinton effectively forced the USAF to go back and reinvestigate the question of the bodies.

It didn’t help much because in 1997 the USAF decided the screw the President with yet another Roswell report, this one called “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.”

Answering the President’s order that he wanted to know about the bodies, the Air Force spend much of the report dreaming up the bizarre notion that dummies dropped in 1953 clearly explained why people in 1947 were reporting bodies in connection with the Roswell crash.

Conclusion

These are the key glimpses of disclosure that have occurred over the past fifty-seven years. There are dozens of other examples that I could have used but left out for the sake of time.

Once Clinton left office there were some strong indications that George W. Bush might make further UFO disclosures. These hopes faded shortly after he entered office, and after 911 it appeared that the complex issue of disclosure may have been put on the back burner while other issues dealing with terrorism were dealt with. At the present time, the only effort I see to provide glimpses of disclosure is the material being provided to Bob and Ryan Wood through the many documents they are still receiving. This is a complex story that I will allow them to tell in their own way.

UFO Hocus Pocus: The Story of the Falcon

Written by Grant Cameron
Wednesday, 11 July 2012 22:54

UFO Hocus Pocus: The Story of the Falcon

 

Part of our intelligence process is to be involved in counterintelligence, to lead the enemy in another direction by providing those misdirecting dots. From the book Homeland Security and Intelligence

“Something does not make much sense here. Why would someone in Washington mount a disinformation effort if the only result is to confuse members of the UFO research community, which is a very small group without much influence over the public at large?” Researcher and Author Jacques Vallee

Cast of Characters

Bill Moore – Prominent author and UFO researcher in the 1980s. Moore wrote “The Roswell Incident” which put the 1947 Roswell UFO crash story on the map. Prior to the book no one in the UFO community had ever heard of the story. He released the now infamous MJ-12 documents (a document that purported to be a UFO briefing for then President-elect Dwight Eisenhower) to the UFO community with Jamie Shandera and Stanton Friedman.

Jamie Shandera – Shandera was Hollywood film producer who teamed up with Bill Moore to research and release the MJ-12 document. He was not a UFO researcher prior to teaming up with Moore. It was Shandera who received the MJ-12 document in the mail.

Stanton Friedman – The third member of the MJ-12 research team who played no part in the hocus pocus detailed below. When approached with the name of the Falcon he told me “never heard of the guy.”

The Aviary – When Moore and Shandera were operating with their many high level intelligence sources in the 1980s, they used bird names for each source so that they could talk on the phone about the sources without using their names. Thirty years later Moore and Shandera have still not disclosed which person represented each bird. Most of the birds were never aware of this bird naming game till years later, and few if any know which bird they were.

The Falcon – The Falcon was one of the two most important birds. Moore has now confirmed that he believed Falcon to be Harry Rositzke – a former high ranking CIA official who was brought out of retirement claiming to represent a group of government insiders who wanted the UFO story put into the public. Moore apparently never met Rositzke but calculated who he must have been.

Richard Doty – Acted as the Falcon to protect the identity of the real Falcon. Reported to be a Special Agent for Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirkland Air Force base, but may actually have been working not for AFOSI but for Air Force Intelligence according to a new claim.

Lee Graham – A technician working for Aerojet in a classified position who was chosen to leak the documents that Moore and Shandera were receiving from their intelligence sources.

 

Setting the Stage

In a lecture given in Las Vegas in 1989 researcher Bill Moore recounted how the story of the Falcon and how the document leaks began,

“In early September, 1980, I was approached by a well- placed individual within the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high-level project dealing with UFOs. This individual told me that he spoke for a small group of similar individuals who were uncomfortable with the government’s continuing cover-up of the truth and indicated that he and his group would like to help me with my research into the subject in the hope and expectation that I might be able to help them find a way to change the prevailing policy and get the facts to the public without breaking any laws in the process. The man who acted as liaison between this group and myself was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty.”

Most importantly, Falcon told Moore that the information he would receive on UFOs would not all be accurate. Some of it would be disinformation. It would be up to Moore to figure out what was true and what was false. Moore accepted the challenge.

The Moore/Falcon/Aviary story is a story that still fascinates UFO researchers thirty-two years after it first began. Many researchers, such as myself, spend a lot of time trying to figure out who each of the birds of the aviary are and what information they told Moore and Shandera. It is an example of a second level UFO cover-up which is very common in Ufology. Many researchers sit quietly in the background gathering pieces of the UFO story from government and intelligence stories. The information gathered, however, is not shared with the general public. It becomes like a second level cover-up where an individual or a group of individuals, like rich men hunting rare illegal wild game, have gathered some of the UFO secrets withheld from government for their own person enjoyment.

The story that Moore would be feed would later be called the UFO “Core story.” Three men Dr. Kit Green, Hal Puthoff, and Jacques Vallee met to identify what they knew for sure about all the circulating UFO stories – they came up with the core story – that extraterrestrials have visited the earth, there was a crash and the government has had a lot of trouble back engineering the saucer technology, and at least one alien was a guest of the United Sates government. The main piece of information that Moore would be given that was new was the MJ-12 document which claimed to be a UFO briefing given to the President-elect Dwight Eisenhower.

Moore’s recalled in his Sept 30, 1989 “Focus” magazine that when his research partner Jamie Shandera first received the MJ-12 Eisenhower Presidential Briefing documents anonymously in the mail in 1984 he went to talk about the document with both Richard Doty and the Falcon. He wanted to know what to do.

According to Moore, Doty told him “find someone to show them to who would do a lot of talking about them to a lot of people. ‘Show them to this person,’ he said, ‘but be sure not to give him any copies. Let whoever it is talk all they want.’ …It sounded like a good idea and I decided to act on it. After carefully considering ‘candidates’ and discussing them with Rick and others including ‘Falcon’ himself, we settled on Lee Graham.”

And so Graham became the “Pigeon” of the infamous UFO aviary – the bird who would carry the message to the curious UFO research community. He was perfect for the job. Graham held nothing back. There were no secrets. He even took every document that Moore would leak to him to his security department at AeroJet where he worked under classification as a technician. Most of the documents got out but as Graham has confirmed to me there were other documents that he received from Moore that never saw the light of day.

Now let’s move ahead to a key incident that occurred between Moore and Graham that has important new Rositzkemeaning in light of the disclosure by researcher Greg Bishop in a June 30 presentation that the Falcon was Harry Rositzke, a former high level CIA official who died in 2002. The Falcon, the most powerful of all Bill Moore’s sources has remained secret until Bishop unraveled the secret almost thirty years later. Bishop had been friends with Bill Moore for many years, and had met with Moore many times.

The incident in question occurred at a restaurant where Moore and Graham met about once a month to talk about UFOs. In Lee Graham’s own words during the dinner, “Mr. Moore showed my wife and I an ID card with his picture that identified him as a Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).”[1]

The question immediately arises – why would a researcher like Bill Moore, who prided himself on conservative level-headed research suddenly break from the instruction he had been given by Falcon to suddenly show Graham a government ID regardless if it were real or a practical joke? Moore himself raised this point himself in a 1989 speech he gave to the MUFON symposium in Las Vegas where he read from a prepared text, “If I did, does it make sense that I would pull it out of my wallet and show it to Lee Graham — or any other UFO researcher, for that matter?”

It is a significant question. He would be risking the entire operation if he had decided to free-lance. Most importantly, as described above, Graham was picked for his pigeon aviary role because he was the one to carry the message. He would surely tell everyone about Bill flashing government identification.

If Moore knew that Graham would tell everyone, as he eventually did, the move must have been part of the plan initiated by the Falcon. Falcon had instructed Moore to show him the AFOSI identification. Graham would tell everyone, and everyone would think Moore was working for AFOSI. For decades – that is how history has recorded it – Moore worked for AFOSI. Moore himself world admit as much in his 1989 MUFO speech with the twist attached that he worked “with” AFOSI instead of “for”. Prior to that public admission Moore denied the charge especially to skeptic Phil Klass who pressed him on the issue. [2]

So why would the Falcon put Moore in the position of starting a rumor that he was working for AFOSI? Both Falcon and Moore knew that Moore would face accusations from other researchers because in the UFO community it is common to accuse other researchers of working for the government. Moore and Falcon, however, were actually planning to provide the guns and ammunition for the firing squad.

The answer is simple. Moore was working for Falcon and Falcon was CIA. Therefore Moore was working in a CIA operation and Falcon did not want that fact known. They wanted the UFO research community to believe that Moore was AFOSI to divert researchers down the wrong road. The idea was to misdirect the audience while you are busy doing something you need done.

Moore couldn’t admit he was working for AFOSI or his UFO career would be over. As history would show a rumor was enough to cause all researchers to focus on AFOSI.

To help direct all eyes towards the AFOSI Master Sergeant Richard Doty was brought in help and reinforce the misdirection towards the AFOSI and away from the real Falcon and the CIA. Doty became the second Falcon. He knew about Harry Rositzke and knew about the CIA operation. Doty’s Falcon performance would fool almost everyone in the UFO community, and there are some who will never believe there was a second Falcon. For them, Doty was, and always will be the Falcon.

Doty’s Falcon impersonation of Falcon began in 1983 when he called documentary film producer Linda Howe to Kirkland Air Force base. At the time Linda was doing a documentary for HBO on UFOs. She was a big name in Ufology packing lecture rooms wherever she went. He had risen to prominence in ufology after producing an Emmy award-winning documentary on cattle mutilation called “A Strange harvest.” Doty’s story to Howe was that he was going to help with the documentary providing actual footage of a landing of aliens at Holloman Air Force Base.

While in his office he showed Howe alleged presidential UFO briefing papers, and told her that her cattle mutilation documentary had upset the government. Then he threw out the bait. He told Linda that he was the Falcon.

Why tell Howe that he was the Falcon? Because, like Graham, Falcon and Moore knew they could rely on Linda to tell everyone what had happened. Linda held the secret for a while, but Doty and his AFOSI bosses never provided what they promised. Inspired by Doty’s appearance in connection with a hoaxed document a few years later Howe went public. Right in line with the plan, all researchers focused their attention on AFOSI.

Doty did many things to keep his name prominent in the UFO community but his biggest contribution to making AFOSI the focus of the UFO community was when he made his acting debut playing the Falcon on national television. It occurred on a documentary called “UFO Cover-Up Live” which played to a large live national audience. The UFO community sat on the edge of their seats watching, as the whole thing had been hyped as a major disclosure event. Doty was taped for the show, backlit and with his voice altered. That was for the audience. He talked about an alien that was a guest of the United States government. The alien he said liked Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. It was all very secret and very dramatic.

The producer, however, was given Doty’s identity. He quickly talked and the story spread. Once again, as with Graham and Howe, the story got out quickly and all eyes turned to the AFOSI as the real Falcon had planned.

Bob Emenegger, an advertising executive whose story was featured as part of the documentary, had already discovered that Doty was going to be on. He phoned a contact he had in the CIA, and told them they better tune in and watch what this guy claiming to be an intelligence officer and that he would be claiming to expose the cover-up. He was told that the CIA would “stand down.” The next day, however, the head of counterintelligence would meet with Colonel Weaver and two men who have always been rumored to have been involved with UFOs at the CIA – Dr. Kit Green and Dr. Ronald Pandolfi. The discussion was the appearance of Doty playing the role of the Falcon the evening before.

It was important to keep the focus on the AFOSI and off the CIA. Later, after the plan had been completed, the story of the whole Moore Shandera and the MJ-12 documents was spun into a story where Moore, Doty, and AFOSI were simply trying to catch Soviet spies. Writers such as Greg Bishop, Mark Pilkington, and Christian P. Lambright wrote extensively about the Paul Bennewitz and the story of how AFOSI played on his belief in UFOs he claimed to be seeing around Kirkland Air Force Base to the point of driving him medically insane. Even though Bennewitz worked on the UFOs he was seeing for almost 23 years most of the disinformation theory discussion centers on a couple encounters Bennewitz had with AFOSI officials in the early 1980s.

Doty, who played a key role in the operation against Bennewitz, would be described as a Special Agent who specialized in disinformation. He came to be blamed for every bizarre UFO story leak on the internet. Later, it would be revealed that Doty was not even AFOSI. He was Air Force Intelligence. Most blamed Doty or a combination of Doty and Moore for the appearance of the MJ-12 document. Doty, however, was investigated by the FBI and cleared. He also passed a lie detector test as was pointed out by Kit Green to the CI Director of the CIA the day after UFO Cover-up – Live.

Bill Moore – A Spy for a Day

One of the ideas that have been advanced by a number of researchers is that the entire Moore/Shandera encounter with Falcon was nothing more than a Soviet sting operation and that nobody was really interested in UFOs. The UFO documents and stories were nothing more than bait for soviet spies intent on stealing military secrets and destroying the United States of America.

On the surface there is some evidence that points to part of what happened to Moore as spy games. As pointed out above Moore had worked for the CIA. He wrote and spoke Russian which would have made him an asset to the CIA Soviet intelligence and counter-intelligence units. He, however, was helping the CIA “catch Soviet spies” long before he ever got involved in the UFO subject.

The amount of Soviet spying that Moore did appears to be minimal however. If Richard Doty is to be believed he told research James Moseley that Moore had worked as an AFOSI a source or conduit, but he was “terminated” already in 1986.[3]His one claim to fame as a Soviet spy was passing the Aquarius document to Paul Bennewitz, a scientist who lived outside of and detected UFOs over the Monzano Nuclear Weapons Storage in New Mexico. According to Richard Doty Bennewitz was sticking his nose where it did not belong, and he had a friend who was a Soviet scientist. This supposedly made him a target for Soviet counter-intelligence and AFOSI made plans to neutralize Bennewitz.

Moore had passed the Aquarius document to Bennewitz knowing that it was phony. He wasn’t however a full time spy. It was one document which leads to the question of whether or not Rositzke was pulled from retirement by the CIA to pass one phony document to a scientist in New Mexico. Moore stated, and I believe him, that he never received any money for what he did for Falcon. His key interest was always to get at the information that would tell him how the UFO cover-up operated.

Moore was playing spy for a day. Lots of patriotic Americans play spy for a day. This type of thing happens often in paranoid military based countries like the United States where at times everyone is encouraged to report suspicious behavior and where all phone calls are monitored. One only has to look back at the McCarthy hearing is the 1950s to see illustrate the point.

Other researchers played spy according to Moore. He constantly, according to Doty, for example, insisted that John Schuessler was working for the CIA. According to Moore even the eminent J. Allen Hynek had played spy for a day. Where Moore had passed Bennewitz one phony UFO document, Moore claimed Hynek had provided Bennewitz with a computer with software to supposedly track the UFOs he was viewing. The whole setup didn’t in fact track UFOs. It was so that AFOSI could track what Bennewitz was doing.

This didn’t mean that Hynek was not a professor at Northwestern University or the head of the CUFOS organization studying UFOs. It didn’t mean that all his UFO work was done to catch Soviet spies. It simply meant that Hynek had made a tradeoff like Moore had done. Hynek would have been asking for UFO leads from intelligence people, and like Moore he would have to play spy for a day in exchange.

The theory that the MJ-12 document release had anything to do with catching Soviet would then have to consider Timothy Good in the United Kingdom as a spy for the day as well, because he is a big part of the story. He too had been leaked the MJ-12 document, and the fact that he was putting it in his book “UFOs: Above Top Secret” is the reason Moore and Shandera when public with the document in 1987.

The document had been received by Shandera in December 1984 and in 1987 they were still researching what was in the document. The Falcon came to Moore and said that they better put it out as it was about to be released in England. Here was a key document that someone was to be used to catch Soviet spies and the Moore/Shandera/Friedman team wouldn’t release it.

Add to this evidence produced by Lee Graham which showed seemed to support the gradual release theory. In May 1986, a year before the MJ-12 document was released by Moore author Timothy Good was in California to speak at a conference. Graham and his wife were invited to have dinner with Moore and Good at a restaurant in Tujunga, Calif. At dinner, Moore and Good made guarded quips about MJ-12. Later, Good ordered a carafe of wine. While eating Moore and Good made indirect comments about MJ-12. Good proposed a toast but didn’t explain why. Later he would find out from Moore that “the toast was for the simultaneous release of the MJ-12 document in England and the U.S.”

In a May 1988 letter to Good, Graham stated that Moore had informed him that Good had been provided the document as a “controlled informant,” and his role was to release the document in England at the same time it was made public in the United States. Good wrote back confirming that Graham information was “accurate.”

Some researchers have mentioned that the Moore MJ-12 era was under the Republican Reagan administration right in the middle of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Looking at the UFO actions of the Reagan administration however there were only positive signposts to disclosure. Besides the open remarks made by Reagan related to UFOs, the best piece of evidence showing disclosure came from the story told by Robert Emenegger who with Allen Sandler had done the UFO documentary “UFOs Past Present, and Future” in 1974 with help from the Department of Defense.

As Emenegger tells the story in the first term of the Reagan administration (exactly when Moore was being courted by Falcon) Emenegger reported that he was contacted again by the Department of Defense to do another UFO documentary. He was told that the Defense Department had liked his first documentary and would like to try to put out another one. Emenegger immediately asked if this request was coming from Reagan, to which he didn’t get an answer.

The people who represented for the new government backed documentary were Bob Scott, the Director of the Defense Audio Visual Agency (DAVA), and his Deputy General Glenn Miller who had been Ronald Reagan’s first agent in Hollywood. The DAVA facility at Norton held all the military department film, and also had clean rooms where agencies like the CIA would do training filming.

J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee were brought on board for the production. A number of meetings were held with Miller and Scott to plan what they would do. Emenegger and Hynek showed up for one meeting at DAVA and Miller told the DAVA Security Manager Paul Shartle to get all the UFO film out of the vault and give it to Hynek. Shartle refused saying that he needed a formal request which Miller wouldn’t give. The project fell apart when Hynek and Vallee pulled out fearing that they were being set up.

The Emenegger affair shows clearly that disclosure was the tone of the day. This extended to the late 80s when Emenegger received an offer to interview a live alien. Moore, Shandera, Howe, and UFO researcher writer Whitely Strieber were also offered an interview with the live alien. Years later Emenegger thought this aspect was all bunk evidenced by the fact that the interview never took place, so I asked him who had made the offer to him. He mentioned Paul Shartle.

Was Shartle reliable I asked? Emenegger answered in the affirmative, meaning that his offer was coming from someone who had been reliable in the past. That interview may have been set up by Col. Lane from AFOSI who was at Norton and involved in the second documentary. Emenegger stated he met with him a couple of times. Years later I was notified that Col. Lane golfed often with Doty’s father.

A key point that should be noted related to the Emenegger/Sandler documentaries is that like the Falcon/ Moore story, there was a CIA representative present during the entire production schedule for “UFOs, Past, Present, and Future.”

Not only did disclosure seem to be the order of the day the idea of catching Soviet spies with UFO stories and documents really didn’t make much sense. Beyond a couple stories about Moore being asked to watch someone or read a postcard or two over the phone, there was not much to support this huge Soviet counter-intelligence operation centering on UFO documents.

It did, however, provide a wonderful cover for the real operation that the government was operating. It also provided cooperation by instilling fear in a foreign enemy determined to destroy America. It was similar to the fear instilled in Americans with the claims years later of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Building up the fear of a powerful foreign enemy also made it easier to get Moore to do things like he normally wouldn’t do like spy on fellow researchers and pass a fake UFO document Bennewitz.

The fear of Soviet spies being used as a cover was used at Area 51. One of the stories that Bob Lazar told many times was the story of his boss David Mariana taking him to the police station to get a license to carry a concealed gun. Lazar was given the story that the Soviets had been part of the back-engineering work at S-4, but after a breakthrough by the American scientists they had been kicked out. They were now on the streets of Las Vegas. One worker at S-4 hadn’t showed up for two days and officials feared the Soviets had the worker. Lazar would be required to carry a gun so that he couldn’t be kidnapped by the Soviet agents.

Although the Moore Falcon affair went on for almost ten years, no spies ever reportedly caught by the MJ-12 document or by spying on UFO researchers. That was probably because the Soviet spy stories were a cover and there was no plan to catch anyone, except by accident.

More importantly those UFO researchers who should have been part of any such Soviet flypaper plan were not only totally ignored but aided by the government. The two main researchers who fit this category were Lee Graham and his aviation enthusiast buddy John Andrews. Both played a role in the MJ-12 story and both were also interested in finding out what they could about the most advanced military aircraft that were being developed in the military black world. Graham who was fed every document Moore ever received, never reported being contacted by an Soviet agents.

Also important to the story is that neither Graham not Andrews reported being approached by anyone who might be passing information back to the Soviet Union. Graham was investigated twice by the Defense Investigative Service for his investigation related to the Stealth fighter but they found no Soviet connection. Andrews told Graham he had never been investigated and he wouldn’t be investigated.

The things that happened to Graham and Andrews showed that intelligence knew what they were doing but did nothing or even helped them. The actions were completely contrary to a concern that UFO enthusiasts were good bait for a Soviet trap. They were actually provided legitimate information on at least one classified black budget program.

The bizarre nature of the help they received is illustrated by two meeting that occurred on the same day in September 1987. Both Graham and Andrews were contacted on the same day about their interest in the still classified Stealth F-117. Both meetings also involved the subject of UFOs.

Andrews reported the details of his visit from Col. Hennessey, the head of security for Air Force Special Projects, in a letter to Graham. “He instructed to not use its (Stealth 117) ’F’ number nor its codename. He didn’t ask me how I had learned such things, and I didn’t offer. He opened the conversation saying, ‘I don’t know anything about UFOs.” Andrews continued, “‘Hennessey said ‘I won’t lie to you.’ But his comment about not knowing anything about UFOs was already a lie. He professed to not even know what NICAP was.”[4]

Graham’s meeting came in a visit at work from a 2- Star general from Air Force Headquarters who actually provided Graham with the still classified “Senior Trend” designation for the Stealth fighter and then got him to sign a certificate swearing him to secrecy. When shown the Snowbird UFO document (claiming that the US was test flying a UFO craft) that Moore had provided, General Kerby told Graham he would do what he wanted with it.

The biggest problem with the soviet spy theory was Moore himself. When Moore was first approached he believed that he was at the top of his field, and he might have been. Everyone that knew Moore would confirm that he had an ego and could be very arrogant. That is how Falcon first baited Moore to get involved with the CIA operation. It was only days after Moore’s best selling Roswell book was published. “You,” said Falcon, “are the only guy that knows what he is talking about.”

Moore would not have traded the chance to break the UFO cover-up to try and catch a Soviet spy or two for which he would be just an anonymous agent in the history books. Moore wanted the glory of being the guy that broke the UFO cover-up, and he got closer than any other research did or has since. Had Moore known for a second that his interaction with US intelligence was only about spies and not a chance to break the UFO cover-up he would have walked away – that is a guarantee.

Moore believed this was about someone on the inside helping him to get close to the truth. It was about being first and being the best.[5]

This is not to say that Moore didn’t work “with” as he defined it the AFOSI. It was this part of the Air Force after all, that despite the claim in 1969 that they had gotten out of the UFO business, was still busy gathering all the information they could on the subject. Moore was determined to break the cover-up and did take every opportunity he could to find out what the AFOSI had in terms of files, conclusions, and what higher levels they were sharing their files with.

It was this ego that destroyed him in the end. After his speech in Las Vegas describing what he had done with intelligence his reputation was gone. He was looked down on my all but a few researchers. No longer the star of the UFO world he left the field with a final declaration of ego and arrogance. He declared that he had gone as far as anyone was going to get with the UFO cover-up. It was a waste of time for anyone else to try. After a couple more years of trying to get to the heart of the UFO cover-up he left saying that he was going on to do other things.

Conclusion

Does this mean that Moore was a “bad apple” and someone out to deceive the UFO research community? Absolutely not. Moore was simply following a play book that had appeared to be set up to disclose certain details of the UFO cover-up, while preventing the whole plan of disclosure from spiraling out of control.

It was similar to President Jimmy Carter writing in his diary that a psychic in the remote viewing program had helped U.S. intelligence find a two engine American plane in Africa. The plane was actually a TU-22 Soviet supersonic bomber that had been converted to an intelligence collecting aircraft. U.S. intelligence was desperate to recover the plane and uncover the secrets it held, but Carter couldn’t tell that to the public.

Moore had been approached twice by the Falcon only days after his book “The Roswell Incident” was released. As Moore described it, “In early September, 1980, I was approached by a well placed individual in the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high level government project dealing with UFOs. This individual, who subsequently came to be known as” The Falcon”, told me that he spoke for a small group of similar individuals who were uncomfortable with the government’s continuing cover-up.”

At that point Moore made a decision to “play the game” in order to obtain information on UFOs that had been covered up by the government. In order to do that he had to use deception as this is used in every intelligence operation. “I had practiced an occasional deception now and again over the years,” Moore would write when the operation had ended, “in order to protect the integrity of our project.”[6]

The plan was always to disclose UFO information, and Moore stated correctly that he could have walked away from the operation any time he wished. He didn’t walk away till 1989, so it is apparent that he still believed in the promise that Falcon had made in 1980. The fact that he was not being paid for it which supports the fact that the end result was a disclosure operation. If the main purpose of the operation was trying to catch Soviet spies, it would make sense that they would pay him like every other spy gets his pay check.

This is not to say that U.S. intelligence didn’t catch some poor Soviet agent interested in advanced American Air Force technology. If there was someone captured it was never made public. Moreover, if there were such a Soviet agent he couldn’t have been too smart because he bought into documents that most people in the UFO community declared as hoaxes almost from day one.

Why Moore?

The question could asked – why would Falcon would approach Moore? If the CIA wanted to catch Soviet spies surely they would have used an operational spy, as opposed to Moore who was writer and former school teacher. Are we to believe they were short on spies in 1980? Moore stated that Rositzke had been brought out of retirement to run the operation. Were they short on people to run Soviet counter-intelligence operations?

The idea that someone high up wanted UFO information to be leaked to the public made more sense. Moore had just published a book (together with Charles Berlitz who spent many years as an Army Intelligence agent working for the OSS, which later became the CIA[7]) detailing the hard data about the UFO crash at Roswell New Mexico, he showed himself to be a candidate who could do the job that was required. Falcon, representing a group of high level intelligence people that may have included Richard Helms and James Angleton, were impressed what Moore had done and had made the decision to use Moore to get out more secret UFO information to the public. ‘You are,” Falcon told him on the phone, “the only one who knows what he is talking about.”

This first encounter led to Moore being provided a lot of information on the group MJ-12 which now has much Goosesupporting evidence. He was given the “core UFO story” that is now a stable part of many UFO researchers evaluation of the cover-up. Moore was even flown to Area 51 where he reported on a strange seemless craft nicknamed the goose that he witnessed take off. All these actions seemed like information rather than disinformation loading.(See Moore hand drawing to the right)

Secondly, Moore was approached because he may have had more than a passing interest in the CIA. In a December 24, 1988 telephone interview with me Bill Steinman told me about Moore and the CIA. According to Steinman in the 1982/83 period Bill Moore would be on the phone with him almost every second day. They were very close. Steinman had come across a lead about Dr. Eric Wang who had been the head of the Special Studies Department at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where he was rumored to have played a major role in back-engineering recovered UFOs. The section was moved to Kirkland Air Force Base Sandia Labs in New Mexico and Wang died in 1960.

When Steinman learned of this he did research and found Dr. Wang’s wife. He phoned her and Mrs. Wang confirmed that her husband had been he husbands work, but that his papers had been taken after he died, and that if Steinman wanted to know more he should talk to Dr. Henry Kissinger who was in charge of the program.

Two days after the conversation with Mrs. Wang Bill Moore suddenly phoned up and asked why Steinman was he was bugging Mrs. Wang. Understandably Steinman in turn asked Moore how he knew that there had even been a conversation with Mrs. Wang. Moore replied he had “intelligence sources.” Moore asked whether Steinman had talked to Dorothy at the Library (turned out to be Dorothy McKimmon at Kirkland at the Kirkland Air Force Base Library) Moore then began to recount very parts of the conversation between Steinman and Mrs. Wang which caused Steinman to demand how he had access to all this. Moore told Steinman to come over the next night and he would tell him. According to my notes of my call to Steinman this is what Moore told him.

‘While Moore was at University, the CIA was recruiting on American campuses. Moore was approached by the CIA to work for them. Moore told Steinman that he didn’t want to work for the CIA but he did do some ‘footwork’ for them, and ‘wrote a couple of reports’ for the CIA. When Moore became a research writer he renewed the ties he had with the CIA, and in Moore’s words ‘he is using the CIA.’ He claims this is how he got access to the deep throat sources.”

Why Shandera

Many have always wondered how Jamie Shandera became the guy who got the MJ-12 documents in his mailbox in the winter of 1984. Shandera was quiet, unknown, and not even a UFO researcher. Well it turns out Shandera like Moore and Flacon had ties to the CIA. This revelation came from Moore himself in a radio interview hosted by Greg Bishop. As Moore described the Shandera-CIA connection, “We were in a meeting with some CIA people and others. After it ended, we were standing around talking, and one of the agency guys looked at me and said “You’re new here, but you [pointing at Shandera] we’ve known about for awhile.”[8]

So in the end the entire MJ-12 affair appeared to be what Moore first described it as – an operation by some element of the government to get information into the UFO community. Falcon claimed to be the head of the group wanting the information out, but couldn’t have been even if Moore thought he was. Moore told Bishop that Rositzke had been called out of retirement to conduct the operation of leaking the MJ-12, Snowbird and Aquarius documents.

However, the plan had already been hatched. Only at that point was Rositzke brought in to execute the plan. Therefore the idea for the operation and the initial direction to Rositzke came from a higher level. Falcon had a boss.

One possible candidate for bringing Rositzke into the UFO game is Richard Helms who outranked Rositzke being a former Director of the CIA. Helms had at least a couple stories about him which place him in the game to disclose UFO material. One is the often quoted line that he reportedly gave Dr. Kit Green saying, “Always believe what Richard Doty tells you about UFOs.”  If true this indicates that Doty may not have been quite the bad-boy disinformation specialist he has been painted by many, and that his job may have had as much to do with UFOs as catching Soviet spies. It also clearly shows that Helms was aware of Doty and thus the related Bill Moore story. Doty was after all supposedly just a lowly Master Sergeant at Kirkland Air Force Base, someone who should not be the topic of conversation from an ex-CIA Director.

The more dramatic evidence that indicates Helms may have been a part of the plan to disclose key UFO facts to the Moore/Shandera team as well as other researchers such as Don Berliner and Timothy Good comes from a forwarded message passed to Gary Bekkum’s Starstream Research group from what Bekkum considered a reliable source. The person in question was part of a three-man team. He wrote about his encounters with Helms and UFOs, describing being contacted almost the same way that Moore claimed he had been contacted by Falcon. Helms had contacted the team of three to discuss how to best promote government disclosure of the alleged extraterrestrial core story.

“Why he contacted me,” the one team member wrote, “and wanted to meet with me privately at the National Research Council, and was so unambiguous confuses me. I did not get the impression he did so because he was using me, indeed, he was insistent on privacy… “I am not prepared to repeat what he said to me before that, because I am uncertain as to his mental state — he seemed intact, but the subject was, after all quite crazy — he required secrecy, and he never said I would be released from it –the Core Story (explained later in the article) he claimed was true is the same we have heard.”[9]

Another possibility for someone superior to Rositzke, running a UFO disclosure operation, is a certain senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The search for the Falcon over the last 30 years has been taken on by many high level people. One group had verbal confirmation that the person who leaked the MJ-12 document was a high level DIA official. (whose name I was given and who is still alive)

The scenario for this story is that this Admiral got a hold of James Angleton’s old Soviet disinformation documents which included the famed MJ-12 documents. The documents created in the 1960s were produced by Angleton’s shop to track information handling inside the Soviet Union. The Admiral leaked them to Shandera and Moore (S&M) as an experimental test of UFO disclosure, or recruited Rositzke to do the job.

Leaking the Core Story

Considering all the evidence available related to all the events, the theory that best explains what happened is that some high level intelligence group, with access to all the UFO evidence that has been collected, chose to release some of the evidence. This evidence is the basic UFO core story. Importantly, as Falcon said when he first approached Moore the plan was to “get the facts to the public without breaking any laws in the process”

The real material is released by hiding it in fictional stories from anonymous sources to researchers, by putting out documents that appear legitimate but are a mixture of real and false information. The whole process is very much like fictional books put up by former CIA agents who weave the truth of what happened into a fictional tale. In this way the reader is never certain which parts of the story were true, and classified material is protected. The release occurs without breaking the law.

The alternative is a book that says “we know what UFOs are, we had an alien captive, we recovered a number of ET crafts, people have been abducted by the aliens, and we had to kill a few people to cover the secret along the way. That is not an option, as no one wants to be dragged through the street by an angry mob like Gadaffi. A fictional book is a much better idea.

Some researchers would say that these information/disinformation leaks are meant to damage the UFO community and that all we can use are legitimate verifiable leaks from verifiable sources. I would answer that these types of verifiable stories are rare. The UFO subject is the highest classified secret in the United States, and that people who tell such stories are violating their security oaths. The government throws those kind of people in jail for treason, so it would make sense there aren’t a lot of them still on the street telling stories they shouldn’t be telling.

Dr. Kit Green was a Senior Division Analyst with the Office of Scientific and Weapons Intelligence from 1969 to 1983 and who was also rumored to have run the “UFO desk” at the CIA, and the person who was rumored to have briefed Presidents on the subject. Bill Moore described Green as “a person close to the President of the United States, capable of checking on information to determine its reliability.”

Green described the core story this way. “Simply put, the core story is this: ‘The ETs came here, maybe once, maybe a few times. Either through accident or by design, the US government acquired one of their craft. The only problem was that the physics that powered the craft were so advanced that for decades we humans have struggled to understand it or replicate it.”[10]

This core is presented in a cloud of disinformation. This helps to prevent the disclosure from spiraling out of control. It is in fact quite similar to fictional books written by former CIA agents based on true events.

Green described how this gradual UFO disclosure might work.

“If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we must consider what may be the basic facts if you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they’d get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years. You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about reptilian aliens eating our children, about the crazy stuff we’ve see recently in Serpo. Then one day you say. “Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it’s not that bad, you don’t have to worry, the reality is this” and then you give them the real story.”[11]

This makes total sense and is pretty much what Moore was told. Falcon told him he was going to be leaked certain documents and stories. He was warned that not all of it would be true. Some of it would be disinformation. Some of it would be true. Moore and Shandera would have to figure it out for themselves.

Final Observations

With all this said we are reminded that nothing in Ufology is simple. The intelligence agencies that have dealt with the phenomena have also covered their tracks with various misdirections. Even high level intelligence people who have been tasked to work on the UFO problem indicate that even they feel that they are being cut out of the loop by some unknown group in control. In an e-mail, for example, obtained by Starstream Research sourced from an associate of Richard Helms, the former Director of Intelligence confirmed knowledge of the existence of the “core (UFO) story,” adding something to the effect of, “You do not have need to know and neither do I.”[12]

Gus Russo, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author and researcher interviewed many of these “insiders” and concluded, “Summing it all up, there is certainly a very small percentage of government officials with intelligence clearance — some active, some retired — who are interested in the UFO research community, if not UFOs themselves. Some of these men are of the impression, rightly or wrongly, that a very few individuals in government and the private sector are keeping the big secret even from them.”[13]

In the UFO world it appears that the government insiders might themselves be outsiders.

Bill Moore has been out of the field for two decades and still the game of leaks related to MJ-12, the UFO cover-up, and Roswell goes on. Are they still trying to catch Russian spies as the AFOSI cover story claimed, or is a gradual disclosure of the UFO cover-up still under way? Prime examples of leaks information/disinformation that have continued since Moore and Rositzke left the playing field include;

  • Starting in 1991 CIA scientist Ronald Pandolfi began to use Dan T. Smith — the son of the late presidential advisor to President Eisenhower to pass information into the UFO community. This parade of information began by hinting that there was a live alien at Los Alamos. Pandolfi told Smith that the President does not have a “need to know” about UFOs, but that 28 government officers have been given an official briefing on the visitation. Pandolfi even revisited the AFOSI “catching Soviet spies” theory by saying that some of the material in the MJ-12 documents was classified and had been passed to the KGB.[14]  Pandolfi even asked Smith to spread the rumor that the Falcon was Col. Barry Hennessey who was head of security for Air Force Special Projects.[15]
  • Also in 1991 New York Times reporter Howard Blum reports that “a senior official at the National Security Agency” gives him a strange lead. The official was helping him with a book he was doing at the time about the Walker spy case. The lead was “there’s been a lot of talk around the NSA about outer space. Weird stuff. UFOs. Heard they got some kind of all-star working group or something. A panel of hotshots zeroing in on UFOs. Going to get the truth at last.”

    The story turns out to be true, and Blum publishes a book about the group. The group turns out to be a Top Secret SCI group under the auspices of the Energy Department, known as the Advanced Physics Theoretical Working Group. It was headed up by Army Col. John Alexander, set up to look into UFOs. The Blum version turns out to be a fictionalized (information/disinformation) version of the real meetings which took place starting in 1985.

  • From 1992 -1999 thousands of pages of leaked documents were leaked from various sources such as a Counter Intelligence Corps officer calling himself Thomas Cryll “Cy” Cantwheel, his daughter Salina, a CIA Archivist, a CIA FOIA reply, S-1, S-2 leaked a series of UFO related documents that were collected together by Robert Wood and his son Ryan into a collection called the new MJ-12 documents. http://www.majesticdocuments.com/sources.php
  • In March 1994 research Don Berliner received the 23 page “Som-101:Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal” document.
  • A Colonel friend of Former CIA Director William Colby approached Dr. Steven Greer at CSETI in the mid-90s. A message was sent from Colby that it was time to end the secrecy on the covert operations that had covered up the UFO secrecy. A meeting was set up in April 1996 where Colby and Greer were to talk. The week they were to meet Colby was found dead in a mysterious canoeing accident.
  • In November 2005 and continuing to the present anonymous source e-mails started to appear on the internet claiming to be a retired official of the US government. The information told the story of a top secret exchange program of twelve US military personnel to planet “Serpo”, a planet in the Zeta Reticuli star system, between the years 1965-78. To almost everyone in the UFO community whole story was badly written fiction. Kit Green, however, told author Mark Pilkington, “There are certain facts in there, certain references in there that prevent me from being able to reject the material out of hand, even if the story that it’s telling is not patently true.” The SERPO material Green suggested “might have served a purpose to someone, somewhere, perhaps conveying information in a heavily codified form.” He reminded Pilkington that SERPO had caught the attention of some of the senior players in the defense intelligence field – perhaps some of the most senior players.”[16] (I can confirm this as one high level person contacted me about the SERPO material) The SERPO material might have been a way to make classified material public by a retired spy writing a fictional spy novel as mentioned above.
  •  Bestselling author James Bamford’s latest book “The Shadow Factory” has carefully hidden on the front Top Secret_MJ-12cover a classification stamp – “Top Secret – MJ-12.” Bamford is perhaps the top American author and journalist on the United States Intelligence Agencies, especially the National Security Agency which has long been rumored to be a major player in the UFO cover-up. When asked how “Top Secret/ MJ-12” ended up on the front cover of his book, which had nothing to do with UFOs, Bamford replied that he had no idea.
  • Chase Brandon – On June 23 ,2012, while being interviewed on the nation-wide radio show Coast chase brandonto Coast AM, Chase Brandon, a former CIA covert operations officer and later the Entertainment Industry Liaison Officer for the CIA, made extraordinary claims about the so-called “Roswell incident,” declaring: “I also absolutely know as I sit here talking to you that there was a craft from beyond this world that crashed at Roswell, that the military picked up remains of not just the wreckage, but cadavers.” Brandon then recounted an occasion when he saw direct proof of the alien nature of Roswell within the CIA’s own Historical Intelligence Collection (HIC).

Brandon was checked out by various researchers and reporters and the results of these investigations showed that Brandon was “the real deal.” Robbie Graham and presents volumes of evidence that Brandon was an official with the CIA which immediately leads to the question of whether or not he had CIA authorization to appear on Coast to Coast and to make the clear statement that Roswell was the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

See Article on Brandon written by Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford Ph.D.

http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.ca/2012/07/senior-cia-officer-claims-knowledge-of.html

In reply to a letter of inquiry drafted by Robbie Graham the CIA Public Affairs officer Ian Tuttle replied, “Off the record, we will look into your questions and get back to you as quickly as possible.”

In order to “look into the questions” there is little doubt that the CIA would have talked to Brandon regarding what he had said. They would need to ask him exactly where in the vault he saw the material.

Assuming that they did, it is now quite certain that the Roswell leak is coming from the CIA and not Brandon. The reason for this is that two weeks after talking about the secret Roswell files he saw, and after the CIA would have talked to him, Brandon talked again.

This time he talked to Lee Speigal at the Huffington Post and added new details to what he had said on Coast To Coast AM (at the same time Brandon avoided answering follow-up questions from one researcher who had been talking to him about the Roswell story earlier). The CIA had approved of what he said and green lighted another interview with the Huffington Post, which had a large circulation and could get the message out.

If this is not enough evidence to convince the reader about Brandon, stay tuned, as he is about to speak some more. You have not read the last. Meanwhile the CIA took the predicted out. They had “found nothing in the Agency’s holdings to corroborate Mr. Brandon’s specific claims.” Reporter Billy Cox got the HIC archivist Hayden Peake declined to provide additional information saying, “My comments are all in that statement released today.”

The list of UFO leaks since Moore left the field shows clearly that the Falcon story is only a small part of a much bigger more complex story.

The pattern is always the same – put out the UFO story (what Jacques Vallee called the “dangling carrot”)  – pull it back – then when questioned claim ignorance and refer to the standard government statement – the government is out of the UFO business and there is no cover-up.

The question must be asked – Are all these UFO stories a counterintelligence effort to catch members of al-Qaeda who have replaced the Soviets as the prime enemy of the United States, or a continuation of an apparent UFO disclosure plan?

Confused? I think that’s also a part of the plan.

The investigation continues.

Grant Cameron

[1] Lee Graham MDR Request to the Air Force January 17, 2011

[2] Moore was challenged by many including the main UFO skeptic of the 1980s Phil Klass. In explaining what happened Moore was quite deceptive and yet kept the rumor alive. He told Klass in a March 31, 1987 letter that the only thing he had showed Graham was a press pass. The idea about being an “investigator for the Air Force” came from a paranoid conversation. Moore told Klass he had talked with Graham “about the possibility of government secret agents infiltrating the UFO community and disseminating disinformation. I replied that I had no direct evidence of any such process, but if in fact there were such people then anyone might be one of them. I then said something to the effect that, “who knows Lee; I might even be one myself.’ Then, in an offhanded manner, I flipped open my wallet to some random glassine window (probably my MUFON ID card, which has a picture on it –I really can’t recall what it was) and said, ‘See…I’ve got my secret agent’s I.D. right here.’ Apparently Lee took the joke all too seriously…the matter about the AFOSI probably has some similar origin, although I cannot imagine just now how that might have been. Needless to say, I would have been deeply honored by such an approach if it had happened, but I certainly wouldn’t have apprised Lee Graham about such a situation.”

[4] Letter – John Andrews to Lee Graham September 16, 1987

[5] A prime example of this is Phil Klass’s recounting of the battle between Moore and Good to be the first to release the MJ-12 document. Klass wrote, “With Good’s book scheduled for publication in July, Moore could be the first to reveal MJ-12 papers in mid-June and Good’s book would soon follow to provide independent corroboration. However, Good’s publisher decided to hold a press conference on May 29 and to feature the book’s MJ-12 papers. Apparently, Good did not inform Moore of this until a few days before the London conference. Moore was running late in getting out the next issue of FOCUS, dated April 30, 1987, partially due to work associated with his upcoming UFO conference. But he managed to release the MJ-12 papers to the U.S. media on May 28—one day before Good.” See http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/klass_files_volume_44/

[6] Bill Moore, “Focus Magazine” September 30, 1989, Page 20

[7] Greg Bishop, “Was Bill Moore a CIA Agent” http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/04/16/was-bill-moore-a-cia-agent/

[8] Greg Bishop “Jamie Shandera and the Proof of UFOs- Part 2”

http://www.ufomystic.com/2007/02/01/shandera-ufo-proof/

[9] Gary Bekkum, “The Falcon and the Core UFO Story” http://www.starpod.org/news/1201181.htm

[10] Grant Cameron, “John Alexander, UFOs, Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities: The Rest of the Story” http://presidentialufo.com/articles-a-papers/359-john-alexander-ufos-myths-and-conspiracies-and-realities-the-rest-of-the-story

[11] Grant Cameron “The True Story of Area 51: A Look at the Actual Evidence”

http://presidentialufo.com/articles-a-papers/379-the-true-story-of-area-51-a-look-at-the-actual-evidence/

[16] Mark Pilkington, “The Mirage Men” Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, Page 278

Disclosure Pattern 1972-75

Written by Grant Cameron
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 21:29
The events of the early to mid 1970s were some of the most critical days in Ufology. There is almost no doubt that the government was planning some sort of disclosure about UFOs. This is particularly important in that there was no pressure to release after the shutdown of Project Blue Book in late 1969.

If they wanted, those who controlled the secret could have sat back and never had to address the subject again. Instead through various people they started to leak the idea that a disclosure was imminent. Consider the following statements

“…the government will release all its (UFO) information within the next three years.” (APRO UFO Organization 1974) “

…the government is almost ready to release some of the information it has reportedly withheld from the public for 25 years concerning extraterrestrial life…This super cover-up… concerning UFOs… makes the White House’s Watergate mess look like a high school affair.” (National Examiner Dec. 9, 1974)

“We predict that by 1975 the government will release definite proof that extraterrestrials are watching us.” (Authors Ralph and Judy Blum April 1974)

“The government will tell us what’s been going on, in a series of television documentaries over a period of months… The entire story is slated to be disclosed by the 200th anniversary of Independence on July 4, 1976.” (Robert Barry), head of the 20th Century UFO Bureau)

The most dramatic evidence that some sort of disclosure effort was being planned can be seen from the following incredible story.

1972 Film Disclosure Offer

Along with the release of this dramatic UFO document, in 1972-73 Colonel William Coleman, former USAF Project Blue Book spokesman, and former ATIC Commander Colonel George Weinbrenner, made an offer of “800 feet of film… as well as several thousand feet of additional material” of dramatic UFO material to documentary film producers Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler at the Pentagon. They would be allowed to use the UFO footage in a special film project they had been asked to join.

Holloman

Holloman AFB where U.S. officials have claimed more than once aliens landed and met with officials on the ground.

The promised film was reportedly dramatic footage of an encounter between the occupants of a landed UFO and officials at Holloman Air Force Base. It impressed Emenegger who described what he saw in 1988, “What I saw and heard was enough to convince me that the phenomenon of UFOs is real – very real.” Paul Shartle, who had controlled the film at Norton described what he saw on the film as,

“I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts. One of the craft landed and two of them went away… It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods. A sliding door opened, a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens… They were human size. They had odd gray complexions and a pronounced nose. They worn tight-fitting jump suits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communications devices, and in their hands they held a translator, I was told. The Holloman base commander and other Air Force officers went out to meet them…”

The project was described to the two producers as a documentary on a secret government project. When the two men discovered that the topic of the secret project would be UFOs, they were surprised because “they had assumed that the matter had been resolved with the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969.”

Col. Weinbrenner, as well as former Project Blue Book spokesman Col. Bill Coleman, his bosses in the Defense Public Affairs Department, and other defense department officials, made the offer to the two men at the Pentagon in late 1972. They were told that the government was now ready to release all the facts about the alien presence on earth. They were shown evidence that they could use for their tell-all documentary. This evidence included:

  • Photographs and films of UFOs.
  • 800 feet of film showing a landed encounter between three aliens and Holloman Air Base officials during a landing that had reportedly occurred there in May 1971. Several thousand feet of additional material was also offered.
  •  memo describing an encounter between six CIA officers (including Arthur Lundahl, the director of the most highly classified photo lab for the intelligence community) and an alien by the name of AFFA. The trance channeled communication led to a visible fly-by of the building where they were in Washington.
  • Emenegger and Sandler were given a tour of the NPIC office where the 1959 communication had taken place with the alien.
  • Photos of UFOs taken by astronauts, which NASA had formally denied the existence of.

The offer by Colonel Bill Coleman to suddenly make public dramatic evidence proving extraterrestrial visitations, and to free up classified information related to the UFO mystery was quite an about face from what he had formally written to NICAP member Kurt Zeissig. The 1962 statement related to AFM 190-4, Chapter 4, Section B.2.g, as it applied to Air Force personnel statements on UFOs and other military subjects. Coleman wrote Zeissig,

“By this order, the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information must delete all evidence of UFO reality and intelligent control, which would, of course, contradict the Air Force stand that UFOs do not exist. The same rule applies to A.F. press releases and UFO information given to Congress and the public.”

In 1988, Coleman clarified and expounded on his 1962 statement in a letter to Florida Today columnist Billy Cox. It made his 1972 and 1985 approaches to Emenegger with film footage a strange move indeed. Coleman wrote Cox,

“In reviewing material for publication by authors who at the time of creation of the material were under USAF aegis, it was necessary to remove any material that would put the USAF in the position of supporting the thesis that alien intelligence was in fact visiting planet earth. The reason for this is simply the fact that evidence we possessed from the thousands of investigations did not in any way support the thesis. We had a warehouse full of stuff, but non of it, not one iota, would support the ETIH.”

As plans for the government inspired documentary unfolded, Emenegger and Sandler were invited to Norton Air Force Base in May 1973, where they met with the Head of The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), and Paul Shartle former head of security and chief of requirements for the audiovisual program at Norton.

Here they were again assured that they would be provided the Holloman landing film to produce their documentary. Shartle would state in a 1988 interview that he had actually seen the Holloman landing footage. The documentary had been sponsored by the Department of Defense to do a public relations turnaround needed because if the Vietnam War. At least that is the story Emenegger and Sandler were told by Bill Coleman. A number of different subjects were proposed for the documentaries, but no other subject, other than UFOs, were brought up.

As the documentary neared completion, the two producers waited for the promised dramatic alien landing footage. Colonel Bill Coleman who had first made the offer to provide it in 1972, however, withdrew it. According to what Emenegger told researcher Tim Good, Coleman had declared, “The timing was politically inappropriate, due to the Watergate scandal.”

Once he was informed he would not be getting the film he had been promised, Emenegger traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to see one of the men who had been at the Pentagon, Col. George Weinbrenner. He demanded that the Colonel tell him what was going on.

According to Emenegger the Colonel stood up and walked up to a chalkboard complaining in a loud voice, “That damn MIG 25! We’re so public about what we have all kinds of things we don’t know about. We need to know more about the MIG-25.”

Moving to his bookshelf, he continued his rant about the MIG-25, while pulling J. Allen Hynek’s book The UFO Experience off the shelf. He showed Emenegger Hynek’s signature and dedication to Weinbrenner on the inside cover while he talked.

To Emenegger it was clear that Weinbrenner “was confirming the reality of the film while making sure that no one overhearing the conversation would realize what he was doing.”

It also illustrated the fact that the Holloman landing must have been a piece of information held by a group that would go to any ends to keep it secret. Weinbrenner was clearly afraid to be caught talking about the film. It was a film “they” wanted everyone to know about, but “they” wanted no insider to confirm.

It was also a film that involved many players below the surface such as the John MacArthur Foundation who put up the funds for the Sandler documentary, but who asked not to be listed in the credits. This appeared to be a clear case of someone supplying the money, and using the foundation as a front in order to protect their identity.

This classification fear is further backed up by a story reportedly told by one of the key figures in the Holloman UFO film story, Colonel Robert Coleman. The reported story, told on the inside, is that Coleman told Emenegger that in order to tell him the true story of the Holloman landing, he would have to take him out into the middle of the ocean on a boat. Then Emenegger said that Coleman had said Jokingly, at that point, he would have to kill him.

The Emenegger/Sandler documentary, “UFOS, Past, Present, and Future” released by Sandler Films in 1974, was forced to use standard animation, background film taken at Holloman, and “elaborate drawing of the so-called aliens.” At least that is what the producers thought when they first ran the film.

Later, the words of the film’s narrator Rod Serling took on new meaning when Shartle and Emenegger appeared in a 1988 interview on a nation wide TV special called “UFO Cover-up . . . Live” to state that 12 seconds of the film used in the documentary had been actual film of the 1971 UFO landing.

During the narration of the film Serling had declared, “Let us look at an incident that might happen in the future, or perhaps could have happened already.” Now those words took on new meaning.

It slipped through the security net, according to Shartle, and the public never realized that they had actually viewed a flying saucer landing at a highly secure USAF Base.

This 1972 Holloman case of a reported film of an interaction between “us” and “them” being offered and then withdrawn is what Jacques Vallee described as “a dangling carrot case.” Evidence would be provided to convince those who were to carry the message to the public, but no evidence would be provided to the messengers, which they would need to convince everyone else. Vallee should know. He was involved in an almost identical case with J. Allen Hynek in 1985.

Despite the drawbacks of the initial offer made by the government to Emenegger and Sandler, the incident is important because the government didn’t have to do it.

Further, it began a pattern of further releases by whoever controlled the UFO secrets that would continue on for the next 30 years. This pattern appeared to be a process for dropping the most bizarre, dramatic, concrete, and most paradigm shattering pieces of the UFO mystery into the UFO community, while at the same time destroying the case’s pedigree and other marks that would provide proof.

Robert Emenegger in the book he wrote in 1974 written in conjunction with the UFO documentary, seemed to realize the significance of the Holloman story in the overall history of UFOs. Emenegger wrote,

“But until the answer is found, the challenge remains. The momentum towards finding answers has begun – for a most significant and historical meeting has, quietly and without publicity, taken place.”

It was not the first time that the Pentagon had offered dramatic UFO video evidence, nor would it be the last.