| 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,
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.
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 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) 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.
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. |
Tag: ronald pandolfi
UFOs, Transparency, and Civil Rights
| Written by Paul Robinson |
| Thursday, 06 October 2011 13:18 |
Introduction
This article assumes that since government and military officially consider UFOs a non-issue, and hence not a matter of national security, it can also be taken as read that any interference and/or activities in the field, official or otherwise, are completely unwarranted. Despite grand ideas concerning government transparency at the outset of the Obama administration, it would appear no real “change” has been forthcoming. President Obama has said if something is to be kept secret that he will “… tell you why.” The problem with this is how does one pose the question to begin with? Attempts have been made to contact the White House concerning UFO secrecy, calls have been made, letters sent, but the administration refuses to acknowledge this. And so it would appear that the easiest way to not keep one’s word, such as telling the American public why they can’t have this information, is to pretend you didn’t hear the question. Progress of TransparencyOn the day after his presidential inauguration (1/21/2009), Barack Obama signed off on what were supposed to be considered sweeping reforms concerning the declassification and accessibility of information. In practice, however, it would seem that those wishing to use the FOIA request system haven’t seen much in the way of progress. Since this time, we have seen the launch of FOIA.gov and the implementation of technologies to bring disclosed information to light via the internet. The question, of course, is what information will be released even with these new tools in place? More low level/classification information than ever before? Should we really expect to see anything at Top Secret or above just because the president has requested a more open and tech savvy government? Probably not. As for the FOIA.gov site itself, on the page about how to submit a request, there is a list of agencies to which a request can be made there is currently no mention of the National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), or the Office of Naval Intelligence(ONI). That said, neither are a great many US agencies. Current Transparency Status
Thomas Paine’s quote, seen above, is clearly made in reference to the British Government as it was before, during, and after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is, however, missing a few other forms of governance, namely Oligarchy, Plutocracy, Corporatocracy, and Kleptocracy. Oscar Grusky and George A. Miller go on to argue the reasons why the republican government structure of Paine’s day may not be so republican any more. As such, should we really expect to see anything in the form of more government transparency if the majority of its people are not its concern? Revocations of classification appear to be caught in a vicious circle. The problem would appear to be a simple one:
Aside from that which has been politically expedient to make transparent, e.g. spending on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), nothing else has really come to fore as far as declassification is concerned. Indeed, TARP spending should be public knowledge. This is not, however, earth shattering information. Nor, apparently, are the abuses and vague / outright unknown appropriations thereof. There will probably not be new releases of UFO information, a la France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, etc., because that would mean having to officially declare unofficial interests, which allegedly came to a halt after Project Blue Book was closed in 1969. Yes, it is known by many researchers that information is being withheld, but the media is happy to ignore this and has been doing so for quite some time. The President’s BriefingPresident Clinton, who had a clear interest in the subject of UFOs, was probably hoping that any such briefing would have come in the form of a presentation made by then CIA scientist Ronald Pandolfi. Instead, the task was handed off to UFO researcher and Naval Optical Physicist (retired), Dr. Bruce Maccabee. Suffice it to say that no previously unknown data was discussed. In the case of President Obama the story goes that this same task fell to UFO researcher, Dr. Steven Greer. It is doubtful that such maneuvering by the CIA would likely instill much in the way of trust in the President. FOIA Stonewalling & Exemptions AbuseSome UFO researchers will tell you about problems they’ve incurred in their attempts to extract UFO data through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications. One of the newer modes of preventing information from getting out to the public has been to price searches beyond the ability of the average citizen to afford. Others have found that they get treated as repeat offenders, trouble causers due to the amount of applications they make. There are, of course, other methods that can be employed to withhold information. One technique has been to store records on sightings with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). In this case the records are made exempt from disclosure since NORAD does not qualify as a United States governmental agency. It is, instead, a combined U.S. and Canadian effort. Another technique is to place records in an inter-agency status. Simply, this would involve, for example, the CIA placing their files with the NSA. The CIA would not be able to include the files in FOIA searches since they are not in their possession. The NSA would not be able to include the files in FOIA searches since they belong to the CIA. Yet another example is a practice of placing sensitive files with government contractors, say, for the purpose of research and development. Again, the originating agency would no longer have those files in their possession and the contractor is exempt from disclosure since it is a private entity. A document outlining the use of Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) by the United States Department of Energy‘s (DOE) intelligence branch states:
(https://www.directives.doe.gov/directives/current-directives/5639.8-BOrder-a/view) This appears, essentially, to put highly classified information record archives into the hands of private industry and out of the reach of the FOIA request. Self Censorship of the Fourth Estate
It was once hoped that the fourth estate would hold the government up to close scrutiny. Unfortunately, we have all been witness to politics shaping the agenda of the press around the world – the U.S. has not escaped this by any means. Does anyone really believe that Fox News is not right-wing or that MSNBC is not left-wing? No matter what your politics are, there probably exists a media outlet that is more than happy to pander to your beliefs and, more importantly, influence and shape those beliefs in the name of the Almighty Dollar. All profit making institutions must, of course, consider their reputation. They don’t want to look bad in front of their rivals. But what do they consider to ‘look bad’? The main stream media (MSM) is quite happy to trot out phrases like ‘Little Green Men’ and ‘True Believers’ in almost startling attempts to distance themselves from the subject. And while they would be more than happy to interview a man like, say, Charles Manson, such a person is nowhere near the threat to their credibility as a military General speaking out on the subject of UFOs. They know that they will suffer attacks from their own organization, rival organizations, and readers who mysteriously always seem to tell them that such information is “not news.” How does one decide what is and is not ‘news’ especially when one is not even in the field of journalism? In light of the fact that many blame today’s MSM of producing nothing more than Yellow Journalism, and reports of UFOs are also considered to be a high demand part of that cadre, one has to wonder why reporting on such things as UFOs as often as possible is not a low-hanging fruit. The trouble, perhaps, comes with the saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” This could only be argued in the case of UFOs if it was featured heavily enough in the media to get people thinking about it. It isn’t. The effect is one of self censorship. While it may seem like they’re just looking out for themselves it also sends out the message that they are more than happy to put news blackouts on certain items. And when this happens the government knows that they are, at the same time, malleable and can be trusted not to mention whatever a governing body doesn’t want them to mention, without them having to constantly look over the producer/editor/director/publisher’s shoulder; their compliance is assured. First Amendment Under AttackSurrounding more publicized UFO events of both the past and present has been seen a pressure that has been brought to bear on the media and press to cease and desist. The excuse used has been that in publishing such stories, much embarrassment and ridicule has been visited upon the town or city most closely involved. However, what might, on the face of it, be considered self preservation nonetheless doubles as a governmental attack on the First Amendment, most notably, freedom of the press. One of the latest examples of this happening was when Angelia Joiner was pressured out of her job with the Stephenville Empire-Tribune after closely following and reporting on the 2008 Stephenville Lights event, a UFO story that made waves in the media at the international level. We have also seen politicians such as Dennis Kucinichget ousted from running as a presidential hopeful on national TV after having his UFO sighting questioned. No one questions politicians who believe the planet is only 6,000 years old – that’s OK. Transgressions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The MSM has certainly been overt in its backing of Christianity and, for the most part, religious freedom in general. With some well publicized exceptions, people’s religious beliefs are not the subject of near constant ridicule. The same cannot be said of people who voice their opinions of UFOs. Whether a person believes in UFOs or merely thinks reports of alien visitation might be true, you can be almost certain that they will be publicly demeaned and humiliated without a second thought. That un/informed opinion is now considered news, and ultimately taken by the masses to be actual truth, means we can no longer trust that we are being accurately informed. And so it is that we see any coverage of the subject of UFOs accompanied by glib, childish comments and the compulsory presence of skeptics/debunkers. This is not something that you would see in a news article or chat show about religion. Since religion requires one to believe, not something required in the face of proven fact, one has to question why it is that we don’t see James McGaha or Robert Sheaffer arguing with Pastor Rick Warren on the ‘Larry King Live’. (Since the writing of this article began the show has gone on to become ‘Piers Morgan Tonight’. No UFO stories thus far.) Cowardice perhaps? Simply not worth their time? Believers in religions can tend to be a little more fundamentalist. Suffice it to say that if people who believe in God were treated in the same manner – at a level as visible and vocal as the MSM – as those with an interest with UFOs, the outcry would be such that this kind of treatment would come to a screeching halt.
Again, assuming that the matter of alien visitation is officially considered a non-issue where national security is concerned, we can also assume that Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is under attack. While not focusing on the outright, ad hominem attacks clearly seen to be transgressions of Article 12, Article 19 promotes the rights of a person to express those beliefs “through any media regardless of frontiers.” This obvious extension of Article 12 outlines the right of an individual not only to hold beliefs without fear of ridicule, but to push them out to the public through the media. Instead, what we see is a media that decides what constitutes important news, tells its audience that this is what they the public want. The people then agree with them whole heartedly, forget rather conveniently that they were told this and then allow the same media to insist that they the public came up with those opinions of their own accord. The media (in some cases) tells the public that UFO sightings are to be ridiculed. And shortly thereafter, if they make another UFO report, the public tells the media that UFO sightings are to be ridiculed. The organization in question is then happy to let such information slide, no matter how startling the information that presents itself. Civil Rights ImplicationsAs mentioned in the previous section, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights(signed and ratified by the US in 1966), Article 19 mandates freedom of expression. And while ridicule – and I hope to write much more on that subject in another article – can be though of as freedom of expression, too, it is also a tool of suppression, subjugation, and neutralization all of which can be seen as human rights violations to at least some degree. ConclusionsIn many issues that concern some kind of discrimination there are legal consequences that can be visited upon the malefactors. This, of course, usually only comes to light in cases of religious, sexual, racial, and age or disability–related discrimination. The First Amendment covers the first of these. Federal and State laws cover the rest. However, despite the fact that religion is considered paranormal and UFOs are considered by many to be paranormal, belief in UFOs are subject to outright public attacks. Aside from the First Amendment one can also assume that religion also possesses the protection known as ‘safety in numbers’. Voices are needed to help overcome the discrepancy between how beliefs, ideas, and interests are viewed by others. Recently, we have seen such names as Katy Perry and Sammy Hagar speaking out on the subject of UFOs and aliens. If you are a celebrity, speak up and speak out. If you are anyone else, discuss with friends. And whoever you are, do not feel ashamed to mull over and shift your worldviews around the possibilities that UFOs may or may not represent. |
John Alexander, UFOs, Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities: The Rest of the Story
| Written by Grant Cameron |
| Monday, 11 April 2011 18:34 |
| The long awaited John Alexander book titled “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities” is finally on the book stand. It is an important book that everyone in the UFO community should read.
The reason that the book is so important is that Alexander dares to look at the question of whether the government, or some “THEY” that has little answer-ability to the government, has processes in place to investigate the UFO mystery. Alexander has chosen to play in the right ballpark where many more researchers should spend some time. Most of what ufology has done for the last sixty years involves UFO case investigation. Researchers with varying levels of investigative skills have looked for and then evaluated new UFO sightings. Many UFO WebPages, including my own presidential UFO site, have a daily news link where the latest greatest sightings can be viewed. Whether working alone or as part of a UFO organization researchers did their investigation and ended up putting the cases in a categories such as “hoax” or “Insufficient information” or “unknown.” They were limited by skill, lack of time, often the unwillingness to share their data, and with little or no funding. When each investigation was over and there was nothing more that could be done the case it was filed and the investigators went on to the next investigation hoping that one would solve the mystery. After sixty years we are left with have filing cabinets full or hoaxes, insufficient evidence, and unknown cases. It is a vicious circle with no end in sight. After sixty years of research the UFO community seems to have come to the conclusion from the evidence that something very unusual is going on but we really don’t know what it is. UFO researchers really don’t know what to do with the evidence, so more is collected hoping an answer will emerge. The general public and media, on the other hand, do not have the time to review the vast quantities of evidence that have been collected and therefore do not pay the subject much attention other than to listen to some of the more spectacular stories. UFO investigative research has become like a three day news cycle where a new sighting is revealed, everyone gets excited for a couple days, and then after the “it’s unusual but we don’t know” conclusion is arrived at, everyone goes back to their daily lives, and we wait for the next UFO story to break. This cycle has made it easy for people to make up stories or dump disinformation into the UFO community because the main focus of ufologists has become finding the latest greatest case that can be talked about online or presented at a conference. Those wishing to drop a bad case into the UFO community can be assured that someone will jump on it. Alexander, viewed by many in the UFO community as a government insider, concludes in the book that UFOs are real. However, Alexander spells out that in his long search talking to high-level government, intelligence, and aerospace officials who should have known about a government role in the UFO phenomena, he has arrived at two downbeat conclusions. There are people in government, intelligence, and aerospace institutions interested in UFOs, but there is no institutional interest in the same. Therefore there doesn’t appear to be any cover-up by government or by a secret group working running the show. “The government,” concludes Alexander “is telling the truth.” There is no UFO cover-up. There are a many things that Alexander says in his book that I agree with but there are a few issues where “the other side of the story” must be put forward where I think the book has it wrong or where Alexander has avoided bringing up certain evidence. The areas I would like to discuss are:
Advanced Theoretical Physics ProjectAlexander opens the book talking about the Advanced Theoretical Physics Project. This was a group of invited people all possessing TS-SCI clearance who met under strict secrecy restrictions to discuss the UFO phenomena. It was called the Advanced Theoretical Physics Project to avoid being discovered by a UFO researcher filing a Freedom of Information Act request. Alexander’s description of the group’s mission was that it was initiated “to examine issues regarding UFOs, and what role the Department of Defense might be playing.” The first part of this statement is true, but the second part about the original purpose of the group being a search for who in the government was minding the store on UFOs is not supported by the evidence. This is important because the basic premise of Alexander’s book is that he searched for the people behind the UFO cover-up and found they didn’t exist. This led Alexander to conclude there is no cover-up, “The government is telling the truth.” The agenda put out by Alexander to the ATP members outlining the original objectives and purposes behind the ATP clearly did not mention a search for who was behind the cover-up. A quote from the typed agenda provided to the attendees stated: 2. Objectives a. Explore evidence presented/available to determine if further study is warranted. b. If evidence from 2(a) is sufficient, is there sufficient evidence to support an R&D (Research and Development) program? c. If evidence from 2(b) is sufficient, what would the thrust be? d. Develop an action plan (assumes sufficient evidence to proceed). 3. Purposes a. Exploration of the facts. b. Determine quality of known evidence. c. Determine methods to collect more information to fill gaps in information (collection plan) The only mention of the government comes later in a meeting on direction for the group. A government plan was outlined. The first item listed in the government plan was to “prepare the case”. The second item was to “get authority” to which a series of names and agencies were listed. Names included President Reagan’s Science advisor Dr. George Keyworth, (FAA official John Callahan would years later accuse Keyworth’s Office of Science and Technology Policy of being part of a group that came in and seized UFO information related to the JAL Flight 1628 UFO sighting over Alaska in) and Reagan’s National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. Next on the list was “gather data” and “prepare R&D.” The last item on the list was “contact”. Only at this point is a possible authority mentioned when the question is asked, “Who is the authority?” As to the authority the following points were listed. They did not seem to question who the authority was but whether the authority would fulfill certain qualifications 1) high enough 2) money 3) mindset. It appeared from this that the search was not for what role the DoD was playing but would there be a source for funding. The ATP appeared to be a group hoping to be allowed to play the UFO game with government backing. The Presidential ParadoxThe first thing that stands out about the chapter is that it has no footnotes. This is significant for one key reason. Alexander openly demanded that former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer reveal the name of the USAF General who has told him “every word is true and more” related to the Col. Phil Corso UFO book describing a deeply-held government cover-up. If Alexander expects others to source their material, then his own unsourced material could be viewed with the same suspicion he holds about Hellyer’s claim. The problem with Alexander’s main argument – that there is no institutional interest or cover-up – is that Alexander appears to have used cafeteria research to make his case. It appears that he has only included the cases that supported his “there is no cover-up argument.” Any stories that opposed the theory appeared to have been left in the display case. Alexander, for example, puts on his tray the story how NASA chose not do another UFO investigation for Jimmy Carter, and talks about how the USAF Blue Book UFO study set back UFO research, but avoids the testimony of attorney Daniel Sheehan who testified that when working on a study for the Congressional Research Office during the Carter administration that he was granted access to the classified Blue Book files (which should not exist if there is no government cover-up). Sheehan further reported that president-elect Carter was turned down on his request for UFO files by then CIA Director George Bush Sr., as “this was information that existed on a need-to-know basis only. Simple curiosity on the part of the president wasn’t adequate.”1 If Alexander had at least called Sheehan a liar or confused, that would have been fine, but he didn’t even consider Sheehan’s key testimony. Alexander also picks up the story of Ronald Reagan, his sighting, and how it did not change the way he governed, but leaves out the testimony showing institutional involvement and a cover-up told of by John Callahan, a former FAA division chief. Callahan clearly stated that during his investigation of a major UFO sighting by a 747 Jumbo jet in Alaska with lots of supporting data, that people from the FBI, CIA and Reagan’s OSTP staff where brought in. The data was seized, and one of the CIA officials ended the meeting saying that the meeting never happened.2 Is Callahan lying? Where are the records that were seized? Why is this important story not evaluated in a book looking at possible government UFO cover-up? Although Alexander claimed to have searched out many senior government officials his book only details one attempt to talk to someone at the level of the Executive Officer of the President. This occurred when the late ranking democrat Senator Claiborne Pell wrote a letter to ex-president Jimmy Carter trying to arrange for Alexander and Claiborne’s Senate aide Dr. Scott Jones to visit Carter to discuss UFOs. The story Alexander tells is significant but it does not support his basic theory that the president is told the truth and there is no cover-up. After the letter was sent to Carter, a couple weeks passed without an answer. Jones phoned Carter’s administrative assistant and asked him if he had received the letter. The reply was “Yes” and that “There will be no response.”3 Alexander may be right in concluding that the failure to respond was an attempt not to do anything that would leave a paper trail. The question is why. If, as Alexander maintains, some government people (like Carter) are interested and there is no institutional involvement, why would Carter be afraid to talk about it now that he is out of office? He talked in his recent diary book about remote viewing, and he gave a radio interview on UFOs to a skeptical group which is an action much more on the record than returning a letter.4 The reason Carter talked on the record to the skeptics about UFOs and not to Alexander and Scott was undoubtedly the fact that the Alexander/Scott interview was not going to be about weather balloons and Venus, but rather what did you do when you were in the White House, and are there classified aspects? This is a road Carter would clearly avoid if there was substance to some sort of government role in UFOs. Carter, after all, had already talked about the possible classified aspects of UFOs even before he became president, and knew the rules. He stated, “There may be some aspects of the UFO information with which I am not familiar that might be related to some secret experiments that we are doing that might involve our national security or new weapons systems. I certainly would not release that.”5 There is some support for Alexander’s argument that many higher officials appear to be ignorant of government research on UFOs if one looks at the written record. There are few if any UFO files in presidential libraries and presidents rarely make any more than a passing reference about UFOs in their speeches. Unfortunately, the lack of records on a subject in the White House does not prove much as evidenced by the recent mention of remote viewing by President Carter in his published diary. A check of the Carter files for the two dates Carter mentioned being briefed on the remote viewing will find no files on the subject, or any reference that remote viewing was discussed. During a recent complete review of Carter’s presidential files the records showed no references to remote viewing in any of Carter’s papers. Because there are no remote viewing files in the Carter library, does that mean the Carter administration did not deal with or know of remote viewing? Absolutely Not. The lack of written UFO records can probably be tracked back to the testimony of General Robert Landry who became the Air Aide to President Truman in 1948 just as the modern flap of UFO sightings was just beginning. As opposed to Alexander’s theory of non-involvement by high officials such as the president, Landry confirmed in an interview done with the Truman Library that the president requested and received regular briefing on the UFO subject but it was done orally, and there were no written records. “I was directed to report quarterly to the president after consulting with Central Intelligence people,” said Landry, “as to whether or not any UFO incidents received by them could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications at all. The report was to be made orally by me unless it was considered by intelligence to be so serious or alarming as to warrant a more detailed report in writing. During the four and one-half years in office there, all reports were made orally.”6 If the testimony of Landry’s grandson where to put on the cafeteria tray General Landry would later tell the grandson in reply to questions on the Roswell crash. “If I told you the truth about what happened back at Roswell, you would never see life the same way again”.7 This is not quite the blank stares and denials that Alexander claimed were consistent with the Generals he talked to. There is more evidence that shows UFO actions were no written down. Like Truman – Alexander tried to cover up his ATP UFO investigation with oral meetings. There were to be no written records, and no notes. Well, at least that is how it was supposed to have worked. If Landry could keep UFOs out of the written record, and if Alexander could set up a Top Secret UFO investigation where there was no paper trail, how can Alexander now claim no one else in the government tried the same trick, and was more successful? Alexander would have been successful at covering up his UFO working group if I hadn’t received and showed part of the cover page, showing the name of the group, the dates, and where the meetings were being held, at an Ozark UFO convention lecture a number of years back. If this release hadn’t occurred the story of the Alexander’s UFO working group would have remained a vague black world rumor like MJ-12. Common sense says that if Alexander and Landry tried it, there is a good chance someone else has tried running a secret record less group looking at the UFO problem. Despite the fact researchers will find few records in the presidential records of UFO investigation activity by Truman there is a video record of Truman answering a question on flying saucers. Confirming that the White House was actively investigating UFOs Truman said, “Yes we discussed it at every conference that we had with the military. There was always things like that going on – -flying saucers and we’ve had other things if I am not mistaken.” If Alexander theory were to be followed Truman should have said, “Interesting stuff but we weren’t involved.” The fact that Truman discussed UFOs often with the military, and there is no record of this, shows strongly that there was a cover-up. It is strange that Alexander was not able to find any evidence contrary to his no cover-up theory because a lot of it has been published for years. Even I had provided a piece of testimony that was completely ignored. I am a Canadian living in the frozen wastelands of Canada. I have no security clearances and no friends in the Pentagon who will point me in the correct direction.8 Yet I was able to get a question to Vice President Dick Cheney who had often been rumored to be read-in on UFOs. I asked a direct question related to a secret government investigation and Cheney’s knowledge of that effort. “In all your jobs in government have you ever been briefed on the subject of UFOs,” I asked Cheney. “If so, when was it and what were you told?” Cheney’s reply indicated strongly that there was a secret institutional interest, and potentially classified work being done related to UFOs. “If I had been briefed on that subject,” replied Cheney, “it would probably be classified and I wouldn’t be talking about it.”9 Following Alexander theory he should have said, “The government shut down Blue Book in 1969, and there has been no government interest since.” He didn’t. Another fellow Canadian Wilbert Smith, who “was in charge of the Canadian government’s Project Magnet, which was the official (flying) saucer study”10 from 1950 to 1954, was also able to get concrete confirmation “from US officials” that a super secret program was in place in the United States to investigate the modus operandi of the saucers. In a Top Secret document written in December 1950 to the Deputy Minister at the Department of Transport Smith wrote 1) The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher than even the H-bomb. 2) Flying saucers exist. 3) Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Vannevar Bush. 4) The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.11 Smith also mentioned that he had been told that mental phenomena had a relationship to the saucers – something that now seems more apparent from the reports. Even Alexander considers that consciousness could be part of the UFO mystery – something Smith claimed he had already been told by the Americans 60 years earlier.12 So how are we Canadians able to get confirming information, when Alexander’s knocking on doors in the Pentagon gets him only blank stares and denials? Moreover why were Cheney’s and Smith’s statements left out of Alexander’s book? There are many other comments made by presidents and vice presidents that indicate exactly the opposite of Alexander’s thesis that the White House would not be involved. Alexander outlined his belief that “just because certain key individuals express a personal interest in UFOs does not mean that their organization accepts responsibility for UFOs or is involved with studying the phenomena. For organizations in the Executive branch are bound by laws that describe their roles and responsibilities and restrict what they can and cannot fund.”13 The facts, however, are much different than the constitutional theory. Consider, for example, the statement made by Shirley MacLaine in May 1995 on the Larry King Show related to what Jimmy Carter told her about UFOs. “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 crafts, that he believed 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.” In addition, we also now have two independent Hollywood sources that claim they heard Steven Spielberg tell the story that during a private screening of “ET-The Extraterrestrial” in June 1982 that Reagan leaned over to Spielberg and said, “I bet there aren’t six people in this whole room who know how true this whole thing is.” Spielberg, for the record, refuses to discuss private conversations with the president. Much more has and will been added to this interaction between government / intelligence community and Hollywood by Robbie Graham “a full-time doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol doing a PhD examining Hollywood’s historical representations of UFOs and potential extraterrestrial life.”14 Dan Quayle spoke of an institutional interest inside the Bush Sr. administration despite the total lack of any written UFO files that have been found in the Bush White House papers. “The alien situation is very interesting because we had the same issue,” said Quayle. “There are people out there who really believe that there are these aliens, and we literally spent some time looking at this but there was nothing conclusive that came of it.”15 In the same interview Quayle also countered Alexander’s contention that Washington can’t keep a secret when he said, “George Bush know a few things that no one else knows.” George Bush Sr. also indicated that he was in the UFO information loop. When asked about UFOs in 1988 he gave an answer (recorded on audio) to researcher Charles Huffer exactly opposed to what Alexander’s theory would have predicted, “Yes I know some. I know a fair amount.”16 His son George Bush when asked about disclosing UFO while on the campaign trail in 2000 motioned to Dick Cheney at his side and said,” This man knows. He was Secretary of Defense and was a great one.”17 These are hardly the same answers that Alexander stated he was getting from high level officials he was talking to. Reverse Engineering UFOsAlexander writes that he had discussed the UFO subject with the head, or the deputy, of all the lettered agencies and had come away concluding that no one was doing any research or back engineering of alien technology. The example that Alexander used to support his conclusion centered on the claims made by Col Phil Corso which many in the UFO community have already distanced themselves from. Other claims that have more researcher support include the work done at WPAFB by Dr. Howard C. Cross on the nickel/titanium memory metal known as Nitinol. This memory metal work done shortly after the Roswell crash gives much more support to claims of back-engineering efforts by the Air Force research laboratories. Alexander, however, totally ignores this research. There are also scores of other stories that back up the fact that the government has tried to duplicate the technology behind the saucers and that in some cases they succeeded.
All this contrary evidence showing the government and industry were interested in UFO propulsion are missing from the book. Absence of Cover-upAlexander concludes in his book that his years of investigation showed no non-government group or cabal that is dealing with the UFO problem. Alexander writes, “The imaginary THEY don’t exist.”24 Alexander contends that “according to the conspiracy theorists, some mysterious THEY, an independent, extra-governmental body, makes determination about which presidents will have access to the knowledge about extraterrestrials, and which will not. Of course who THEY are is never articulated but the conspiracy theorists are absolutely convinced THEY exist.”25 The idea that the president is not read-in because he does not have the proper clearance and is therefore lied to is “utter nonsense and illegal.”26 The “conspiracy theorists” may not have an alphabetical listing of “THEY” or notes from their nefarious meetings, but there are stories that point directly to the fact that there appears to be a secret UFO game and the President of the United States might not dealt in. Because we cannot prove who is running the cover-up does not mean that there is no cover-up. A review of the published evidence makes the existence of a cover-up a no-brainer, and its denial like Gaddafi stating, “There are no protests in the street. My people love me.” Some of the best examples of a cover-up come from Alexander’s own list of what he considers the best UFO cases. Alexander writes that at “the top of the list of important cases are the incidents that occurred in late December 1980 at the Royal Air Force Base at Bentwaters in the United Kingdom.”27 It involved respected military people responsible for the protection of nuclear weapons. “The quality of the firsthand witnesses is impeccable,” wrote Alexander and each had “undergone extensive psychological testing prior to being assigned to sensitive positions.”28 Alexander praises the high quality case in his book told by these “impeccable” witnesses, but when the same “impeccable” witnesses testify that a cover-up took place at Bentwaters Alexander ignores that part of their testimony. Alexander’s “impeccable” Bentwaters witnesses describe the fact that video and pictures were taken both by the military witnesses and by local police, and that this hard evidence was confiscated. Even the notes of Alexander’s UFO ATP group noted that “film made and flown to Germany.” The fact that all this video evidence disappeared and can’t be found strongly indicates that “THEY”, however identified, do exist. Now in 2011, thirty years after the incident, there is more supporting evidence of a cover-up. The latest release of the United Kingdom UFO documents indicate that all the intelligence files from the time period which might describe what happened at Bentwaters have mysteriously disappeared.29 Like the key missing Roswell UFO crash files found missing during a 1994 GAO investigation it appears a mysterious unknown Air Force dog has again eaten the homework. Alexander acknowledged in his book that some evidence might still be around in somebody’s top drawer, and maybe that is where the Bentwaters video evidence went. The drawer, however, must be very large as it seems to be holding many other rumored military UFO videos besides the Bentwaters material. There are many thousands of private citizen UFO videos and pictures, but it is hard to think of any military videos and pictures ever released. The prime example of this is the many stories of gun camera video taken by US military fighter jets sent up to chase UFOs and yet not a single example of one being released. The top “impeccable” witness in the Bentwaters case, James Penniston, is clearly on the record stating that “we had a cover-up going on.” Penniston stated that he had fourteen meeting with Halt and his superior about the Rendlesham incident and two meetings with AFOSI. The second interview with OSI involved Penniston being administered sodium pentothal. Where are the records of all these meetings and interviews if there is no cover-up and the government doesn’t care? Penniston said further that he was trained and given a new job that he “wasn’t qualified for” with a Top Secret clearance so he could be monitored by “our squadron commander, Major Zigler, and also by certain elements of the command element.” He stated that Halt has been in contact with him all through the years since the incident “gauging what was going on” asking him who was contacting him about the UFO incident and what questions they were asking. Penniston believed he was “monitored in many ways” and that Halt was following orders to monitor him and keep him and another security officer John Burroughs apart. He stated that he had been implanted with false memories. Many years after Major General Gordon Williams, the overall Bentwaters base commander at the time, spoke to Penniston and apologized for what had happened and how Penniston was treated “by certain elements at the base” during the event. He told Penniston that he was just “following orders.”30 The second key witness in Alexander’s top Bentwaters case, Col. Halt said, “There is no doubt in mind there is a serious cover-up and it’s not only one agency.”31 He added further that the NSA had a “thick file about Bentwaters,” but he was told he did not have a need-to-know. Maybe I am misreading the evidence, but this sounds like a cover-up. In two other high quality cases detailed in the Alexander book there are strong indications of some government or cabal type element being involved but Alexander just disregards the evidence. Alexander picks the Cash Landrum UFO case where 23 Chinook helicopters are witnessed all around a craft spewing flames from its underside. To any independent observer this would indicate some military involvement, but to Alexander the helicopters don’t count because everyone claimed they weren’t theirs and the case is therefore just inexplicable. Alexander picks the March 1997 Phoenix lights case as one showing there is a valid argument for UFOs, but leaves out the testimony of Frances Barwood who interviewed 720 of the witnesses while she was a counselor on the Phoenix City Counsel. Barwood’s testimony is quite clear that she confirmed a federal phone tap on her phone and that a key piece of video evidence disappeared after the witness phoned her and promised to provide her a copy of the evidence. This testimony clearly shows that some government or “THEY” entity was involved. He leaves out the fact that the FBI flew two agents across the country to talk to researcher Peter Davenport about the Phoenix sightings.32 Alexander states in a subchapter of the book that “Everything Leaks in Washington.” The implication is that the government couldn’t keep the UFO secret if it did exist. Alexander maintains “real secrets almost always get released – often before they should.” If such is the case I would like Alexander to show me where in the public literature I could find some of the following UFO secrets that the government has been unable to keep.33
Finally, and most damaging to Alexander’s argument that there is no “THEY” is evidence from his own ATP. Did Alexander forget the following events that clearly indicate the TS-SCI members of his group (reputable witnesses) supported the theory that there was a cover-up by some unknown element?
In reaction to this story Ed Speakman (INSOM) commented. “Are we to conclude that an organization exists which sucks up all this material into a box?” Another member of Alexander’s group identified as “Robbie” spoke up, “I think you can believe that.” And finally the most dramatic comment made by Hal McConnell from the NSA who said an “associate knew a man who got out of the Air Force and joined an organization which collected and burned such items.” (This statement is similar to a comment McConnell made to Jacques Vallee about an office at WPAFB that confiscated UFO negatives in order to analyze them secretly.35) It seems much simpler to use duckology to come up with the most probable hypothesis to work from than cafeteria research which comes up with Gaddafi logic. If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has sex with other ducks, it is not a 100% certainty, but it will probably turn out to be a duck. There is a cover-up. A working hypothesis should be forced to deal with 100% of the evidence. To propose a conclusion with only 50% of the evidence, and leave out 50% of the evidence is not fair to the book reader who will generally not be aware only part of the story is being told. The reader should not be expected to do his/her own research to find “the rest of the story.” The Missing NamesWhen I first got my hands on the Alexander’s book, the first thing I did was to go to the index and look for certain key names, and to see what had written about them and their UFO involvement. None of the names I first looked for appeared in the index even though I knew most were known to Alexander and I was sure he must have discussed the UFO situation with them at some point in his long UFO search. The missing names are important because they were high level people with security clearances who had an interest in UFOs and who actions appeared to support the concept of a government interest or cover-up. James Woolsey and John Petersen: James Woolsey was Bill Clinton’s first CIA director. John Petersen is a former naval flight officer who went on to positions at National War College, the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff at the White House. The relationship between the two is that Woolsey used to sit on the board of Directors of the Arlington Institute in Washington DC run by Petersen. The Woolsey name is important because of a story told many times by researcher Dr. Steven Greer, who at the time was the head of the Starlight project. Greer’s story is that Woolsey and Clinton had requested but had been denied information on UFOs, based on conversations he had with Woolsey. As Alexander contends that the president is never denied information this interaction is important but missing from Alexander’s book. Dr. Greer tells of a secret three hour meeting (unlike the Alexander model that top officials in the lettered agencies were never involved) in December 1993 with Woolsey and Petersen. In the meeting Greer gave Woolsey a review of what information he had been able to gather about the UFO situation. “Woolsey,” said Greer, “had an interest in the subject and felt that the subject was valid, that he had not been able to find out any information through channels, even though he was the head of the CIA, NSA, and the NRO, and other civilian agencies.”36 Alexander contends in his book that there is a chain of command and there is no secret cabal running the show. Andrew Cockburn at the New York Times Magazine, however, counters Alexander’s world view that information flows legally through channels and supported Greer’s contention that Woolsey could be lied to on various issues. Cockburn wrote, “Jim underestimated the manipulative quality of the agency bureaucracy, where lying and deception are institutionalized, said a former senior national security official. He was too trusting, and that made him easy prey. He wasn’t ready for people lying to him when he was loyal to them.”37 Now Alexander and others might simply say that Greer is a lying SOB (and many have done just that) and made up the story. This is a possibility, but there are many undisputed parts of the story that are confirm Greer’s version of the story is probably the truth. In his book Alexander talks about how briefing for the president (POTUS) would probably be done.38 First the person with the briefing material would have to get an influential person close to POTUS to accept the idea of the briefing. Then a pre-briefing would then have to be given to that person (such as chief of staff) who would either reject the briefing or approve it being given to POTUS. Giving a briefing to the DCI would be similar. One would not just walk in and present the material. There would be a protocol. In Greer’s case, however, none of this appointment protocol was followed. In a part of the story that has not publicly disputed, John Petersen followed Greer around to four lectures and finally talked to Greer at a lecture he was giving in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Following the lecture Petersen approached Greer and stated, “Dr. Greer, I think it is time that we help you.” Greer asked who he was, and Petersen said, “Well, I know a few folks in Washington who I think you need to meet with.” Greer then asked who those people might be and Petersen responded, “Well I’m good friends with the Director of Central Intelligence.”39 The point of this is that Greer did not ask for the meeting. According to a FedEx Petersen sent from Petersen to Greer, Woolsey asked to see Greer.40 If senior government officials such as Woolsey can get UFO information legally through channels and the system works as Alexander claims in his book, why would he need to go “to the street” and drag Greer into a “dinner party” to get UFO information? This is very similar to the claims made by researchers William LaParl and Derrel Sims that they were contacted indirectly by Hillary Clinton for UFO information. Why did Hillary not go through channels and get the best intelligence information that would have been available through government channels? Well, if Dan Smith is to be believed Hillary did go to the CIA on UFOs but was blocked by CIA agent Ronald Pandolfi. “Ron’s job relative to the Clintons,” wrote Smith, “was to prevent Hillary from trying to find out who Jim Woolsey’s sources were, since they would have had to know the real story in order explain to Jim why George Bush, Sr. should not be given the content of it.”41 Both Woolsey and Hillary went through channels and did not believe they were being told the whole truth. That’s why they went to the street for answers. Greer’s version of the story is also supported by things that happened after the meeting. During his meeting with Woolsey Greer asked Woolsey to force out the UFO documents at the CIA and thereby disclose the truth. Woolsey’s reply was “Dr. Greer, how can we disclose what we are being denied access to? What would that say to the world?”42 Following the meeting the official record shows Woolsey did put out a directive to review the classified files for UFO material. A 1997 article, which can be found on the CIA website, states clearly, “In late 1993, after being pressured by ufologists for the release of additional CIA information on UFOs, DCI R. James Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on UFOs.”43 The CIA had initiated a UFO study. That’s institutional interest. In his book Alexander ignores the Greer Woolsey encounter, but does refer to this 1997 article written for the CIA by Gerald Haines, an NRO historian. However he fails to point out the fact that it is just an article written on the documents that were found in the CIA search ordered by Woolsey. So did Alexander talk to Woolsey and ask if he felt (as Greer contends) that he and the president were being denied access? Did he ask Petersen if Greer was contacted to provide information to the DCI? Ronald Pandolfi Alexander’s argument is that the president is at the top of the pyramid and “should have access to the best information available so he can make informed decisions about the security of the country. “ The idea that there is a secret group keeping information from the president is, according to Alexander, “utter nonsense and illegal.”44 In order to evaluate the validity of this theory let us take a look at the Clinton White House which we know did ask for a UFO briefing from the CIA in April 1993. They made the request after they received word that philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller was requesting a meeting towards a goal of Bill Clinton declassifying all withheld UFO records. Ron Pandolfi, considered the top scientist in the CIA in 199645, was tasked with preparing and presenting the UFO briefing to Dr. Jack Gibbons, the Science Advisor to President Clinton. Pandolfi is known to Alexander, and is one of the names that Alexander leaves out of his book. In fact, Alexander invited Pandolfi to participate in the Advanced Physics Theoretical Conference set up by Kit Green and Alexander. The meetings were held starting in May 1985 at the BDM Secure Facility in McLean Virginia and was classified Top Secret/ Restricted Data Signals as Required. Pandolfi, however, left the group after the first meeting according to what he told one researcher in a taped interview.46 The reason Pandolfi was tasked with the UFO briefing for the White House was probably because of his rumored position at the CIA of running the “weird desk” responsible for all the UFO and other paranormal phenomena files (sometimes known as the phenomenology files). Now Alexander’s position in his book is that nothing is withheld from the president. So did the Pandolfi and the CIA provide the White House the best UFO information available so Clinton could make informed decisions about the security of the country? The answer is no. Instead of Pandolfi doing the briefing as requested, he tasked a civilian, Dr. Bruce Maccabee to provide a briefing on UFOs which really doesn’t count as all Maccabee would simply be presenting is publicly available information. It certainly would not be considered the “best information available” promised to the president. The best available evidence would theoretically have been held by Pandolfi ‘s CIA agency which at the time headed up all US intelligence agencies. Why did Pandolfi not do the job he was given by the White House? The simple answer is that the CIA could not publically provide UFO information because they were on the record as not been involved in studying or investigating UFOs. If no government agency was involved as Alexander maintains the briefing would have been easy. “Mr. President, the coordination of all intelligence available to us shows, there is no threat to National Security, and no agency is involved in investigating. Here is a copy of Blue Book which tells the whole story.” Instead Pandolfi provides the President’s science advisor with the best evidence collected by the private UFO community. In a phone conversation with Scott Jones Pandolfi gave his reason for not doing the White House briefing, “We didn’t have the material here to do it on such short notice (and) didn’t have any reference material in the file records.”47 He then told Jones that he helped Maccabee put the White House briefing together which Maccabee denied. There is no dispute that Clinton was interested and there is no dispute that the Clinton White House did ask for the information. The official record, recorded by the Rockefeller UFO initiative documents, shows that the White House did not get an “official” briefing, except if someone like Pandolfi or someone else from the CIA secretly went to brief the White House after the presentation of the Maccabee non-briefing.48 Moreover, if the president asked for a briefing, as we know his science advisor did, and he is given the best information on the subject as Alexander contends should happen, why did Clinton then task his Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell to go out and find out “who killed JFK and two, are there UFOs?’49 He should already have been in possession of the best evidence available. Common sense would say that Hubbell would not have the necessary clearances or the knowledge of the military and R&D worlds to get at the UFO secret, so why would Clinton call on him when he had already asked the CIA for information? There can be only one reason. Clinton did not get the information that he requested from the DCI, or he did not believe what he had been told. The request was then made to Hubbell, who was a long time friend of Clinton’s. Hubbell was someone Clinton could trust. Asking for the Kennedy assassination investigation indicated Clinton also did not believe the Warren Commission report which claimed to have solved the murder years earlier. The reason is that Clinton distrusted what he was being told on at least two issues – UFOs and the Kennedy assassination. He did not believe he was getting the truth as Alexander maintains would be happening. (As a point of interest an FOIA was placed with the Clinton Library for all files on the Kennedy assassination and a preliminary search showed 2500 pages of files indicating that Clinton people did have people look into it. The 2500 pages of files have not been released yet.) Another indication that Clinton did not believe the answers he was being given on UFOs came in a 1995 speech he gave in Belfast Northern Ireland just after he received the report of the USAF Roswell investigation on the Roswell UFO crash. In his speech Clinton said, “If the USAF did recover bodies (at Roswell) they didn’t tell me about it and I want to know.” The reason Clinton brought this up is that the first Roswell report failed to deal with the witness reports of alien bodies at the crash site. The USAF was forced to go out and conduct a second Roswell report to explain the witness testimony of alien bodies. In 1997 the USAF produced a second Roswell reports that focused on the alien body reports Clinton was demanding they explain. Their answer to the President was that the reports of 4’ grey aliens were confused with 6’ wooden dummies dressed up in Air Force uniforms that had been dropped by aircraft 5-10 years later. In 2005 Clinton again spoke out indicating he might not have been told the truth on UFOs. The statement came in answer to a question posed to him following a speech in Hong Kong. Clinton was asked if presidents passed secrets from one administration to another like “where is Jimmy Hoffa?” and “what really happened at Roswell?” In his reply Clinton confirmed that there was an institutional interest in his administration on the subject of UFOs. He stated that he did investigate Roswell, and had concluded from what he had seen that it was not an ET craft. He further stated that a lot of people in his administration believed there was an alien and a flying saucer at a base in Nevada (Area 51) and he sent someone to Area 51 to check that out as well. This is a further indication that Clinton did not believe what his intelligence people were telling him. It was in the 2005 Hong Kong Q&A that Clinton made a statement that clearly indicated that he believed there might be a “THEY” running a UFO cover-up. Speaking on the possibility that he may not have gotten the full story on Roswell, Clinton said, “I’m probably not the first president that’s been kept in the dark or that bureaucrats have tried to wait out.”50 In a similar way Clinton confirmed his believe in “THEY” when replying to a question he faced from long time White House reporter Sarah McClendon when she asked him why he didn’t do something about disclosing the UFO secret. Clinton replied, “Sarah, there’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.”51 The final example that shows the President might not be in control of the UFO subject takes us back to Ron Pandolfi. For whatever reason this top scientist, who is now with the office of the National Intelligence Directorate responsible for collating the intelligence from all US intelligence agencies and providing it to the president, has interacted a lot with the UFO community. Much of this interaction has involved passing UFO stories to various UFO researchers that are then spread through the UFO community. One of his main contacts for this activity has been Dan Smith, a researcher with a physics background whose father worked as a tax advisor in the Eisenhower administration. There are many stories that could be related concerning Pandolfi but I will look at the UFO briefing issue as Alexander seems to contend no one inside government is paying attention and therefore there should be no reason for briefing. Back in 2000 before and as George Bush was on his way to being president there was a lot of rumor on the internet as to a briefing on UFOs being proposed for the president -elect. Two of the key names in all the stories were Pandolfi and Smith. In one of the stories Smith told of James Woolsey being used to brief George Bush, a story Pandolfi would later deny when Smith brought it up when the two were having dinner with Pulitzer Prize nominated author Gus Russo. The story Smith told is that the UFO story is very real but as Pandolfi told him “the various intelligence agencies are in no way bound to cater merely to official curiosity,” and that if the CIA Director makes a determination that the president shouldn’t know, then “indeed the president does not have a need-to-know. Period.”52 Smith stated, “So I ask(ed) Ron about briefing the next president. And he said that if George W. [Bush] wanted a briefing he could just ask his dad about it. Ok, and what would his dad tell him, Ron? Well, his dad could tell him that he had tasked Jim Woolsey to find out and get back to him. Oh, really! And what was the result, Ron? Well, Jim came back and told the president that he just didn’t need-to-know.” In late 2010 I phoned Dan Smith to get more details on the Bush UFO briefing story and whether or not it had taken place. It appeared that there had been no briefing but Smith added a new wrinkle stating that Pandolfi had told him that if there would be a UFO briefing it would have to occur before Bush became president. I asked why and was told Pandolfi said that’s the way it would have to be. Smith told me as well that Pandolfi had told him that he was tracking almost 200 people who had been given a UFO/ET briefing. This is a statement that Smith has repeated on the internet and should have been of great interest for Alexander to check out.54 Then I asked Smith about another related item he had written on his internet blog about Pandolfi, Woolsey, and the discussion of a briefing of Bush. “I did have three questions for CF (Catfish/Pandolfi),” wrote Smith. “With regard to the Woolsey briefing of GHWB, he tells me not to waste my time. The presidents cannot be players. You tell them what you have to tell them, and then hope you don’t have to put them down. Democracy and capitalism are not the be all and end all of human existence.“55 As an interesting sideline there is a related story told by Lt. Colonel Ron Blackburn. Ron was one of the people that John Alexander invited to his ATP group. It was Blackburn who had introduced Alexander to the existence of the Area-51 base, and to Ben Rich, the president of Lockheed Skunkworks. Although Alexander stated that the Advanced Physics group concluded that UFOs were real but no one appeared to be in charge of studying the phenomena, Blackburn tells a different story. He spoke of an 87 year-old contact who Blackburn claimed was handling the alien bodies while working at Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque. The amount that Blackburn was able to gain from the man was limited due to the concern the witness had for security even though he was retired and very old, so Blackburn set up one last attempt to get the man to talk. As he was leaving Blackburn said to the man, “I was hearing that the Congress and President are thinking about granting immunity to all the folks who were involved.” In reply the man gave what Blackburn called a stunning reply, “The president’s edict would not be near enough.” Kit Green Another forgotten name in the Alexander book is Kit Green, who according to an audio tape interview with Pandolfi was the man who started the Advanced Physics Theoretical Conference with John Alexander. Kit Green worked for the CIA from 1969 to 1985 as Senior Division Analyst with the Office of Scientific and Weapons Intelligence. While at the CIA he was responsible for the “weird desk” before Pandolfi arrived and took over. Green was rumored to have possessed very high security clearances. Bill Moore, the UFO researcher that came up with the concept of the Aviary (a group of intelligence and military people who Moore utilized in an attempt to find out the truth about what the government knew about UFOs), described Kit Green as ” a person close to the President of the United States, capable of checking on information to determine its reliability.” Green like Pandolfi talked about UFOs and the president, and the fact he may not have a need-to-know. Speaking to reporter Gus Russo Green stated, “I have spoken to three former presidents and the subject always comes up, not as a briefing, but they also want to know the truth. But apparently they aren’t cleared for it.”56 Green also spoke openly about the possibility of a cover-up with Mark Pilkington and John Lundberg who were doing a book and documentary on “the truth of UFOs in America.” Their research involved talking to “intelligence agents, disinformation specialists, and UFO hunters.” In an interview conducted in Detroit, Green outlined the “core story” first developed in 1986. Green said that he “along with Hal Puthoff and computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee, distilled what they knew about the subject into what has become known as the core story.” “Simply put, the core story, according to Kit,” Pilkington wrote 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.’”57 This statement by Green is a strong indication that there is an institutional interest and there is a group of people tasked to handle the hard evidence. Yet for some reason, Green and his statements have been ignored in the Alexander book. There are many other names not mentioned in the book such as Brigadier General Arthur Exon who claimed there was a UFO crash and there was a group set up to deal with the subject. Exon stated on the record that he was aware of a group he called the Unholy Thirteen” that was a UFO controlling committee made up primarily of very high-ranking military officers and intelligence people. He mentioned being aware of testing by other personnel involved, and the recovery and shipment of bodies while C/O at Wright-Patterson AFB. Also not mentioned were comments made by 4-star Army General Wesley Clark who when asked if he had been briefed on UFOs said, “I heard a bit. In fact…There are things going on. But we will have to work out our own mathematics.” Once again the question is why do Generals say confirming things to UFO researchers and say nothing to Alexander? It is a question that Alexander should have dealt with in his book. The Killing Joke – A Prime example of a Missing StoryI may be wrong but I think that Alexander has badly twisted the story of Col. Bill Coleman, who Coleman describes as “one of the important players,” making the joke about killing people. In doing so he avoided telling one of the biggest stories that show institutional interest and involvement in the UFO phenomena. This is a story Alexander knows and left out. In his book Alexander described Coleman’s telling a joke in terms of people who come forward with UFO claims and have no documentation to back it up. “They often hide behind the old adage, ‘I’ll tell you but then I will have to kill you.’” Alexander writes. “Even Bill Coleman employed a version of this saying that led to considerable speculation. He told selected people that, “We will go for a boat ride. I will whisper in your ear and then I will come back.” The true story, as far as I know it, is that Coleman only told this to one person. That person was Bob Emenegger wrote the book and co-produced the TV documentary titled “UFOs, Past Present and Future.” If Coleman told it to someone else I would love to hear the story. Bill Coleman, at the time was the Air Force Chief Public Relations Officer. He was also the Pentagon front man on the TV documentary. He was the head of the government unit that reviewed the script and signed the contract with Bob Emenegger and his partner Allen Sandler for the UFO documentary. The two men were asked to produce the UFO documentary but “to hide it” under documentaries on advanced technologies being advanced by the Department of Defense. Coleman also set up a meeting at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) at Wright-Patterson AFB for Emenegger and Sandler to meet with General George Weinbrenner who was in charge of the unit running the USAF Blue Book investigation. Various Blue Book directors were made accessible to Emenegger and each cooperated fully. Art Lundahl, who was in charge of the UFO files at the CIA before Kit Green took over the job, even provided Emenegger details on a 1959 psychic incident where a Navy intelligence officer channeled an alien named AFFA at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. He also wrote up a memo that documented the whole incident. During the event Lundahl and the other CIA agents (whose names we have) witnessed a flying saucer fly by the window and over the Capitol. Blue Book head Robert Friend was called to Washington by Lundahl and the Navy officer was put back in trance. Friend was very impressed at what he saw and also provided information on this dramatic story. He actually went on film in the documentary to tell the story of what had occurred. Lundahl refused do go on film telling Emenegger, “You don’t understand. I am still on duty.” This was a story that had been totally unknown before it was released to be used in the documentary by Lundahl and Friend. Emenegger’s crew was allowed to film at Holloman AFB with no restrictions. The same permission was granted at Wright Patterson AFB. He and Sandler would go to the Pentagon to visit Coleman, and they would walk into the building without signing in. When they had trouble, like being able to film at Holloman, they would contact Navy Major Leo Verona at the Pentagon. He would pick up the phone, make a call, and any roadblock they had would suddenly disappear. The John D. MacArthur Foundation put up $250,000 production money before withdrawing. MacArthur’s name was not to appear in the credits but they were allowed to keep the money. CIA agent Dick Beske was at all the LA production meetings, although Emenegger did not believe he had influenced anything. There were helping hands all through the production. Emenegger had been working for Bill Carruthers, television consultant to Nixon, on the Nixon reelection when the offer came to do the UFO project. Another production company had originally been chosen for the job, but they had messed up a project on the Pentagon papers and were in the DoD doghouse. Bruce Herschensohn, deputy special assistant to President Nixon and a friend of Emenegger, was in contact on a regular basis as the documentary was put together. Another person Emenegger knew in the Nixon administration was Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff. Always curious about the alien landing at Holloman, Emenegger questioned Haldeman during a chance encounter in Los Angeles. Emenegger asked if he had heard about the alien landing at Holloman AFB. Rather than the blanket denial Alexander claimed from all his inquiries, Haldeman said “Yah, I think I heard something about it” but would go no farther. The key element to the story is that Coleman allowed Emenegger official government UFO footage to use in the documentary. The two main films provided were 1) A landing of a UFO at Holloman AFB in 1971, filmed by three separate cameras, where aliens are filmed coming out of a craft and meeting with base officials. 2) A film marked Top Secret of UFOs tracking a launch at Vandenberg AFB which is still in a private film vault. The killing joke came after the documentary was completed. At the very end of the production Bill Coleman called the film back to the Pentagon telling Emenegger and Sandler they could no longer use it. A man was supplied and he drove the film back across the country from LA to Washington in a car. Emenegger naturally asked Coleman why the film was being pulled, and Coleman told him that the Watergate scandal had changed things and the time was not right. It would be, according to Emenegger, one of many reasons Coleman would give him in the ensuing years as to why the film had been pulled. Emenegger said Coleman told him another time, “they were using classified lenses on the three cameras doing the filming and they didn’t want the Russians to know.” Another time Coleman told him the reason the film was pulled was that “we didn’t have diplomatic relations with the visitors.” Another time Emenegger was told the story that Coleman would give others asking for an explanation for the Holloman landing – an A-12 had a flameout and had to make an emergency landing at Holloman. Emenegger continued to ask and Coleman continued to come up with different explanations. Once, according to Emenegger, they were at a hot dog stand in the open area inside the Pentagon and Coleman said Emenegger could play 10 questions looking for a reason to the pulling of the film. Emenegger said he used up his 10 questions without getting an answer. Emenegger concluded that the Coleman himself probably didn’t know why the film had been pulled. After continued questioning Coleman came up with the killing joke. He told Bob that if he really wanted to know Coleman could take him out in a boat in the Atlantic (Coleman lives in Florida) and tell him the real reason why they had pulled the Holloman film, but then he would have to kill him. That is the true story of the joke and a version that clearly runs against Alexander’s thesis that there is no cover-up and no institutional interest. A final important part of the story that completes the Coleman connection is what happened when Emenegger asked Coleman years later, “Why did you help us and cooperate with us when we were making the documentary.” Coleman’s reply was, “When the Secretary of the Air Force tells you to do something you follow orders.” The Secretary of the Air Force at the time the documentary was being made was Robert Seamans Jr. – the same USAF Secretary that shut down Blue Book in 1969. If the Secretary of the Air Force is giving orders to supply help for a UFO documentary, providing film, and access to government officials on the UFO subject, that confirms institutional interest in UFOs, and a cover-up by some element controlling the hard evidence. The pattern clearly appears to be – control the hard evidence – then let people talk. Stories prove nothing. If that story isn’t enough to show a government active in the UFO field there is another chapter to the story. Later in the early 80s Emenegger and Sandler were contacted again this time by Bob Scott who was then the Pentagon agency head at the Defense Audio Video Agency (DAVA). With Scott was his assistant General Glen E. Miller who had been Reagan’s first agent in Hollywood. Both Scott and Miller were Reagan appointees. This is another story Alexander knows, and another story that runs completely contrary to his basic theory that the government is not involved. Scott and Miller met with Emenegger at his house and said “we liked what you did back then (UFOS: Past, Present, and Future – 1975) and we’d like to do something new.” Emenegger immediately asked if Reagan was behind the request but got no reply. General Miller invited J.A. Hynek to come to Norton and according to Emenegger “to see anything he wanted to about UFOs.” Everyone met at DAVA, and General Miller gave an order to Paul Shartle, DAVA Security Manager. Miller said “I would like you to get Hynek the UFO films. I want to show him.” The reply was “sorry Sir, you’ll have to give me a written directive to do that.” And Miller said, “God damn I’ll have your ass. You show him.” And Shartle said, “Sorry Sir, I can’t do that.” The grand finale of the Emenegger government story came in the late eighties when Emenegger was offered an interview with a live alien. It was the same offer that was being made in the same time period to Linda Howe, Whitley Streiber, Bill Moore, Jamie Shandera and others. Emenegger said that the interview never took place and that he thought it might just have been part of the disinformation that he believed was being put out in that time period. I asked Emenegger who had made the offer of the live alien interview. He said it had been made by Shartle, so I asked “was Shartle reliable or part of the disinformation stories inside the UFO community.” Emenegger replied, “Shartle was reliable.” Emenegger/Sandler dealt with officials that were in a position to know. The experiences they reported were consistent with officials whose government organizations were institutionally involved with UFOs. ConclusionOn the presidential front the evidence seems to support one of two scenarios. 1) The president is briefed and in control. Like many other subjects he is sworn to secrecy and doesn’t talk about UFOs. 2) The president “does not have a need-to-know” and “THEY” will only tell him if such a need arrives. The idea that various presidents have varying degrees of access best seems to be supported by the overall evidence. The idea that all presidents know everything and the government, it is telling the truth on UFOs, and the government is not involved in research on UFOs, is not well supported by the evidence. The idea that there is no cover-up is countered strongly by hundreds of witnesses testifying in relation to crashed UFO recovery stories such as the 1947 Roswell crash (600 witnesses) and Varginha Brazil (up to 50 with detailed and consistent information supporting an ET related crash recovery59). There are many witnesses testifying to the recovery of alien bodies by government militaries. There are reports and documented cases of documents or video evidence disappearing from key UFO cases investigated by government and military organizations. There is an excellent study of government UFO documents done by Larry Fawcett and Barry Greenwood in their book, “The UFO Cover-up: What the Government Won’t Say” that indicate a cover-up of the UFO facts by government is a reality. On the cover-up front it appears that there are two camps forming. A group of people who claim they have direct knowledge of a UFO cover-up and the group of people Alexander talked to who said they were not aware of a cover-up or UFO control group. Is it possible that all the people with direct evidence of a cover-up like Wilbert Smith, Shirley MacLaine, Steven Greer, Richard Dolan, General Exon, Edgar Mitchell, General Landry’s grandson, Emenegger, Lt. Col. Ron Blackburn, the hundreds of witnesses at Roswell, and hundreds of others telling similar stories not mentioned here are all lying, and Alexander’s people are all are telling the truth? As the expression goes, “Slim and none, and none just left town.” What would be the reason that the pro UFO cover-up witnesses to lie in that most are not bound by security oaths? What reason would Alexander’s witnesses have to lie keeping in mind that most have high level security clearances that if lost would end their career? The readers must decide for themselves because someone is lying. I think the answer is rather evident. Alexander’s situation is a follows. Whether or not there is a cover-up John Alexander does not have a UFO need-to-know. People who have a need-to –know on the UFO subject should not be talking to Alexander. It appears that is what has happened. Either that or Alexander has left out the evidence for a cover-up, and there is a lot of evidence of this in the book. If there is a cover-up Alexander like the president may be out of the loop as curiosity is not sufficient need. If the security system works like Alexander maintains, people would follow the rules and they would not be leaking classified information to Alexander. Most importantly if someone did violate their security oath and leaked classified information to Alexander he couldn’t put it in his book for fear that Alexander and the person talking would both end up in jail. On a positive note I believe Alexander is right on with his evaluation of what should be done to get at the truth. Alexander has proposed the following 1) The most senior representatives of the US government officially responsible for determination of classification (the president, DCI, and others) should state there is no classification of material as it relates to UFOs.60 This would save us the cost of more public investigations by government agencies or Congressional studies which will simply come back with “we don’t know and we need more study” or worse yet conclude “this is a total waste of time.” Moreover, If classified information was involved the congressional hearing would not even be public. We have millions of pieces of evidence (stories, photos, and documents) and spending taxpayer money to gather another million pieces of public information will get us no closer to an answer. The only evidence that would help is the possible classified aspects that a presidential determination could open up. Those that control the cover-up have made sure to control the hard evidence such as military films, bodies, military and intelligence investigation reports, and hardware. Examples of this are the seizing of the FAA data of the JAL 1628 flight over Alaska, the recovery of gun camera films, or the recovery of films taken during the Rendlesham Forrest incident. That, along with making key documents disappear such as happened with Roswell and Bentwaters, is all that is required. No one has been prevented from speaking as that kind of testimony proves nothing. The prime example of this is the missile silo operators who have talked about UFOs around their missile silos for years. Because they have no hard evidence their testimony becomes just another story in the thousands that are told. It is a three day news story and then it goes away. If the story gets some traction as Bill Moore’s 1980 release of his book The Roswell Incident did, you simply mix some chaff into the wheat with disinformation stories, and the researchers will eventually give up on it due to all the confusion disinformation caused. Another problem with the congressional hearing is that people hope they will come to a conclusion and thereby vindicate the UFO community. However, it takes of guts it takes to evaluate the UFO evidence and come to a conclusion, and the bipartisan congress is the last place to find guts or unanimous decisions. The presidential determination would also end the scorn associated with UFOs for people who would choose to testify, and help end the scorn associated with studying the subject. The present situation is that in the UFO community many researchers dare not openly conclude anything about the phenomena. Many researchers do not use the word ET and UFO as they believe it would discredit them as respectable researchers. This has caused many researchers to move toward the use of another acronym for UFO and to always conclude “we do not know what the phenomenon is. “ A presidential determination would cost almost nothing. It is the way we should go. The president simply declares that as far as he knows there is no cover-up. He then provides a blanket amnesty to anyone under a secrecy oath who wishes to come forward. If the president is given all the best information and there is no cover-up as Alexander maintains the president could easily make the determination, and no one will come forward. Alexander would be vindicated. If as I maintain there is a cover-up and the president knows and is not talking, the president will not grant amnesty. If there is a “THEY” running the cover-up and the president is “not cleared” the president will also not grant an amnesty as “THEY” will find a way to stop him. Time will tell. Let’s see what the president does. My bet is he will do nothing. 1 http://www.presidentialufo.com/jimmy-carter/98-the-marcia-smith-story-the-presidents-ufo-study 2 http://ufology.wikia.com/wiki/John_Callahan 3 John Alexander, “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities” Thomas Dunne Books, New York, page 105 4 Jimmy Carter Skeptical Guide to the Universe 5 Statement made before becoming president to the National Enquirer. We have the audio. 6 http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/landryr.htm 7 Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt, “Witness to Roswell” 2009 page 243 8 Richard Dolan has made the same argument stating that he is not a military person with a security clearance but he was able to come up with many sources willing to state unlike Alexander that there is active research taking place on UFOs. 9 Dick Cheney, The Diane Rehm Show, PBS Washington, April 11, 2001 10 Letter Wilbert Smith to Daniel Fry, October 28, 1955 11 http://www.presidentialufo.com/the-canadian-cover-up/149-top-secret-memo-text 12 http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/23/retired-army-colonel-says-ufos-are-real-but-denies-government-c/ 13 Alexander page 85 14 See Robbie Graham’s blog for a link to all his research. http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.com/ 15 The History Channel Documentary “The Presidents Book of Secrets” 2010 16 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_bush02.htm 17 Bush says Cheney Knows About UFOs” http://www.rense.com/general3/ufobush.htm 19 http://greyfalcon.us/restored/Project%20Silver%20Bug.htm. 20 Project 1947- Project Silver Bug 1955 http://www.project1947.com/fig/sb/page_iv.htm 21 Letter – Wilbert Smith to Gordon Cox Canadian Embassy, January 3, 1951 22 http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=51 23 http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/12insiders/Ron_Blackburn_001.html 24 Page 270 25 Ibid page 101 26 Ibid page 113 27 Alexander 155 28 ibid 29 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12613690 30 Interview of James Penniston by Angelia Joiner January 15, 2011 31 Linda Howe “8,500 More UFO Pages Released by U. K. Ministry of Defence – But RAF Bentwaters Files Are Missing, http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1822&category=Environment 32 FBI Meeting with Davenport? http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/feb/m10-001.shtml 33 http://ufoupdateslist.com/2005/oct/m03-012.shtml 34 http://www.oocities.org/topsecretresearch/saic.html 35 http://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2011/03/howell-mcconnell-ufo-man-from-nsa.html 36 Dr. Steven Greer interview with Art bell January 5, 1998 37 Cockburn, Andrew “The Radicalization of James Woolsey” New York Times magazine July 26, 2000 38 Alexander page 119 39 Speech, Disclosure Town Hall Meeting, Everett, Washington, September 11, 2001, also found in Disclosure Town Hall Meeting, Seattle, Vancouver, Canada, September 9, 2001 40 The Fed’ex sent to Greer by Petersen read re “I talked to Woolsey this morning and he (underlined in original) suggested getting together over dinner. He was not aware of your organization or that anyone was planning such an announcement (regarding UFOs/smg). 41 http://www.presidentialufo.com/old_site/part6.htm 42 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/disclosure/esp_disclosure_project_3.htm 43 CIA Role in the Study of UFOs 1947 -1997 https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/ufo.html 44 Alexander page 113 45 http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/137178 6 http://www.starpod.org/MP3/RON%20PANDOLFI.mp3 47 Phone conversation Dr. Ron Pandolfi with Dr. Scott Jones April 15, 1993 – Document in OSTP files released by the Clinton White House 48 Dick Farley who wrote the actual presentation that was made to Clinton’s Science advisor maintained to me that both Pandolfi and Kit Green confirmed to him that Green did go in later to brief the Science Advisor. 49 Debra Orin, “President Wanted UFO Probe, Former Official Says” New York Post, November 23, 1997 50 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3F3CXspsuo 51 Statement recorded by Dr. Steven Greer from a private conversation he had with Sarah McClendon. 52 E-mail, Dr. Jack Safatti to Dan Smith, SafattiScienceSeminar, Message 91, November 16, 2000. 53 http://www.presidentialufo.com/george_w__bush.htm 54 http://www.bestpossibleworld.com/nexu73.htm 55 http://bestpossibleworld.com/nexu53.htm 56 http://www.starpod.org/Psyche-Leaks/1102232.htm 57 Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs” p 279 58 Alexander 207 59 E-mail from A.J. Gavaerd March 11, 2011 |
The True Story of Area 51: A Look at the Actual Evidence
| Written by Grant Cameron | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 03 October 2011 18:29 | ||||||||||||||||||||
This paper is an analysis of the key facts behind the Bob Lazar S-4 story. It is intended for those who are already familiar with the basic story. It is not intended as a telling of the story.
General Overview of the Facts
The Bob Lazar story can be summed up best with two general opposing set of observations;
Of the many theories that have been floated to explain the Bob Lazar/ Area 51 story the theory that best seems to explain the various discrepancies and facts of the story is that this was a move to gradually disclose the basic fact that there was some sort of crashed saucer program at S-4. It was masked with various misdirections (some might use the word disinformation) to prevent researchers from obtaining solid proof of the saucer program and therefore end the cover-up. This disclosure conclusion is accepted by all the main participants as a possible answer to what had occurred to Bob Lazar.
“I’ve worked it longer than anyone and my opinion is that while it is not a black or white story and it is not clear as to what was going on whether Bob was really telling a revelation or whether he was telling a story that was supposed to be told. I don’t believe he was consciously telling some disinformation thing. I think he was led down a path. I think they let him see glimpses of stuff. They decided to pick someone who could be easily discredited after the story gets out and he was perfect for it. He had such crazy wild interests and had credentials that were not easily provable. They figured let’s see what happens when we tell this story of Area 51… I believe Bob really was out there. I believe he really did see some of this. He saw something that looks very much like flying saucers…I think maybe there are factions that wanted this story out. Would people really freak out? How would they react? It could very well be that they did have the intention – let’s tell this story. Bob gets discredited and then everyone will leave us alone, because we really do have exotic things flying around out there. No one will ever believe a story about what is flying around out here ever again… The effect was that they put it out and then pulled it back. They allowed Bob to spill the beans, allowed us to tell the story, and then in the eyes of a lot of people discredited him entirely.”1 When presented with this theory that Lazar had been taken to the base knowing that he would spill the beans and then get exposed, John Lear agreed and stated that he and Lazar had actually discussed the possibility; “That’s certainly plausible. I’ve always thought that it was possible they were trying to get the information out. They said Lear is interested in it. Let’s work this out so that he can get the information out. I’ve always told Bob (Lazar) that we tried our best but we didn’t do a very good job.”2 Lazar’s close friend Gene Huff said; When you extrapolate that out that there must have been some people that wanted to get it out and some who didn’t – right? I think there was a conflict there because if there was a consensus that they wanted to get it out it could have been accomplished. They certainly tried to prevent it after the fact. He asked them when he was there, “How do you keep this secret?” and they said it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. As long as you don’t prove anything one way or the other – as long as you keep people on the fence and ridicule those who believe or who have seen things, and dismiss the rest it is easy to keep secret because everyone wants to say there’s no life anywhere else that we have discovered.3 The time line of the Lazar story is supported by other apparent gradual disclosure events that were occurring at the same time. President Reagan was leaving office just as the Lazar story happened. Reagan had a big interest in the UFO subject, and researchers around at the time will remember that there was a lot of talk about Reagan disclosing the truth before he left office, including one rumor that stated Reagan would appear in a video message with the live alien.
Besides Falcon being in the audience, there were other indications that those in control might have been behind the show. The executive producer of the show was Michael Seligman who was working for Grey Advertising in New York. Grey had long faced the rumor in the UFO community that it was a front for the CIA. This does not mean that Seligman knew but that the CIA might just have used Grey without being visible in the whole process. Such a story would seem like typical UFO conspiracy theory, except that Grey Advertising had been connected to another UFO documentary where there was influence from government officials. In 1974 UFOs Past, Present, and Future was released. One of the producers of the show Bob Emenegger, was at the time a Vice-President for Grey advertising in Los Angeles. Emenegger stated that the documentary had nothing to do with Grey but it is possible higher ups arranged doing the documentary without his knowledge. Emenegger did confirm at least two items that indicated a CIA connection to the documentary. He did not know why but stated that there had been a CIA agent, Dick Betsy, present during the entire production. The second thing that Bob brought up was about his partner in the project Allen Sandler. Emenegger told British researcher Robbie Graham that Sandler, “did things for the CIA, and maybe even the FBI… they all seemed to work together.” Despite the bad reviews of UFO Cover–up Live by participants, in the succeeding years it has become apparent that there were items shown in the documentary that appeared to be ideas that officials may have wanted to get out that were carefully hidden within the documentary. These included
 Putting the Pieces TogetherConsider the following possible scenario.
John Lear had become interested in UFOs, and overnight became a prominent UFO figure just months before Lazar came on the scene. His family name alone made him a person whose word carried some weight. He had exposed the existence of Area 51, the Stealth fighter, and was attracting a lot of attention in Las Vegas and in the UFO community with lectures (including one to the Las Vegas chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers) and papers on the UFO cover-up. People were listening to him, and he was attracting big audiences. Although Lear was popular many in the UFO community at the time had doubts about some stories and conclusions that he was putting out. Lear knew this making a joke at one point that any question asked of Lazar that started with “John Lear says” would be answered with “John Lear is a nutball.” The questions about some of what Lear was saying by researchers would make him a perfect candidate for putting out a story that would get wide distribution but that would not be taken seriously. The targeting of Lear mirrored the targeting of earlier researchers and film producers who were used to get information out but keep everyone sitting on the fence when it came to the UFO reality. In the mid fifties Walt Disney was contacted by the military to produce a UFO documentary to help acclimatize the population about the UFO reality. He was promised actual UFO footage for the documentary. As he was finishing up on the documentary he was notified that the film would not be available He finished the project and released it without the film.
Despite not having the whole film, the idea that aliens had interacted with the military did get out, as Emenegger and Sandler told the story of the landing, described as “as an event that might have happened” using animation. Two of the researchers who were targeted to get out information were Linda Howe and Bill Moore. Linda Howe had gained UFO community and media prominence with her cattle mutilation documentary called A Strange Harvest. As she was preparing for a new HBO project on UFOs she was approached by AFOSI agent Richard Doty who told her she had upset people in Washington with her cattle mutilation documentary. He showed her a purported Top Secret UFO briefing for the President, and offered her actual film for the HBO project from the alien landing at Holloman AFB. Howe would later share what she had read in the briefing with the UFO community but was never able to verify any of the information in the document. The idea that there were numerous high-level UFO projects got out and a second message was delivered that there had been an alien landing at Holloman was repeated. Linda suffered little damage except for losing the HBO documentary caused by Doty’s failure to provide the film.
Moore was neutralized but the concept of MJ-12 would get out. In the succeeding years a dozen other witnesses would independently confirm the existence of MJ-12 – the Majestic group. One such confirmation was provided by John Lear’s mother who phoned her friend General Jimmy Doolittle on John’s behalf. Asked by Mrs. Lear if Majestic had existed Doolittle replied, “Yes Moya, it did, but that’s all I can say.” CIA’s Pandolfi told researcher Dan Smith that because the government can’t track the UFO phenomena they track the people who study it.6 It also appears that the government may not be able to control the UFO phenomena but they can control the researchers and film producers. As with Howe and Moore the idea was that Lear would be used to carry another key piece of the UFO story that they wanted out – the story of alien hardware and at least one alien at Area 51. Why they would want it out is somewhat speculative, but the concept of controlled releases has been discussed openly by Dr. Kit Green. As a former member of the CIA, Green had as part of his job for six years control of the “weird desk” which handled the phenomenology files including UFOs. Speaking with author Mark Pilkington, Green described gradual UFO disclosure.
Now that is a tried and tested desensitization model. And to the extent that there is a core story that is true, and to the extent that the people who want to get the core story out want to do it in a way that will not hurt the people, that’s what they would do – they come up with a bunch of nonsense, and then they get rid of it, gradually making the public more comfortable to that when they are finally presented with the truth, it’s not as frightening as they originally feared. “I can believe that,” they’ll say. “I didn’t believe the crazy reptile stuff, and I didn’t belief that they were abducting babies from wombs on beams of light. But I can believe the part about the spaceship and the back-engineered technology.”7 Lazar would carry the story of back-engineering alien technology. A true piece of the story would be mixed in with piles of material he would read in “briefings” presented to him on the first couple days at S-4 such as the aliens creating man through a series of genetic manipulations, the account of a battle with the aliens underground at Area 51, government projects on control of time and space, and deals with the Russians. As had happened with Bill Moore and the MJ-12 documents researchers would reject the alien Area 51 story it as just another UFO hoax, once everyone learned about Lazar questionable background, and the inconsistencies in the story. Like Moore whose career was ruined by his MJ-12 announcement, Lear would hopefully be silenced, or at least totally discredited. Bill Moore had introduced the existence of MJ-12 to the public and was silenced as a credible researcher. Lear would do the same for the Area 51 disclosure. The concept that there were crashed saucers at Area 51 would become installed in the public consciousness, and the necessary cover-up would be maintained. At least that was the plan. This gradual disclosure scenario begins to explain many of the inconsistencies that have always been a problem in the Bob Lazar story. Consider for example the fact that Bob Lazar fit none of the qualifications that would be needed for the job on the base. Even he himself admitted this saying it had “perplexed him” why he was hired at S-4. He confirmed in many interviews that there were many people available who would have been better qualified. His only real expertise was in jet engines as he had built one in a Honda he owned and talked about it with Dr. Teller who was his main reference on his resume. Lazar asks to work at Groom Lake where there are probably thousands of jobs dealing with jet engines where he might have some ideas to contribute. Yet, he is not hired for jet engine related job, but for one of 22 jobs at the base working on flying saucer back engineering. So why was he hired at S-4? The answer lies in his three interviews for the job. All three according to Lazar were mostly technical. The only oddball question was the first question in the second interview – tell us about your relationship with John Lear and what do you think of him? That’s how we know for sure that Lear was the target. That’s why Lazar was hired in the flying saucer program at S-4 instead of the jet engine program at Area 51. Those behind the plan wanted him there because of his association with Lear. Otherwise it makes no sense to place a friend of Lear’s in the Top Secret UFO program if the plan is to keep it secret. There are two possibilities of how authorities knew the Lear connection.
In 1987 Lear had written a paper for other researchers about crashed saucers and about things such as the aliens killing many scientists and Special Forces at an underground base at Dulce. Lazar brought back stories about crashed saucers and also about the alien killing of scientists and Special Forces. In the briefing he had seen, however, the incident had occurred at Area 51 and not Dulce. Lear would be interested in this underground battle story as he had written about it. In the same was Moore was interested in Roswell and therefore was fed the MJ-12 document which included details on the Roswell crash written up exactly as Moore had outlined the event in his 1980 Roswell book. Viewing the Lazar encounter at S-4 as a possible event that was planned from the beginning explains many of the inconsistencies that have always been part of the story.
Cover Story OptionOften when the Bob Lazar flying saucer story is brought up there are a substantial number of researchers who believe that the story was set up by the USAF as a cover story for the many earthly advanced aircraft that supposedly were being developed at Area 51. A cover story is a fictional version of a story that is put out to cover an organizations real actions or intentions.
Later, however, Hayakawa came to believe that the objects he had seen were not alien crafts but “our aircraft (such as prototypes of newer black triangular craft) (or possibly, the initial phases of test-flights of UAVs, or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, or even ‘unmanned combat aerial vehicles’ (UCAVs), or other remotely-controlled platforms.”10 The Lazar stories he believed may only have been a cover story. A key example of a confirmed cover story is the one that was used just after the first nuclear test at the Trinity site in July 1945. Because the explosion could be seen as far away as Texas, the military put out a cover story that there had been an ammunition magazine explosion at the Alamogordo Field. The public bought the story, they went back to their daily life, and forgot about what they had seen. That is how a cover story is supposed to work. If Bob Lazar’s Area 51 story was a cover story it did not work so well. In fact, it could easily go down as the worst cover story ever employed. If one googles the Pyramids of Giza you will come up with 1,370,000 hits. If you Google the Great Wall of China you will come up with 18,000,000 hits. If you Google Area 51 you will come up with 91,000,000. Area 51 has become one of the most famous places in the world. That’s the first thing that goes against the Area 51 story from being a cover story. Nobody forgot and nobody went back to their daily lives. The second thing that goes against the cover story explanation is the unlikely possibility that what Lazar and his group saw in March 1989, or what Hayakawa and his group saw in February 1990 were good old American technology. Hayakawa came to the conclusion that they were our aircraft such as black triangles, UAVs, or other remote control vehicles. However, the question must be asked in 2011. Did the USA have black triangles or UAVs twenty-one years ago that could duplicate the flight characteristics of a flying saucer? The argument that they did would be a tough sell. In addition to the lack of evidence that the USA had this very advanced technology back in 1990 the question arises as to whether there were even any advanced triangles and UAVs at Area 51 in 1990. Knapp came up with over two dozen witnesses that pointed to flying saucers being there. How many witnesses are there to prove that such things as advanced black triangles were being tested in 1990? Perhaps the rumored stories of star-trek like advanced aircraft such as black triangles and UAVs were just cover stories to cover for the flying saucers being tested at S-4. There seems to be more witnesses for the saucers at Area 51. A prime example showing that it is more likely that officials are using advanced aircraft to explain their inability to explain UFOs, than Top Secret planes being misidentified as UFOs can be seen in a UFO study put out by the CIA in 1997.11 The UFO study of CIA files was ordered by James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA Director. Woolsey had a UFO sighting and therefore had a personal interest. There may also have been pressure from Clinton for the study as he was looking into UFOs.
By Haines own figures commercial planes at this time were flying 10,000 to 20,000 feet and the U-2 was at 60,000. The pilots according to Haines would see the object high up and assume it to be a UFO. This would mean a difference of 40,000 to 50,000 feet between the plane and the U-2. (The U-2 would later fly at 70,000 and the SR-71 at 80,000 so the numbers used above by Haines are the most conservative numbers possible.) Most people have seen commercial airlines fly overhead. They now fly at 35,000 to 40,000. Most people would agree that the human eye would not be able to see the airliner unless there was a contrail that gives it away. Even then the object at the head of the contrail is no more than a speck in the sky. In the CIA argument the minimum number of feet between the commercial plane and the U-2 or SR-71 would be 40,000. The maximum would be 70,000 feet for an SR-71 at 80,000. Given this information what are the chances 50% of all UFO sightings were from pilots seeing objects at least 40,000 feet above their altitude, or from ground witnesses where the spy plane is 60,000 to 80,000 feet above the ground? The chances are zero and none. The CIA knew that scientists, the media, and conservative UFO researchers were so desperate for a natural explanation for UFOs that they would fall for the CIA conclusion that their spy planes were causing half of all UFO sightings. Given the facts presented in the 1997 CIA study, the rational conclusion of the facts is that the CIA was trying to explain away unexplained UFOs sighting in their files, and their role in the UFO mystery. They did this by using spy planes as a cover for UFOs, not the other way around. The CIA study also backs up the idea that cover stories are used after the fact to cover something that has become a public problem. If a cover is used before it tends to jeopardize the secrecy of a program. The biggest drawback to the Lazar story being a cover story comes when we put the story in its proper historical perspective. Today Area 51 is a household word where almost everyone in the world knows what it is. However, prior to May 1989, when Lazar was first shown in a KLAS-TV interview, 99.99999% of the world had no idea what Area 51 was. It was in the pre-Internet days where only a couple people in Las Vegas would have seen a story on it. Here is the historic situation prior to the May 1989 Lazar interview. No one in the public, except John Lear and a couple hikers even knew there was even a base there. There were mountains hiding the base and it was in the middle of an inhospitable desert where few people dared to travel. From 1955 till 1989 officials had been able to test various Top Secret planes in complete secrecy. In 1985 they grabbed 49,000 more acres of land to keep out hikers, installed heavy security around the base complete with cameras, ground motion detectors, and signs with threat to kill messages to anyone who chose to get closer. It doesn’t get much more quiet, secure and secret than that. Like all other Top Secret military facilities in the United States, and around the world, those at Area 51 quietly went about their Top Secret work for the national security of the country. The cover story explanation expects the researcher to believe that one day in late 1988, the officials running the base decided to all take off their clothes, run onto the Las Vegas strip with their hair on fire, waving their hands, and yelling “Area 51 Area 51 Area 51”. Why would anyone call attention to the base when it was totally unknown to the public, and completely secure? Why is this (and possibly Kirkland AFB with the Bennewitz story) the only places where officials decided to put all their secrecy and security at stake by calling attention to what was going on at the base? Was all this to deceive a small number of researchers with no public influence? The basis of all military secrecy is to keep quiet and out of the mind of the enemy. Yelling Area 51 while running around naked with your hair on fire tends to go against that basic rule. One idea that was put forward to back the cover story idea is that the flying saucer story at Area 51 is one that would attract Russian spies who would get caught outside the base. Would officials really draw attention to everything going on at this massive Top Secret base to catch a spy? Strangely, the “Russians spy” story had actually been presented by base security to Lazar to get him to feel patriotic and aware of the ever present enemy. In a story much more creatively written than the one that was hinted to Bill Moore about Kirkland AFB, Lazar was told that the Russians had actually been partners at S-4 working to back-engineer the saucers. There had been a breakthrough by the American side at which point they threw the Russians off the base. Now they roamed the streets of Las Vegas trying to bribe S-4 workers for information. When an S-4 worker did not show up for a couple days, Lazar was told they feared the Russians had him. Lazar’s security boss Dennis Mariani took Lazar down to the local police detachment and had him registered to carry a gun. There were Russians and saucers both at Kirkland, Dulce, and Area 51. There was a chance of a Russian spy being gunned down in downtown Las Vegas. The only thing missing was the weapons of mass destruction. It was just like a James Bond movie. What would the military mind do without an enemy? In 1989 the Russians were the flavor of the year. How would the Russians spies get back on the base? Would they phone up Knapp or Lazar and get instructions? How would base security know who the spies were among the hundreds of people who showed up outside the base every night after the story broke? Another problem would be that the perimeter base security had no authority to arrest anyone and the Russians would be watching from public land. Would the Russians risk an agent when all they would have to do is reprogram their satellite to photograph the base? Would the Groom Lake officials run a cover story when they knew that it would simply cause the Russians to reprogram their satellites? The Russian reaction, according to Knapp who was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, was that they did use their satellites to take a look. They changed their satellite to check the base everyday instead of once or twice a month. In one meeting Knapp had a General handed him a photo of S-4 that was taken in 1988. Would the Area 51 officials employ an unneeded cover story knowing that they would expose everything happening at Area 51 to increased scrutiny from enemies of the United States? The logical course of action would be to do what all Top Secret bases do – not attract attention to the fact you are there and only use a cover story to cover things that get exposed. An example of the risk of not just shutting up comes from an incident where President Jimmy Carter leaked to the press the fact that the USA had Stealth technology. It caused anger at Skunkworks because how they knew the Russian satellites would be trained on the production facilities watching who came and went and what went in and out of the buildings. In a similar way Carter outed the remote viewing program when he publicly told a story of a “psychic” who had located a downed plane (a Russian TU-22 supersonic bomber being used as a spy plane) in Africa that American intelligence officials were unable to find after an extensive search. Dr. Russell Targ, one of the directors of the program, wrote that the unwanted commendation exposed the Top Secret program and the only thing they could do to minimize the damage was change the code-name for the program. Secrecy is the rule. The cover story explanation is shaky at best. The Lazar story, if true, seems to present one of three options. Officials brought Lazar in to work on the flying saucers not knowing that he would spill the beans, or it was a story they wanted out bad enough that they were willing to have every spy agency in the world to now pay close attention to what was going on at Area 51. The third most probable explanation is that they wanted the saucer story out but they misread what would happen. They thought the media would run its usual three day coverage, and the flying saucer story would get into the UFO world. Lastly, the public and the spies would lose interest after all the inconsistencies in Lazar’s story became public. What they didn’t count on was George Knapp. Lear was the planned target. He would widely publicize the story the plan was that it would not get any serious attention. Lear, however, simply handed the story off to Knapp who carried out a six month investigation. During this investigation he would uncover enough witnesses validating the Lazar claim to justify staying with the story. Reporters usually can’t do this because they have to get to the next story. News is a business, and new stories are the life blood of what sells. Knapp did something that was totally unexpected. Instead of a short segment ridiculing the UFO story, as all other reporters had done, he ran the Lazar claims to ground and went public with what he had discovered. This tenacity by Knapp, along with a public interest in UFOs, caused the story to go viral, or as Knapp described it “like a tsunami traveling around the world.” This is what officials had not expected. Every major news outlet in the world took time to travel to Area 51 or at least to do a story. The story continued to grow. All the Area 51 officials could do is continue to deny the base’s existence, use presidential decrees to keep themselves out of jail, and take over another 5,900 acres to stop the busloads of people who were now up in the hills (called by Newsweek the Groom Lake bleachers) from looking down every night at the base and hoping to see a flying saucer. The base took a call from John Podesta, the President’s Chief of Staff, asking if they had saucers at the base. President Clinton said so many people in his administration believed there was a saucer and an alien at Area 51 that he sent someone to the base to check it out. There was a congressional representative who did an investigation on the rumors. He indicated to Knapp the cover-up at the base was going on because those in charge were afraid they would end up in jail if exposed. All of this for a cover story when the base was secure, quiet and unknown before Lazar? It doesn’t seem highly likely looking back. Once the media storm had quieted down, and once Area 51 officials were able to close down all the places where people could watch the base activities, the officials did exactly what they should have done before they brought Lazar on the base. They secured the base, said nothing, and went about their business. It is exactly what every other Top Secret military base does, and why using a “we’ve got a flying saucer” cover story doesn’t make much sense. The theory that the Lazar/S-4 story not created as a cover story, does not negate the fact that American intelligence would have watched the Russian (Soviet Union) reaction to the Lazar/S-4 story, and would have exploited it after the fact if they could. American intelligence would be watching Russian reaction to all things being done in America, the release of the final Blue Book study, or the release of the Federal Budget, or the appointment of a foreign ambassador. The study of these various Russian reactions, and the secret government behind the reactions, became known as Kremlinology.
1 George Knapp interview of John Lear and Gene Huff, Coast to Coast AM Radio, March 22, 2009 |
Knapp, who conducted the biggest investigation of the case, came to this conclusion;
Lazar was hired only five weeks after the UFO documentary “UFO Cover-up Live” which was hyped prior to its airing as a disclosure effort by those controlling the UFO secret. Most of the people involved in the documentary didn’t like participating because the whole production was carefully scripted. Everyone was forced to read from cue cards, and the material on the cue cards was not what they had written. No one knew who had written the material on the cue cards. In the small audience of less than a dozen quietly sat the Falcon from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was Falcon who had contacted Bill Moore for almost a decade providing him the whole MJ-12 and Project Aquarius story.
The whole story centers not on Bob Lazar but on John Lear. Lazar is only a pawn in the game.
In 1974 Bob Emenegger and Allan Sandler signed a contract with the Pentagon to produce another UFO documentary. They received cooperation from all the military and intelligence officials they contacted. As part of the deal they were promised, and actually had in their possession, film of an actual landing of aliens at Holloman AFB. At the last moment, like Disney before them, the film was pulled at the last moment and was delivered back to the Pentagon from Los Angeles where the documentary was being produced. They were, however, allowed to put eight seconds of the video for the documentary not involving the landed craft or aliens.
The next researcher target after Howe was Bill Moore who had become a target following the release of his co-authored book The Roswell Incident. The book was a heavily documented account of the 1947 Roswell UFO crash. It sold over a million copies and propelled him to the top of a list of respected UFO investigators. Only nine days after the book’s release he was contacted twice by a DIA agent code-named Falcon with the message that he was the only one who knew what he was talking about, and5 “he represented a group of highly placed people who were unhappy with the secrecy surrounding the UFO subject, and wanted someone they could trust in order to release the information to the public but “without breaking the law.” Moore was fed a series of documents including the now infamous MJ-12 documents. He spent a number of years studying them and was not sure about them. He, however, was forced to release then in 1987 when Falcon informed him that they were about to be released in Britain. Moore released the documents which was the beginning of the end of his UFO career. He was unable publicly verify the documents and faced numerous accusations that he had hoaxed the documents. After telling the story of his interactions with Falcon he withdrew from the field a few years later.
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 (describes the core story which is distilled core of the information known about the subject that in 1986 that he Hal Puthoff, and Jacques Vallee had agreed on – “The ETs came here, maybe once , maybe a few times. Either through accident of by design, the US government acquired one of their craft. The only problem is that the physics that powered the craft were so advanced that for decades we humans have struggled to understand it or to duplicate it.”)…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.
A prime example of the idea that the Lazar story was a cover story was presented by Norio Hayakawa who met with Bob Lazar in February 1990 almost a year after Lazar went public with his claim about flying saucers at S-4. After the interview Lazar gave Hayakawa instructions about when and where he could go to watch the UFO tests for himself. After driving to the spot Lazar had told him to go, Hayakawa described that he and others with him “observed a bright orangish light appearing over the Groom Mountains and (it) made some interesting maneuvers. I was quite impressed at that time. Around 7:15 p.m., another light came up.” Hayakawa stated the object zigzagged and was exhibited extraordinary maneuverability. Later analysis of the picture showed a “domed structure – a disc.” Hayakawa stated that he was very excited and the incident began an interest in Area 51 that continues to this day.
The final report was written by NRO historian Gerald Haines who came up with the conclusion that a lot of UFOs were actually the U-2 and SR-71. “According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project,” wrote Haines, “over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.”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 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 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;
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” [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” [13] Gary Bekkum, “UFO Spy Games:The Face of the Core Story Part Two” http://stargate007.blogspot.ca/2009/07/ufo-spy-games-face-of-core-story-part-2.html#!/2009/07/ufo-spy-games-face-of-core-story-part-2.html [16] Mark Pilkington, “The Mirage Men” Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, Page 278 |
meaning in light of the disclosure by researcher 
supporting 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)
cover 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.
to 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).Gordon Novel, the CIA, and the Potus Briefing Bus
| Written by Grant Cameron |
| Tuesday, 12 March 2013 05:23 |
| “I’m not a CIA agent. I’m affiliated, I work with, and we have a mutual admiration society based upon my relationship with the individuals I work with…. The CIA has multiple sides but it’s been my experience over the years that they’re basically the only good guys in the entire United States government. They’re really patriots. Most of ‘em are patriots and I’ve never known… I personally have never known them to do anything criminal, ever… So I can tell you that my experience with ‘em has been like dealing with Eagle Scouts.” Gordon Novel
On October 3, 2012 UFO researcher Gordon Novel died. He had become famous in the UFO world for a number of stories. One of those stories is the story of the Potus Briefing, which was a film project effort to force a disclosure on UFOs from the President of the United States. http://www.disclosureproject.org/email-update-october-24-2009.shtml Greer’s short history with Novel and Pandolfi is detailed by researcher Ed Komarek at http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0309/arena2.php The publicly known Potus Briefing is simply a script prepared for Steven Spielberg on UFO disclosure. It is not a government document as some have been falsely posting. The whole Potus Briefing script proposal has been posted for a long time by John Hutchison and there is a link to it at http://pesn.com/2011/11/20/9601961_Pontus_Briefing_Eyes_Only_–_UFO_Documentary_Coming/ Novel was the key person behind the script. Parts of the Potus Briefing were written by Richard Dolan and Jim Marrs at Novel’s request. Now that Novel is dead it appears he has been thrown under the Potus Briefing bus by Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, the rumored person in charge of the UFO subject at the CIA. In response to the publication of the Potus Briefing story in the book “UFOs, Area 51, and Government Informants” Pandolfi has gone public accusing Novel of creating a hoax. “Looks like something Gordon Novel created as part of a scam,” Pandolfi wrote in a recent email. “Hard to believe anyone falling for this scam.” In death Novel can no longer defend his version of the story. Were he still alive, the reader would definitely be hearing his take on statements that have just been made. Being that Novel is dead and can no longer speak, let me tell the small part of his story that I know. I will tell the story with the help of Dan Smith who was Pandolfi’s best man for his recent marriage, and who told me that over the years he has had at least 1,000 conversations with Pandolfi. He has been told by Pandolfi that he speaks for him. [1]The only problem with using Smith as a source is that Pandolfi has stated that Smith “makes stuff up.” In the same vein Pandolfi is now on record as saying that I like Smith make stuff up. Therefore buyers beware. Someone in this story, whether it be Smith, Pandolfi, Novel or myself, is making stuff up. For most readers that will create a state of confusion. That, after all is probably how the government tells the UFO story. You take the truth, fictionalize it to protect the classified key elements, create confusion, and then put it out to the public. As far as I know the first time that Gordon Novel spoke publicly about the Potus Briefing – Eyes Only movie proposal was June 2, 2010 on the New Realities Show with Alan Steinfeld. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbKaWuwDkuk In this video Novel actually holds the script proposal up to the camera and explains clearly what it is. Novel tells Steinfeld “We (Novel and his Replicated Alien Machine (RAM) group of which he claimed Pandolfi was a member) are trying to make a movie “Potus Briefing – Eyes Only – the supreme cosmic secret – which is what we are trying to do in Hollywood. It’s a total expose of it. We want to be the disclosure – the full blown disclosure of the whole thing. So we’ve got a) the technology and b) we’ve got all the information because we know where all the bodies are buried. A lot of bodies are buried out there…I think we are going to make a movie – the most sensational movie in the history of the world. It is going to expose the whole thing. Then I think there is going to be a hue and cry and demand from people who are going to say, ‘You mean I can be rich if you release this technology. We are all rich’… we are going to create the demand for it and Congress is going to have to satisfy the demand for it. They going to say ‘All these guys are criminals. They’re covering it up.’ … Potus briefing will expose all the politics and how everything fits together. Asked by Steinfeld how he could prove that the CIA was taking him seriously, Novel replied, “How many people do you know can go around Hollywood handing out scripts (at which he picks up the script and points to it.) with this on “Prepared for the Central Intelligence Agency and Steven Spielberg – Potus Briefing – Eyes Only – Classification Umbra Red – Supreme Cosmic Secret – US government Liaison Control Officer Dr. Ronald Pandolfi… Proposed Official Government Disclosure Program.” Isn’t that about as formal and official as it gets?” “Why aren’t they stopping you?” asked Steinfeld. “Because I have their authority,” replied Novel. “I have their authority to put those seals there. They all know that this is going on.” “They’re for this disclosure?” asked Steinfeld. “Sure,” Said Novel. Pandolfi would of course deny that he and/or the CIA gave any authorization of help to Novel. I know this to be untrue based on three pieces of evidence
In reply to this posting Pandolfi replied but did not deny the Spielberg meetings, “Effective sponsorship of a conference requires honesty and integrity. Please delete all the fabrications and nonsense.”[3] In 2009 Dan Smith posted information related to the Potus Briefing Hollywood script and the related to the Potus briefing document that would be given to President Obama – referred to in the messages as Barry. According to Smith Pandolfi was backing the Potus Briefing effort but would not sign a letter to Spielberg on behalf of the CIA/government. Gordon’s latest effort is a POTUS Briefing film treatment. Gordon, evidently would like to use Stephen Spielberg’s proposed film as a vehicle for briefing Barry. And he is mad at Ron for refusing to sign a letter to Stephen S., to this effect. Ron’s signature on that letter would constitute an official briefing of the President. We don’t know where Ron is on this issue, since any communications that he may have with the WH are privileged. What we do know is that Ron has direct access to the President. He does not need Stephen S. to serve as an intermediary.[4] Novel had demanded the signed letter to Spielberg in a December 22, 2009 letter to Pandolfi when he got the indication Pandolfi was backing out of a previous oral and written agreement. I am therefore now also concluding the official letter to Steven Spielberg will also not be forthcoming and therefore will constitute a further breach of our long term agreement to develop RAM GRAVONICS and PB-EO. The letter to Mr. Spielberg in accord with our previous verbal and written understandings in this matter is now formally requested by electronic transfer to myself and Mr. Sarnoff and Ramsey Clark within the next 24hours. Should this request for this document not be processed, forthcoming and received as heretofore agreed by you in this time period allotted, we will consider this as a full and total breach of our long term agreement and will legally proceed accordingly. I hope you enjoy Dancing With This Wolf in 2010. See you in the funny papers. Merry Christmas Gordon Novel[5] On January 12, 2010 Novel wrote Pandolfi again. His letter indicated strongly that Pandolfi was part of the Spielberg script initiative but was now backing out. Moreover, you haven’t followed through a scintilla on preparing Spielberg’s invitation to meet with you after a great expenditure in time, effort and money to prepare our PB-EO film production Disclosure presentation plan to him and a retinue of famous film makers we are now actively seeking to join an unfixable and politically undefeatable alliance to make this film of the greatest story never told. We would not have done this seminal production work preparation without your encouragement and support in doing so for the past few years.[6] Despite Pandolfi claim that the Potus Briefing was nothing more than a scam document created by Novel, the available evidence shows something much different. It shows clearly that Pandolfi, as Novel always claimed had (with the CIA) backed him on his movie project but for some reason pulled that support in 2009. Jim Marrs who reported wrote part of the document commented that the document was not a scam by Novel as is now being claimed by Pandolfi. Speaking as someone who was involved he backed up what has appeared above in this article. It is wrote Marrs a real document. It’s just NOT official. The POTUS Briefing Paper was prepared by Gordon Novel but NOT as a scam. It was his hope and plan that it would be presented to the president in an effort to make him aware of the anti-gravity technology that exists now and should be used to provide new transportation technology, and perhaps even free non-polluting energy. It was Gordon’s way to produce this document as if it had official standing, NOT as a fraud but as a sales tool. It was supposed to appeal to Government/military types. The people listed are scientists and officials who indeed were either working with Gordon or in communication with him. Some of these supported his work while others were simply kept informed of his plans. Deep and serious consideration should be given both Gordon’s research and his attempt to new technology to the world.[7] Due to the fact that Novel is now dead, the whole story will go down with the rest of the stories in ufology which show that the government has been a part of some gradual disclosure acclimatization of the American public. This program has worked well. However, part of the plan is that like other disclosures the solid evidence remains elusive and researchers are left with just shadows indicating that the government is doing something behind the scenes. [1] The Pandolfi Smith relationship is very important and yet confusing. For example in a January 18, 20120google chat conversation between Smith and Pandolfi there is the following exchange, Smith: Shall I tell Gary (Bekkum) that you are ready to be interviewed about Gordon? Pandolfi: and of course Washington Post reporters were good investigators in those days as always you should tell Gary that you speak for me! Smith: Gary should ask Gordon for specifics. Pandolfi: And speaking for me, tell Gary that [I] think he is a lunatic. Yet in a e-mail from Pandolfi to Bekkum two days later Pandolfi wrote, “The fact that you have verified some information that appeared on Dan’s blog does not make Dan’s information generally reliable nor does it substantiate his rather insane claim that he speaks for me. A deep background source should be a very reliable source. Dan is not. At a minimum, you should offer me an opportunity to clarify or comment on Dan’s claims before you publish.” Smith described this discrepancy in Pandolfi as “example of the fact that Ron has to wear two hats…… One hat when communicating privately(?) with me, and another when communicating publicly about me.” [2] http://lucianarchysoriginalopenminds.web44.net/index12c5.html?board=dansmithsom&action=display&thread=6644&page=3 [4] http://lucianarchysoriginalopenminds.web44.net/index12c5.html?board=dansmithsom&action=display&thread=6644&page=3 [5] ibid [6] http://lucianarchysoriginalopenminds.web44.net/index4ac9.html?board=dansmithsom&action=display&thread=7268 [7] E-mail Jim Marrs to Victor Martinez, March 11, 2013 |
Connected to this effort there was a second briefing document which was sent to President Obama. This second Putus Briefing was headed up by Dr. Steven GreerDisclosure Pattern 1985-90
| Written by Grant Cameron |
| Tuesday, 25 August 2009 12:08 |
| 1985 – 1989
Possible Target or Courier – Howard Blum New Concepts Introduced
According to award winning New York Times reporter Howard Blum, “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.” He approached Pulitzer winning New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh for help on the story. Hersh was upset that Blum would pursue such a story and appeared not to be interested. Two days later, however, he phoned Blum to confirm there was some secret working group working on UFOs but that Blum would have to get the story on his own. Blum managed to find one of the NSA members who sat on the super secret inside group called the UFO Working Group. Blum is able to piece together the story from there. The UFO Working Group was a spin-off of the remote viewing program and more specifically the “coordinate remote viewing” CRV program. One version of the story as told by Blum states that the whole thing started during a meeting held in the secure vault of President Reagan’s Scientific Advisor George Keyworth in the fall of 1985. Dr. Hal Puthoff, then running the SRI remote viewing program, explained that Ingo Swann, a viewer, would demonstrate ” A new perceptual channel through which individuals are able to perceive and describe remote data not presented to any known sense.” A short series of precise geographical coordinates were read to Swann and he proceeded to describe a building that once the target was revealed turned out to be the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev. Following this, a demonstration took place to show how the displayed “scannate” technology could be used in antisubmarine warfare. Swann was shown a series of pictures of submarines, some American, some Soviet, some in dry dock, some not built yet. His job was to provide the exact coordinates of each submarine. As he was set to call up the coordinates of a Soviet Delta-class submarine in one of the photographs, he stopped and reported that he saw something above the submarine. Asked to draw it on a piece of paper he drew a classic image of a flying saucer. A report was made by the SRI team of the incident and sent to the DIA who was the “primary client.” About this same time money from the Army for the CRV program was withdrawn, and the entire program moved to DIA. The Swann submarine incident led to a DIA/Navy Intelligence sponsored program to use scannate to search for soviet submarines. According to Blum’s information, the DIA was able to detect at least 17 UFO objects connected to Soviet submarines over the next 14 months. The project was called Project magnet and the DIA Directorate for Management and Operations supervised it. More importantly, the incidents of the “hovering UFOs” around submarines provided an inspiration to Col. John Alexander, then Director, advanced concepts US Army Lab. Command, Aldelphi, MD. He proposed that the DIA Project Aquarius viewers should view an area above Kickaboo, Texas. It was there that NORAD reported an unknown object had tripped a manmade electromagnetic fence extending up to 15,000 miles above the earth. The three viewers all were asked to view anything unusual at that latitude and longitude in the last 48 hours. By the end of the day all three CRV viewers had send back drawing of a UFO. With this addition evidence in hand Alexander convinced the DIA to set up a “top-secret working group to investigate the possibility that extraterrestrials were making contact with this planet.” Based on this psychic confirmation of a UFO event obtained by radar, the UFO Working Group was formed in February 1985. Col. John Alexander sent out the invitations for others he had chosen to generate a top-secret review of the UFO situation.
Col. John B. Alexander Armen Victorian who squared off with Alexander during the period Howard Blum was researching the UFO Working Group, described Alexander’s role, and the start-up of the group this way, John Alexander’s position as the Program Manager for Contingency Missions of Conventional Defense Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratories, enabled him to exploit the Department of Defense’s Project Reliance “which encourages a search for all possible sources of existing and incipient technologies before developing new technology in-house” to tap into a wide range of exotic topics, sometimes using defense contractors, e.g., McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. I have several reports, some of which were compiled before his departure to the Los Alamos National Laboratories when he was with Army Intelligence, which show Alexander’s keen interest in any and every exotic subject–UFOs, ESP, psychotronics, anti- gravity devices, near-death experiments, psychology warfare and non-lethal weaponry. Having received a lead on the group Blum decided to investigate the UFO Working Group. The story of what he discovered was written up in a widely distributed 1990 book, “Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials.” One UFO newsgroup reader described the Blum book as “the interesting process of turning bullshit into history.” Many other UFO researchers quickly echoed that assessment, and the book ended up receiving little support from with the UFO community. In reality, those who claim to have been involved, claim the book is 90% accurate. These are the same people who were in the secure vaults when the 1985 meetings occurred. Blum described the UFO Working Group as a group trying to “settle this UFO question once and for all”. The men trying to settle the question were a group of men who had each had some contact with black budget programs and government security. There are three views as to exactly what the UFO Working Group was. The first view is that they were a group who knew much more than the average researcher, but they were not the top-level group Blum made them out to be. They were a group scientists, military personnel, and intelligence analysts who basically sat around a table and shared anecdotal information and scuttlebutt they had heard directly or second hand through the black budget community or through the chain of command. They looked at the relationship of various programs to UFO program that all believed existed somewhere in the black budget of the United States government. The second view, exemplified by Howard Blum’s account is that the group was a highly classified compartmentalized group working inside the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Management and Operations which had been given great power to attack the UFO problem. The DIA Connection Blum makes a number of references in his book as to the UFO connection to the UFO Working Group. This DIA tie-in is interesting because it parallels stories being told at the same time by Bill Moore and others about the key role in the UFO hierarchy played by the DIA. (complete story)· The third view is the one put forward by researchers like Jacques Vallee who believed that “the Colonel Phillips secret group is not the real secret group. It is only the latest carrot dangled in front of a public always eager for new revelations… There is clearly an endless supply of such stories, and they are always volunteered to people who are prone to believing them but have no ability to check them.” The UFO Working group, according to all accounts, was able to field CIA assets under cover to investigate UFO sightings. Blum pointed out one case in Wisconsin where two CIA officers were sent impersonating NASA engineers. This type of internal CIA investigation was possible because of President Ronald Reagan’s signing of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to operate within the United States under certain conditions. The UFO Working Group was a “group of insiders who were looking for the insider group.” They were desperately seeking the crashed flying saucers, and MJ-12 group just like the rest of Ufology. They believed, according to some, that there was an unknown mysterious engineering project run by either Admiral Bobby Ray Inman or General John J. Sheehan. A lot of black budget money was known to be flowing in that direction. No one, however, seemed able to get anything concrete on the group. They had an advantage in seeking the answer in that they knew some of the black secrets of the government. In addition, they were able to talk to other high-ranking people who would speak to them because of their backgrounds. The UFO Working Group came together to work on the UFO problem, knowing that together they could share and achieve more than by working alone. They worked on four main problems;
Many of the 17 men in the UFO Working Group would go on to become members of another top-secret chat group known as the Aviary. In fact, the UFO Working Group might just have been how the Aviary came together. This informal group became famous for their connections to researcher Bill Moore in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They went by bird names that allowed them to talk among each other without everyone knowing who they were. At least that was the plan. Many of UFO Working Group, turned Aviary, went on to become members of the National Institute of Discovery Sciences (NIDS), started up by Nevada billionaire Robert M. Bigalow. NIDS like the other two groups provided the members to share their common goal of understanding the truth of the UFO mystery. The head of the UFO Working Group given the name “Col. Howard Phillips” by Blum was actually Col. John Alexander (Penguin). Alexander was former director of non-lethal weapons testing at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. This is a fact that has been posted on UFO discussion boards only months after the book came out in 1996. Other members of the UFO Working Group included former CIA scientist Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green (Blue Jay); USAF Colonel Ron Blackburn, former microwave scientist and specialist at Kirkland Air Force Base; Dr. Hal Puthoff (Owl), former member of the NSA and one of the original researchers who developed the protocols for remote viewing with Ingo Swann; Dr Jack Verona (RAVEN), one of the Department of Defense initiators of the DlA’s Sleeping Beauty project which aimed to achieve battlefield superiority using mind-altering electromagnetic weaponry; Ronald Pandolfi, chief scientist for the CIA (Pelican); Dr. Robert Wood at McDonald Douglas who would go on to become the chief researcher of the 3700 pages of documents leaked in the 1990s from six different intelligence sources; Hal McConnell from the NSA; and Major General Albert Stubblebine, the Commander of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Ninety percent of the UFO Working Group meetings took place in the BDM secure vault in McCLean, Virginia. This is because group member General Stubblebine was the Vice-President of BDM at the time. Only one meeting occurred in the Defense Intelligence Agency secure vault. They were trying to become an official government sponsored group looking for the answer, but failed to get the funding. “They seem like a loose-knit, unofficial discussion group called together on the authority of Phillips, a self-appointed UFO guru within the agency,” says Larry W. Bryant, who directs the Washington, DC, office of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) When ten sessions had been completed of the UFO Working Group John Alexander compiled the information they had gathered in a briefing book. It was presented to the then ready to retire defense authority. He, however, did not want the controversy. He denied the request to officialize the UFO Working Group into a formal government funded and operated group. The UFO Working Group folded but most of the members continued to interact in what became known as the Aviary. In the end of his book Blum concluded based on the material he had been fed, that he had not found the conclusive proof for UFOs. The actual UFO working group arrived at this same conclusion. In fact Blum became convinced that much of the governments silence was due to the vast amounts that it did not know.
1986 Potential Targets or Couriers – Len Stringfield Captain Robert Collins approaches researcher Len Stringfield, while Collins is still stationed at Wright-Patterson. Collins phones him once a week. He offers highly technical papers, and “a meeting with a Colonel who possessed a lot of information.” Stringfield refuses to reveal his sources, and Collins breaks off the correspondence and moves on to contact Bruce Maccabee. Collins told me “I found him too unreliable and dropped him.” As to his connection with the Falcon, Collins stated, “Since being friends with Bill and having a strictly personal interest in UFOs I also knew and understood effective CI methods to cover the identity of a confidential source. Bill was familiar with these methods. Both the use of my name and Doty’s to cover the identity of “Condor” and “Falcon” worked very well for over 21/2 years. The tracks were covered just enough now so that it is doubtful that the real “Condor” or “Falcon” will ever be found. To this day I don’t know who they are and Bill won’t tell me! 1987 Potential Target or Courier – Lee Graham Lee Graham was an aerospace worker at Aerojet Electrosystems in Azusa, California who was shown documents like the MJ-12 and Aquarius by Bill Moore, prior to their public release. He eventually took the documents to his superiors and came under intense security by the Defense Investigative Service (DIS). Moore who provided the documents, however, was never investigated by DIS even though Lee Graham insisted an investigation should take place. In 1987 two men paid an intimidating visit to Lee Graham’s workplace. One of the men identified himself as FBI Special Agent William Hurley. The second man dressed in civilian clothes, who did not identify himself, turned out to be Major General Michael Kerby, USAF, who at the time of the visit was Director of the Air Force Legislative Liaison office. The bulk of the one-hour interview was encouragement and congratulations for disseminating the MJ-12 document to the public. In addition to this “pep talk,” Graham was shown the then Top Secret designation of the F-117 ‘Stealth’ fighter, by Kirby who had been in command of the operational aspects of the fighter while he was stationed at Nellis AFB. This was an item of interest to Graham, who had been seeking it through FOIA requests for years. Strangely, Graham learned the identity of the man in civilian clothes from another mysterious figure in the UFO community. This man was C.B. Scott Jones, then a congressional aide to Senator Claiborne Pell. Jones provided Graham General Kirby’s identity, along with a biography and photograph of the general. He told Graham in the accompanying letter that Kirby was a “mutual acquaintance.” When he was later confronted about how he would know about the mysterious drop-in at Graham’s worksite to discuss the MJ-12 document, Jones stated that the general had been at Senator Pell’s senate suite on a courtesy call, and he had mentioned the visit to Jones, knowing Jones’ “interest in these matters.” When Graham filed FOIA requests related to his meeting with the FBI agent and General Kirby he discovered that he was being monitored by AFOSI Colonel Barry Hennessey in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, Hennessey was the boss of AFOSI officer Richard Doty who had been actively discussing MJ-12 with Bill Moore and Linda Howe prior to the mailing of the MJ-12 documents to Jamie Shandera in December 1984. In his 1983 meeting with Linda Howe, Doty had said “”My superiors have asked me to show you this,” as he handed her the document identified as “Briefing for the President.” The document had included discussion of MJ-12. In 1987, the mysterious Kirby/Graham meeting clearly shows Doty’s boss is now monitoring Graham who appears to have been given the job of disseminating the MJ-12 document within the security community. September 1987 Potential Target or Courier – Whitley Strieber Strieber receives a private letter at his cabin, one of only two in thousands of letters from the public that were received at the New York cabin. The sender left a phone number, which Strieber phoned. The caller related a story of “evil greys” and “appealing blonds.” The greys he said were trying to improve their race through the use of human genetic material. “We are in a war here, he told Strieber, “and you are on the front line.” The caller maintained that “public acceptance” of the aliens by the government would be an “open sesame” that would allow the visitors to conclude the takeover. The caller described Strieber as an “enabler” who was working to counter the government “subtle holding action.” When Strieber used a private detective to track the telephone and address of the caller it eventually led back to a Defense department exchange located in Colorado. Strieber phoned the number that was at the end of the mail drops, the person demanded to know how he had obtained the number. A couple days later the number was disconnected. The Boulder Colorado police threatened to charge the detective, who had tracked the number for Strieber, with a charge of impersonating an officer. November 1987 Potential Targets or Couriers – Linda Howe Former USAF Officer Robert Collins was “frantically” trying to get Linda Howe to meet with him in Albuquerque. At that meeting, also attended by John Lear, Collins showed the two some MJ-12 documents, primarily relating to a live alien allegedly held captive by the U.S. Government. According to Howe, Collins stated that he had worked “behind the scenes” with Bill Moore for years. December 1987 Possible Target or Courier – John Lear New Concepts Introduced
Based on information he was receiving from secret sources John Lear begins to tell stories that there is an underground base at Area –51 and that back engineering work on flying saucers is going on at the base. In addition to these concepts Lear added a number of new ones he had been told such as,
Late 1980s Potential Targets or Couriers – Robert Emenegger, Bill Moore, Linda Howe, and Whitley Strieber. Robert Emenegger is told by sources that he is about to get an invitation to meet with a “live” extraterrestrial in a New Mexico. This may be a distortion of the Linda Howe offer to interview the handler who lived with the live alien captured in 1949. Paul Shartle, who worked for DAVA at Norton Air Force Base, made the offer to Emenegger. Emenegger had never met Richard Doty who was promoting an interview with the “keeper.” Writer Whitley Strieber was also told the “live Alien” story by Master Sergeant Richard Doty. He related the story in his book “Breakthrough: I interviewed Mr. Doty after his retirement, although he apparently told this story while on active duty as well. In my interview, Mr. Doty repeated the same tale that he has told many times, of the capture of a live alien, whom, he said, was a mechanic or engineer aboard a UFO. This being, he continued, had not been able to talk till Air Force surgeons had rebuilt his vocal chords, which was done in 1949. He stated that he had seen videotapes of the alien and is the originator of the now-famous story that aliens like strawberry ice cream. August and September 1988 Potential Targets or Couriers – Len Stringfield Len Stringfield, after a long period of quiet in contacts from his sources, is contacted by 10 new sources all at the same time. “Each promised,” wrote Stringfield, “that useful information about UFO crash crash/retrievals would soon follow. By the end of November most promises were filled, some were first-hand reports, some second. But, most importantly, some provided new backup information for cases cited in my previously published reports. Most rewarding was the timely emergence of persons serving in covert positions with substantive information in key areas of my work.” October 1988 New Concepts Introduced
Moore along with a few other people who had been involved with the underworld of UFO leakers put together a two-hour national documentary called “UFO Cover up Live.” Richard Doty and Robert Collins act the back lighted interviews of Falcon and Condor. They relate the story of the extraterrestrials. The audience is told what they look like, where they are from, and bizarre facts like the fact they like Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. The real Falcon, a man in his 60s is in the small studio audience for the show. Robert Coleman, who is also present for the live show recognizes the man and is surprised that he is involved. There were some 75,000 calls into the toll free number the night of the broadcast, but the number was less than expected. Moore, Friedman, and Shandera received a lot of criticism inside the UFO community for the Falcon and Condor interviews, and of course the idea put out that the captured aliens held by the U.S. government liked Tibetan music, and strawberry ice cream. 1989 Potential Targets or Couriers – John Lear and Las Vegas KLAS-TV reporter George Knapp. New Concepts Introduced
A man claiming to be a physicist named Bob Lazar appears on Las Vegas TV station KLAS. He claims to have worked at Area 51, in a section known as S-4, where he worked on back engineering efforts on 9 recovered flying saucers. Some in the field were led to believe the appearance of Lazar was an effort by intelligence people to hide the testing of a radically new plane called the Aurora. In 1990 an uncovered financial analysis done for Lockheed corporation, showed that the plane was eating up almost a half billion dollars in funding. This concept is a no-brainer, and is symbolic of the problem with the whole disinformation theory related to UFOs. If the Air Force wanted to test the Aurora in complete secrecy, would it make sense to start up a rumor of crashed flying saucers at Area-51 which would attract tens of thousands of people to the area where you are doing the testing?
A Warning Sign Outside Area 51 where Lazar claims to have worked on Flying Saucers. Lazar’s story introduces the company EG&G as a company involved in the UFO program. He also involves US Navy Intelligence as the overseers of the UFO program. The story creates such a worldwide dialogue that thousands head up into the mountains surrounding Area 51 to watch what is going on. The USAF actually takes over public land where the viewers watch to stop the tours. Some stories state the UFO work is actually moved to a new AFB in Utah because of the sudden exposure. September 1989 Possible Target or Courier – Timothy Good The director of a “Special Development Group” associated with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey International contacts U.K. researcher Timothy Good. The director stated that one of his colleagues had been at Good speech a few months earlier at the MUFON Symposium in Las Vegas, Nevada. Good was told the director’s corporation was working on an International Touring Display on the subject that would provide accurate information on UFOs, and be entertaining. When Good expressed reservations about a circus company getting involved in UFOs, the director wrote back and described a government connection to the UFO International display. “Organizations such as NASA, United States Government, Rockwell International, have agreed to work with out cooperation to develop the main part of this show, the future of space and the technical advances predicted over the next 100 years. Their reluctance at first was not the fact that we owned circuses, but on how the UFO subject is going to be tastefully handled. We have now satisfied their concerns…” Tim Good passed off the project to Bob Oeschler who he felt was fully qualified to help. Oeschler had spent years as a UFO researcher, NASA mission specialist and project engineer. When Oeschler was brought into the project known as “Cosmic Journey,” he was told that the project had received the approval of President George Bush, Vice-president Dan Quayle and the national Space Council (an organization based in the White House and protected under Executive order.) In November 1989, Oeschler met at the Pentagon with the general from the intelligence community attached to the “Cosmic Journey” project. He proposed Oeschler check with NASA and NPIC for photos he could use for the exhibit. The general, according to Oeschler also proposed an exhibit of a dead alien in ” a space age looking coffin with blue lighting inside the clear lexan cover.” |
List of Aviary Members
| Written by Grant Cameron |
| Friday, 29 April 2011 14:46 |
|
George W. Bush: His UFO Story
| Written by Grant Cameron |
| Saturday, 08 August 2009 04:17 |
| George W. Bush
January 20, 2001 – January 20, 2009 “As President watchers know, we have a President who likes secrecy. He has hired tested leak-proof and loyal staffers, effectively sealing the Bush White House. He has had his records as the Governor of Texas hidden, shipping them off to his father’s Presidential library, where they are inaccessible. He has stiffed the Congressional requests for information about how he developed his energy policy – refusing to respond… .Not since Richard Nixon has there been as concentrated an effort to keep the real work of the President hidden, showing the public only a scripted President, as now.” – John Dean, former legal counsel to President Richard Nixon “It would be easier if I was a dictator.” – Statement by George W. Bush shortly after becoming President As the Clinton administration came to a close, many researchers inside the UFO community were becoming aware that they could, with a little effort, influence the White House attitude and actions related to the UFO situation. One of these efforts to influence the process was undertaken by Peter Robbins, a British researcher, and co-author of the best-selling book on the 1980 Rendlesham Forest UFO case “Left at East Gate.” His effort involved attempting to confront the candidates who were competing to succeed Clinton in the White House. In December 1999, Robbins and some of his colleagues began Campaign Watch 2000. The campaign was designed to act as a pressure group contacting presidential campaigners, and compel them to deal with the UFO question. As part of the plan, every one of the candidates for President in 2000 election was asked the same three questions:
Peter Robbins wrote to all of the 2000 presidential candidates to answer the three questions, and hopefully obtain their comments on the UFO subject. When it came to Governor Bush, Robbins came up against a brick wall. Robbins reported that he “had written, faxed, e-mailed and telephoned the candidate and his headquarters since early December 1999… to no avail.” Not even Certified Mail, requiring a signature from the recipient, seemed to make it to the destination. It was the first indicator that Bush and UFO openness didn’t mix. The second strong indicator that Bush was not open to UFO disclosure came from the experience of John E.L. Tenney, the co-founder of M.A.I.N, or the Michigan Anomalous Information Network. His efforts to get campaigner George Bush to talk about UFOs met with the same failure that Peter Robbins had experienced. On February 22, 2000, Governor Bush made a campaign visit to Tenney’s hometown of Royal Oak, Michigan. Tenney planned to ask Bush about UFOs during a scheduled meeting between local residents and Governor Bush at a local restaurant. Governor Bush’s advance people selected the people who would be in the restaurant (Jimi’s Coney Island). After answering a series of screening questions, Tenney was picked to be one of the people to meet with Bush. Due to the large number of people in the restaurant, Tenney decided that his best time to ask Bush about UFOs would be when Bush was exiting the restaurant, so he waited outside the restaurant for Bush to leave. He chatted with the CNN crew that was also waiting for Bush to leave. As Bush exited the restaurant, Tenney shook hands with Bush, and asked him, “As a presidential candidate, would you like to issue a statement concerning the American public’s right to access whatever information the United States government currently has available on the topic of UFOs…?” According to Tenney’s recollection of the event, no sooner had the word “UFO” come out of his mouth, when a Texas Ranger with Bush grabbed him by the arm, pulled him out of the crowd away from Bush, and turned him around. Another Texas Ranger pushed Bush into a van, and the van quickly left. Tenney recalled the event, I was instantly turned around by a Texas Ranger, Mr. Bush was pushed into a van, another Texas Ranger grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the crowd and before I knew it Mr. Bush was gone. “What was it all about?” I asked the officer who pulled me away from the crowd. He shook his head and walked away from me without saying a word. The crew from CNN came up to me and the camera- man said,”Well that was weird. It was like they knew you were going to say something strange.”
A frame from Tenney’s video camera taken as he was being forcefully removed from the Bush rally. Despite a positive July 2000 experience researcher Charles Huffer had in asking Bush about UFOs, the experiences of Tenney and Robbins, ended up foreshadowing President Bush’s clear utter disregard of the UFO problem. Once Bush became President, there were other signals that UFO disclosure was far from the President’s mind. Voters who had written the President about their UFO concerns were totally ignored. A prime example can be seen by looking at the responses sent out by the Bush White House staff in response to questions about Dr. Steven Greer’s UFO Disclosure Project. The Disclosure Project was a project initiated by Greer “working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems.” On May 9, 2001, as a part of the Disclosure Project, Greer held a Washington news conference at the National Press Club that involved twenty high- level witnesses. Each of them spoke about their official, secret role in the government’s UFO cover-up. Due to the fact that the event created a large amount of media interest, it was hoped that the Bush administration would be positive in its reaction to the witness statements, and to the idea of now disclosing the truth about the UFO situation. The responses received from the Bush administration to people writing the White House about the UFO Disclosure Project, and the May 9th news conference, however, were anything but positive. Kevin Ketchikan from Woodlands, California, for example, wrote President Bush about the Disclosure Project and received a response back from Deborah Hair, Special Assistance to the President. Hair’s letter resembled that of an ill-prepared student attempting to bluff a short answer question for which she had not studied: The President appreciates the interest and thought which prompted you to write. Because of the large number of similar requests received by the White House, I must decline your request” I am sorry this must be a disappointing response. Thank you for your understanding. Another writer, Lance Cassino, received this letter from the Office of Bush’s Vice- President. This is to acknowledge that your correspondence has been received by our office. At this time, we have forwarded it to the appropriate individual for review Donald G. Ewing wrote a letter to President Bush related to the Disclosure Project. On July 31, 2001, he also received a letter in reply, which made absolutely no reference to the UFO question he had asked. The letter, surprisingly, was actually signed by George Bush himself. I believe Government should be active but limited, engaged but not overbearing. Your views are helpful as my staff and I work with Congress to address our obligations to our citizens and to meet the Nation’s pressing needs. Michael Rieker wrote a letter to Bush asking for UFO disclosure. In reply, Rieker received this letter from Deborah Hair dated August 7, 2001: On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your letter. He appreciates hearing from the American people about their concerns and welcomes their suggestions. President Bush is strongly committed to pursuing policies and programs that meet America’s priorities and address our needs. By working with Congress and focusing on results, hi Administration is making significant progress on an agenda that is worth of our great country. In support of this goal, President Bush welcomes the ideas and opinions of all Americans. Thank you for writing him, and best wishes. The answers received by the voters questioning the President about the UFO Disclosure Project were disappointing, but they were much better than the replies coming to other voters who had written President Bush regarding UFOs. Some received no answer at all, and some received letters from agencies they had not even written to. None of the reply letters contained the word UFO, or anything similar. One such person was Robert Barrow, who had exchanged more than one letter with both Congressman Gerald Ford and Senator Robert Kennedy on the subject of UFOs. On August 13, 2001 Barrow wrote a letter to President Bush asking for answers to the UFO mystery. His letter read in part: Dear Mr. President: The international controversy surrounding the existence and identity of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has troubled many people from all walks of life for decades. My reason for writing is to express my fervent hope that you will use your Office and influence to get to the bottom of the UFO issue. You will agree, I know, that it is the responsibility of this government to tell the people the truth . . . I believe there are people out here, kicking around the UFO research area, who have high hopes that you will address the UFO issue during your term. Some are scientists and some are current and former high-ranking military personnel. I feel there is much to be said to the American people, unsettling or not, and the rewards of a renewed scientific investigation may be overwhelming. Whatever the facts, I hope you will publicly deal with the UFO subject once and for all, and head us in some direction with integrity… In a P.S. to the letter Barrow reminded George Bush, that Bush had undergone pilot training at Moody AFB in Valdosta, where Barrow had run an independent physical therapy clinic for the pilots. “I know well that those who fly for the military are a special kind indeed,” wrote Barrow. “A disturbing number are also on record with dramatic UFO encounters, of course, and I think they who risk their lives daily in defense of the free world, in particular, deserve answers.” Barrow sent his carefully written letter, but despite the common Moody AFB background that Bush and Barrow shared, George Bush did not reply: “I actually did not get a reply from the White House, ” wrote Barrow. “My letter was unceremoniously shoved off to NASA, and a representative sent me the customary NASA handout.” The Briefing of the New President Many UFOlogists were aware of the efforts by Laurance Rockefeller to brief President Clinton in an effort to bring a disclosure of long held UFO secrets. When it came time for a new President to take office, some of these UFOlogists made plans to brief the new President. They hoped to avoid the mistakes that had been made in the efforts to get UFO disclosure adopted by the Clinton administration. One group who began discussions about what lobbying efforts should be made included Ronald Pandolfi, the scientist who had acted as CIA liaison to the Clinton White. Pandolfi had been invited to a supper meeting with Dan Smith, Joseph Stefula, and Gus Russo, despite his reservations about briefing Presidents on the subject of UFOs. Pandolfi felt that “the various intelligence agencies are in no way bound to cater merely to official curiosity,” and that if the CIA Director makes a determination that the President shouldn’t know, then “indeed the President does not have a need to know. Period.” The group met in mid- November 2000, just after the election, and during the time of uncertainty in the Florida voting recounts. The participants were invited by Joe Stefula, a New Jersey UFOlogists, who had previously met and corresponded with the CIA UFO expert Pandolfi. Gus Russo was a journalist/author/experiencer who has attended two previous meetings with Dr. Pandolfi. Dan Smith was also a friend of Pandolfi, who had been used by Pandolfi to leak UFO information into the research community. The plan for the briefing was to go through Nancy Bush Ellis, the sister of George Bush Sr., who was a neighbor of Dan Smith’s sister. While attending Yale University a young George W. Bush had spent a lot of time with the nearby Ellis family. The plan to brief President-elect Bush failed. Dan Smith’s sister would have nothing to do with the idea, and Pandolfi refused to cooperate, because according to Dan Smith, he did not want to “rock the boat.” Despite this setback, this author was told in November 2001, that Dan Smith still planned to brief President Bush. Dr. Steven Greer also had plans to provide the new President with information on UFOs, and had at least one member of “the team” who had run Governor Bush’s campaign for President in one of the biggest states. Greer felt, however, that these types of Presidential briefings rarely had the desired effect, and had given up on using Presidents to achieve disclosure. He had learned this lesson following President Clinton’s refusal to do anything after two briefings that Greer had provided for him. Clinton had sent a message back through the briefer to Greer simply saying “I can’t do this but you can.” Greer had publicly stated in 1999 that the effect to motivate Clinton was dead: “The President is not inclined to take the risk to do this. We have this – We know this for a fact.” The September 11th Effect The events of September 11 were a great setback for the hopes of a UFO Disclosure. It had become a time of war where principles of openness, disclosure, and the brotherhood of man were exchanged for secrecy, a limiting of personal freedoms and principles of the Constitution, and revenge projected towards perceived evil in the world. Anyone who opposed this new militaristic world view was quickly labeled unpatriotic, and a provider of aid and comfort to the evil forces aligned against the United States. UFOs suffered from a lack of focus that affected also every other aspect of society and thought. Charities not directly aligned to the terrorist attacks quickly saw money they would normally, get channeled towards the bombing victims. Those who had died in the September 11th events suddenly became the only victims in America. Public issues such as health care, new roads, and social security suddenly took a back seat to the perceived terrorist threats and their effects on the economy. The issue of UFO and a disclosure of the truth went from a trivial, to a non-issue. During the first days following the terrorist attack, even UFO message boards and E-mail groups did not discuss UFOs. A major national UFO convention in was canceled. The Santa Clara, California UFO Expo continued on, but many speakers did not show, either because they had a hard time getting a plane, or they felt “it would not be proper to speak in light of what had happened.” The World UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada held its convention to only a fraction of the usual crowd, and with many speakers missing. All the speakers tried to tie their UFO messages into what had just happened in New York and Washington, D.C. Just as during the time of the Vietnam War, when personal freedoms and thought were curtailed in exchange for United States national security and a victory on the war front, this wartime mentality will end. Once the war has ended and victory achieved, the American people will again turn to questioning the morality of some of the things being done. They will also turn to issues such as UFOs, which involve principles of where the world as a whole is going, and re-examine higher principles of our place in the universe. Until then, it appears that “secrecy” will be the watch-word of the day. It will be defended by a public wishing to be safe, and afraid of being declared unpatriotic, or an aide to the world’s terrorists. The terrorist situation created a situation where all the Bush White House had to do is say “protect the national security” to get greater latitude regarding secrecy restrictions. Examples of new secrecy include:
Does Bush Know? Some feel that George W. Bush actually knows a great deal about what is going on regarding UFOs. Reasons advanced to support this belief include this include the belief that George W. has likely been given information by, or because of, his father George H W. Bush. Bush’s father had some knowledge of the UFO situation because of his former role as Director of Central Intelligence under President Ford, his eight-years as vice-president under President Reagan, and his four-years as President. A second reason people give for their belief that Bush is knowledgeable on UFOs is that he is a Republican president, and there is a general belief Republican presidents are told more than Democratic ones because they traditionally have had much greater support from high-ranking military officers who are more likely to have been “read in” on UFOs. A third reason that is given for believing Bush has knowledge about the true UFO situation, is that he is surrounded by people who are part of the unacknowledged, unelected policy control group that makes decisions about the UFO problem. These members would include Vice-president Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, who have been reported to have long held deep knowledge about the UFO situation, as is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is also rumored to have some knowledge on UFOs. One of those who maintained that George W. Bush is not well-versed on UFOs was Dr. Steven Greer. In a Disclosure Project Town Hall meeting in Salem, Oregon, Greer described how the younger Bush had followed a different career path from the one his father had taken. This background has limited how much need- to-know he has for UFO information: You have to understand that Bush (senior) was CIA Director prior to being President. He was of course, aware of the subject and had files. I don’t think that he was in that top 25 of the pyramid. He was in that group of 200-300 that I mentioned before that we know about, and with some of them with whom I’ve met. The current Bush – the son – was on a different career trajectory. He has people in his administration who are very aware of this issue . . . I doubt very strongly whether George W. Bush has much, and even if they have knowledge doesn’t mean that they have control. President Clinton used to say that the White House is the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system. I think he realized quite quickly that the emperor had no clothes . . . knowledge of it and having effective control of it are two separate things. . .you can not assume knowledge equals control. This is one of the dangers of this whole issue. We are supposed to be an institution of laws, but in reality, on the most pressing and important issues, these leaders whom we elect, are except in very rare cases, very poorly informed. Whether or not Bush had much UFO information prior to coming to the White House, there can be little doubt that Bush has had some sort of briefing after becoming President, for a number of reasons. The official who encountered Larry Warren outside the White House stated he was aware of the Disclosure Project. It appears, therefore, that the large UFO news conference at the National Press Club was having some impact inside the White House. The Bush White House has also been the recipient of a great deal of UFO mail, perhaps equal to that received by President Jimmy Carter’s White House. Much of this mail was generated by Dr. Greer’s Disclosure Project which held a series of Town Halls all over the country. In the town Halls, Greer had an organized method to get the hundreds of people attending to write to their Congressmen, and to President Bush. As well, Greer provided forms that could be filled in on the Disclosure Project home page where people could fax the White House by simply filling in a form. The Bush White House was also under attack by California protester Lara Johnstone, who went on a hunger strike to get President Bush to address the UFO promise he had made to researcher Charles Huffer. Although the hunger strike ended after 44 days, Lara Johnstone did a number of interviews around the country about Bush’s UFO promise, and did elevate the issue to some public degree. The UFO Disclosure efforts taking place in the nation’s capitol, and all the mail coming into the White House, may not have been seen as a major threat, but it did put the subject on the White House radar-screen. It even got the attention of the High Priest of the voice of the right-wing of the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh actually came to Bush’s rescue on the UFO issue. He took time on his show to attack Disclosure Project legal counsel Daniel Sheehan for his attack on the Bush father and son team for their handling of UFOs. “So let me get this straight,” Limbaugh stated. “The Bushes are at the heart of the vast right-wing conspiracy to keep the oil companies rich by hiding extraterrestrial solar panels or super-warm sweaters or whatever it is they showed Jimmy Carter.” Limbaugh made it clear he wasn’t buying the idea George Bush knew of, and was hiding, extraterrestrial secrets. “You may be surprised to hear me say that Mr. Sheehan is half right,” Limbaugh says. “There is alien life – but we are not hiding it. We see Dick Gephart plain as day!” As George Bush enters his second year in the White House, most UFO researchers agree that the Bush knowledge question will not be answered until after the new perceived threat from terrorism is completely dealt with. In fact, many would agree that everything in the field of UFO disclosure is on hold until that day as well. |
Bill Clinton and the UFO Crash at Roswell
| Written by Grant Cameron | ||
| Monday, 24 August 2009 02:01 | ||
We know for certain in January 1993 when Bill Clinton entered the White House in January 1993 that he had an interest in the UFO phenomena because of what Bill Clinton’s long-time friend Webster Hubbell wrote in his 1997 book “Friends in High Places.” Hubbell reported that Bill Clinton had proposed (in the early days of the administration) to him that if he was given a job in the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General that he should find out “Are there UFOs?” (He was also given the job of finding out “who killed JFK.”) It is not certain where Bill’s original UFO interest came from. One woman came up to me after a lecture in Bill’s home state of Arkansas and told me that either Bill and Hillary or someone very close to them had experienced a UFO sighting in the late 1970s. The woman claimed to be a sister to a key person in Bill Clinton’s Hot Springs background. She promised to provide me the details after talking to her sister, and I never heard from her again. Whatever caused the interest there were many stories circulating that Bill was interested. William LaParl, a friend of CIA scientist Ronald Pandolfi (who was asked to provide a UFO briefing for President Clinton’s Science Advisor) stated, “It was known among the high CIA people, and the people who had contact with these people (Clintons) that they were on the prowl for UFOs. He (Bill) had been asking anyone who would listen to him, to tell him the secret. You know, he would get some Admiral in there, and say “By the way, tell me the UFO secret.” They would just look at him like “What planet are you from?” And so the stage was set for Bill Clinton when businessman and philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller appeared at the White House on April 14, 1993 to make his pitch that the President should open up all the UFO files for the American people to see. Although it is not spelled out in the available documentation, it would appear that Rockefeller, no matter how powerful could not just walk into the President’s office and make his pitch for disclosure. He was instead advised by his close friend and former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to start his mission with Dr. John Gibbons, the President’s Science Advisor. That’s where the whole Rockefeller Initiative for UFO disclosure would be played out for almost the next three years. The Introduction of Roswell
“We believe that your approach of starting by addressing a specific incident is an important and reasonable way to begin the process of declassification in this area.” It was an opportunity that Rockefeller made the most of. He fully encouraged Gibbons to work to declassify Roswell, the “mother of all UFO cases.” Rockefeller wrote, “The July 1947 Roswell incident would be a logical and challenging place to start. While much in the public sector has been written about it, the government has had nothing to say about it after the original press release saying that a flying disc had been recovered was retracted. The public record of this incident has been thoroughly analyzed. Further information depends upon access to classified information.” “Many are convinced that Roswell marks the beginning of government secrecy about UFOs. However, whatever the truth of Roswell, a definite statement about it from the government would be very important. If it actually was UFO related, it could be used to start the process of reversing the government’s 40 plus years of denial on the subject. If it can fully be explained as not UFO related, it would be a significant contribution to the field, and perhaps even contribute to more rigor in research on the subject. If this specific project initiative is successful, it will become an important prototype for the release of all UFO information. Obviously, the means of carrying out this event-related review is up to you. However, to the extent we can be helpful, we want to be.” Rockefeller added, “Scott Jones and his associates are quite current on research accomplished on this subject. I have asked that they be available to assist your investigation in any appropriate way.” In addition to “lifting classification about Roswell,” Rockefeller asked that President Clinton “grant amnesty on an individual basis to allow those with knowledge of the incident to speak without fear of prosecution.” Finally, Rockefeller asked that Gibbons “designate a staff person for continuing contact.” In the meantime, and under these circumstances, Rockefeller promised that he would hold off on the UFO letter he was drafting addressed to President Clinton. At the same time that Rockefeller was pressing the Clinton administration to declassify the true story of Roswell, there were other efforts to solve the Roswell mystery. The General Accounting Office (GAO) was an investigation that had been commissioned by Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico in January 1994. Senator Diane Feinstein joined in requesting that the GAO look into the Roswell incident. On July 28, 1995 the GAO’s Report “Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico” about its Roswell and related saucer crashes documentation findings was presented to Congressman Schiff and Senator Feinstein. Congressman Schiff released the 20-page, General Accounting Office (GAO) Report in a press release on July 28, 1995. In the press release Congressman Schiff indicated that, “important documents which may have shed more light on what happened at Roswell, are missing.” Then in October 1995 the Air Force put out “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” This was the final report of an earlier version published in 1994 called “Report of the Air Force regarding the Roswell Incident.” Both these Air Force reports concluded that nothing extraterrestrial had occurred in Roswell in July 1947. All the flying saucer stories had actually be caused by a Top Secret balloon program called Project Mogul intended to detect Soviet nuclear explosions. Belfast Roswell Talk
In a November 30 Belfast, Northern Ireland speech in front of 80,000 people Bill Clinton answered back to the USAF report stating that nothing extraterrestrial had been behind the 1947 Roswell crash. Those who have studied the making of presidential speeches realize that nothing gets into a presidential speech without good reason. Speeches are rewritten up to 30 times, and are signed off by various government agencies. Sometimes two dozen or more agencies will have to approve of what the president is saying. Every work is checked in a presidential speech. Therefore when Bill Clinton started taking about Roswell in a speech that was advertised as a peace speech, the president wanted to say something important. The speech was given only weeks after the final USAF report on Roswell so it was probably this report that caused President Clinton to speak out. 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. (An FOIA filed with the Clinton Library failed to find this key letter) This is what Clinton said in his speech, 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. When combined with the just released USAF final report on the Roswell crash, it is obvious what Bill Clinton was doing. He had helped force a new investigation by the Air Force of the Roswell evidence. Their final report given to the president weeks before the Belfast speech told the president – we checked it out and it wasn’t caused by ETs. Clinton, however, was not satisfied with the answers in the Roswell report. It was another dead end in years of trying to get an answer to the UFO mystery by the President. In short, the President was saying you claim that there was no supporting evidence for ET, but you did not deal with the many claims by witnesses that there were dead alien bodies recovered in the Roswell crash. With his public rebuke, Clinton effectively forced the USAF to go back and reinvestigate the question of the bodies. This however, ended up in another whitewash by the Air Force in 1997 with a third 231-page Roswell report called “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” President’s Clinton’s challenge to explain the witness reports of bodies was answered by the explanation that the so-called alien bodies that witnesses reported seeing in the desert in separate incidents were anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft between 1954 and 1959 by Air Force balloons, then dropped attached to parachutes” The Lewinsky Roswell Connection pDespite the fact that Clinton’s Roswell body challenge did nothing more than cause the Air Force to do another Roswell study, it did bring a new and important figure into the Roswell crash history story – Paul Davids. Davids was motivated by the Belfast speech. Paul Davids is a Hollywood Director, Executive Producer, Producer, Screen Story, Screenwriter. Following a daylight UFO sighting in 1987 Davids took a strong interest in getting to the bottom of the UFO mystery. He went on to executive producer and co-writer of the 1994 movie Roswell, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture for Television. Davids had some connections to Bill Clinton. His father Dr. Jules Davids had been Bill Clinton’s professor for American Diplomatic History at Georgetown University. Bill and Dr. Davids had continued a relationship after Bill had graduated. Paul Davids had also written Bill Clinton an early letter of “enthusiastic support” during the 1992 campaign telling him about writing a series of Star Wars books he was writing and offering to help write speeches for Governor Clinton. Bill wrote back on February 12, 1992 stating that he was looking forward to the Star Wars looks appearing in the stores, and promising to send his letter to George Stephanopoulos. Davids wrote Bill Clinton later with pictures of his dad and the first round of six Star Wars books that Davids was writing. Then President-elect Clinton wrote back thanks Davids for the items he had sent and his support. Paul Davids, therefore, was not afraid to contact the President after ABC covered the President in Belfast talking about the Roswell crash, and how he had not been given all the answers. “I wanted disclosure very badly,” Davids said, “I had a connection to the president, and I wasn’t afraid to be a little bold.” Paul Davids said, “I heard the President wanted to know so I took it upon myself to write him a Personal and Confidential letter.” In the letter dated January 3, 1996 Paul stated, When you recently made a statement about the Roswell incident during your trip to Ireland, I felt moved to write to you. Your statement concluded with the words, “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it either and I want to know.” To help Clinton – who wanted to know- Davids enclosed a videotape of his 1994 movie Roswell, a videotape of a keynote speech he had give to a banquet for the Golden Anniversary of the White Sands Missile Range, a one hour videotape compendium of media and news coverage on the Roswell case throughout the years, and a videotape of a speech Paul Davids gave following the USAF release on Roswell called “Reply to the Air Force on the Roswell Incident.” Most importantly Davids included with his package the 1991 book “UFO Crash at Roswell” written by written by Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt. The materials were passed through to Clinton through Nancy Hernreich, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Oval Office Operations. Bill Clinton replied by overnight mail on March 20, 1996 thanking Paul for the videotapes. In September 1998 the Roswell book that Davids had sent became public again during the impeachment of President Clinton when it was found in the president’s private study. Prosecutors were searching out Nicholson Baker’s novel on phone sex called “Vox” that had reportedly been sent to the President by White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The associated press reported that the novel “was listed on a shelf right between volumes entitled “Churchill on Courage: Timeless Wisdom for Persevering” and an Air Force report, “UFO Crash at Roswell.”
In September 2005 the UFO crash at Roswell again appeared in Bill Clinton’s life, but this time he brought it up in response to a question which had nothing to do with UFOs but rather the idea of “secrets being passed from president to president.” The question came to President Clinton in a question and answer session following a speech made to the CLSA in Hong Kong. Clinton in reply began speaking about Roswell, “Well I don’t know if you all heard this, but, there was actually, when I was president in my second term, there was an anniversary observance of Roswell. Remember that? People came to Roswell, New Mexico from all over the world. And there was also a site in Nevada where people were convinced that the government had buried a UFO and perhaps an alien deep underground because we wouldn’t allow anybody to go there. And uhm… I can say now, ’cause it’s now been released into the public domain…. This place in Nevada was really serious, that there was an alien artifact there. So I actually sent somebody there to figure it out.” “I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn’t be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me…and I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out.” In 2007 the Roswell crash again became a talked about issue when Tom Carey and Don Schmitt released their new book “Witness to Roswell.” Paul Davids, who wrote the forward to the book, and who had provided “UFO Crash at Roswell” to President Clinton in 1996, decided there was new “case-closed” evidence that Bill Clinton had to see. Therefore “armed with ‘Witness to Roswell’ and another new book titled “The Roswell Legacy” by Jessie Marcel Jr.”, Davids told his wife that he “was determined to get these two books to ex-President Clinton. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it.” In August 2007, while considering a trip to Harlem, New York where Bill Clinton had an office, an opportunity arose to attend a pancake fundraiser in the Hamptons for Hillary Clinton who had started her run for President. Bill Clinton reportedly would be there.
“I might go to all this trouble,” Paul Davids told the 2007 X-Conference, “and never give him the books.” While considering the options Paul discovered that the fundraiser would be held on Davids Lane (Davids LA on the street sign). The location had both his rare last name and LA where he lived. The synchronicity of this situation led Paul to believe that he was on the right track and it was meant to be. When Paul and his wife arrived at the fifteen million dollar mansion where the fundraiser was being held, there was no one there to stop Paul from bringing in the Roswell books. Bill and Hillary were there, and were in a very good mood. It was a beautiful day. Paul quickly took a picture of himself (remembering to smile) with Hillary in the background to prove that he had been there. Paul moved his way right up to the little patio along the house where he listened to Bill give a speech. As he listened he planned how he would get his “own private moment with the President.”
As soon as Hillary finished Paul made his move. He moved back behind where Bill Clinton has seated by himself. “I had the president to myself for between five and ten minutes,” Paul said. ‘There I was with my bag of books in my moment in front of the President. First I introduced myself. I reminded him of the fact that I was the son of Dr. Jules Davids… without being too direct at first I said, ‘Mr. President. I wrote the forward to a new book that just came out recently and I would really hope that you would read it. It’s quite a good forward and actually quite a good book.” “Oh,” replied Clinton, “what’s the book? Paul then took “Witness to Roswell” out of the bag and gave it to Clinton who looked at it. “His eyes were riveted on the ‘unmasking the cover-up’ part of the title,” recalled Paul. “When you were in Ireland,” Paul said as the President continued to look at the cover, “you said that you were very very interested in this subject, and you said if it happened the Air Force hadn’t told you and you wanted to know about it.’ Paul then told Clinton that he had not gone along with the Air Force report that had been released by the Air Force during the Clinton administration, but mentioned that it was good that the head of the Air Force had released servicemen from their secrecy oaths related to the 1947 crash.
Then he gave the President the second book “The Roswell Legacy” by Jessie Marcel Jr., and a new affidavit that had been released following the death of Walter Haut, in which Haut confirmed the object had been from outer space and that there had been bodies. Paul had made a blown up 120% copy to present to the President. He “stuck it in the book so the President couldn’t miss it just in case he didn’t make it to the last chapter.” The last thing that Paul mentioned to the President was “that the people have to know this. The people have a right to be told.” He further mentioned that the former Defense Minister of Canada Paul Hellyer had been speaking out about this, and that the former Governor of Arizona Fife Symington had spoken out about it. “When I said Fife Symington something lit up in his eyes, he took the whole bag…” Paul recalled. “He said ‘You know, I’ve always been really interested in this stuff, and I’m going to read this.” |
Of the many meetings between Rockefeller and Gibbons, one of the key meetings occurred on February 4, 1994 when Laurance Rockefeller met with Dr. Gibbons to discuss steps needed for UFO disclosure. During that meeting Gibbons made a proposal “that as a pilot project” he “might seek information from federal agencies about the incident at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.” It was felt that if the UFO cover-up was as large and secretive as Rockefeller was maintaining, that it might be easier to start with the disclosure of one case rather than taking on the whole cover-up. Rockefeller replied positively to the Gibbons proposal of choosing one case in a 
One month later Bill Clinton acted on Roswell. He had done nothing publicly, but it is generally believed that through his science advisor Dr. John Gibbons the USAF was given the green light to re-investigate the Roswell UFO crash.
Paul had some reservation about putting up the money to attend, and whether there would be agents who might take the bag of books from him.
Paul had consulted the owner of the house about his mission, and was told to get as close as possible and then make a dash once Hillary was done because everyone would be distracted surrounding Hillary.
“The authors of this book went to meet with all those servicemen and all the testimony you never got is in this book,” Paul added as the President continued to stare at the book. “I think it shows that the report that was released when you were President is false, unfortunately, but the truth is here.”
Presidentialufo 