"What The Government Isn't Saying About UFO's" by Patrick Huyghe
Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon a secret meeting is in progress. Seated
at the conference table are three Air Force generals, an Army colonel,
several scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and personnel
from both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
The Colonel, Harold E. Phillips, is running the show. The idea for this cozy
gathering known as the UFO Working Group was all his.
Phillips has convened this session to discuss the "perfect" UFO incident. The
case, he says, involved a whole town full of witnesses. He wants the CIA
to send an investigative team. But a CIA representative at the table balks.
The agency cannot legally conduct domestic activities, he says. A discussion
ensues. Eventually an exception to the rule is found, and two CIA agents,
posing as NASA engineers, are sent to investigate the UFO sightings over
Elmwood, Wisconsin.
The existence of the 17-member UFO Working Group was revealed for the
first time this fall by investigative reporter Howard Blum in his new book
'Out There'. According to the former 'New York Times' journalist, the group
was established in February 1987 to coordinate a review of the evidence for
UFOs and the search for extraterrestrial life. The DIA, of course, denies
that the UFO Working Group exists at all. To UFO researchers, the government
team is less than impressive. "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). Others
wonder how the group could have been impressed by the sightings over
Elmwood, the proposed home of a welcome center for E.T.'s. David Jacobs, a
history professor at Temple University and the author of 'The UFO
Controversy in America', thinks it can mean only one thing. "They're
amateurs," he says.
Blum maintains that the group is official DIA business. But he doesn't
think the government is harboring any secrets. "They're covering up not what
they know, but what they don't know," he says. "They're embarrassed, and
even a little frightened, by their inability to explain certain phenomena."
Blum's view that the government knows little more than we do about UFOs
is a decidedly "lite" version of the cover-up. The more sinister,
traditional view holds that the government has evidence of alien visitations
and has for decades kept this knowledge from the public. This "high calorie"
version of the cover-up as government conspiracy has been around for decades.
The first to raise a stink about it was Donald Keyhoe, a retired major in
the Marine Corps and a former aide to Charles Lindbergh. With the 1950
publication of 'Flying Saucers Are Real', Keyhoe became the first prominent
individual to champion the notion that the government was hiding the
existence of UFOs. Keyhoe had such troubles prying information from the Air
Force that he quickly became convinced a massive cover-up was taking place.
The Air Force was aware that flying saucers were from another planet, said
Keyhoe, but they were covering up the fact to prevent a public panic.
Today many of the arguments for or against a government cover-up hinge
on a single case. On the evening of July 6, 1947, a large glowing disc was
seen over the New Mexico desert. A sheep rancher, who heard an explosion at
the time, went out the next morning to find an area of his ranch covered with
strange wreckage. Days later the public information officer at the nearby
Roswell Army Air Field created a sensation by announcing they were in
possession of a crashed flying disc.
Shortly afterward, however, a retraction appeared: The wreckage, officials
declared, was actually a "weather balloon." This much is history. Less
well-known are reports that a thorough search of the area in the days that
followed led to the discovery, miles away from the sheep ranch, of the main
portion of the crashed disc. Inside, supposedly, were several small beings
who died in the crash. The military is said to have whisked away the
wreckage and its occupants.
During the past decade more and more people have come forward claiming to
have been the craft and the aliens themselves.
If there is a cover-up, then Roswell is where it all began. "Once Roswell
came along, the government had real justification for keeping something under
wraps," says Bruce Maccabee, a physicist who directs the Fund for UFO Studies
in Mount Rainier, Maryland. "Assuming the Roswell case is true, there must
be some groups keeping track of that stuff, keeping it under guard."
Witnesses of the Roswell incident were intimidated, contends Stanton
Friedman, a nuclear physicist in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, who has
interviewed many of the eyewitnesses and other participants. "People were
told not to talk," he says, "no questions about it. One officer was told by
the acting head of the Strategic Air Command, 'I don't want you to talk about
this ever again.'
I even have a man who handled the bodies on official assignment down there,
and not only was he personally threatened, but he was told that if he talked
about this they'd get his family, too."
More convincing is the lack of official documentation on the case. "We
know something crashed," says Barry Greenwood, research director of CAUS.
"We know material was gathered. We know that it was shipped out somewhere.
So where is the paperwork? Where is the analysis? We just don't see it."
But Greenwood, unlike Friedman, is not convinced that Roswell represents the
crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its occupants. He takes the
"lite" view and thinks the government is just as baffled by the UFO
phenomenon as the rest of us.
Thousands of pages of UFO documents generated by the CIA, the FBI, the
Air Force, the State Department, and other agencies have been released under
the Freedom of Information Act. But these, says Maccabee, offer only
indirect evidence of a cover-up: They point to an accumulation of
information that wouldn't be there if no one were interested. "It's hard to
believe that all those reports would pour into government agencies and no one
paid any attention," he says.
"It's hard to believe the government would be so stupid." Maccabee believes
the government is covering up the existence of UFOs, covering up that it
really doesn't know what's going on, and covering up that it doesn't know
what to do about it, namely what would happen if it went public with all
this.
Government agencies still have hundreds of UFO documents that they
refuse to release to UFO researchers. The National Security Agency (NSA)
admits to withholding more than 100 UFO-related documents, the CIA refuses to
release about 50, and the DIA says it's withholding six. This is black-and-
white proof of a cover-up, says Greenwood. "In a literal sense, information
is being covered up in being withheld."
The most tantalizing of all the withheld UFO documents are those belonging
to the NSA, the supersecret agency whose primary job is eavesdropping on
military communications. No one really knows what UFO information its
documents contain, but Friedman has an idea what one may be about. Someone
working for the agency told Friedman that in March 1967 a listening post
picked up communications between Cuban radar installations and two MiG-21
jets sent to intercept a mysterious, bright metallic sphere in Cuban
airspace. When the MiG pilots failed to make contact with the object, they
were instructed to shoot it down. "Suddenly there was this shrieking from
the pilot in the second plane," says Friedman. "The first plane had
disintegrated." Friedman's contact says that NSA headquarters was sent a
report on the incident.
UFO researchers took the NSA to court for its UFO documents in 1980, but
federal district court judge Gerhard Gesell, the same judge who presided
over the Oliver North case, ruled in the NSA's favor. The agency refuses to
release any of its UFO-related documents because to do so would reveal
sources and methods, and that would be a violation of national security. But
Friedman believes that there is something about the phenomenon itself that
the agency regards as a threat to national security. These objects are
violating our airspace, he points out, and they show the powerless response
of our military systems to such intrusions.
Friedman has a name for all this. He calls it the cosmic Watergate.
Philip J. Klass, an aerospace journalist and the field's foremost skeptic,
says there is no such thing. He points out that many of the communications
intercepted by the NSA come from potentially hostile nations and many of them
are coded. So the agency's rationale for not making these documents public
is actually quite simple. "They might reveal the location of certain
listening posts," he explains, "and even more important, they would reveal
that we have cracked and were able to decipher certain codes."
So if the question is whether the withheld documents contain any answers
to the UFO mystery, the answer is, Probably not. "Long ago a lot of us used
to think that the government was covering up a knowledge of extraterrestrials
and their craft," says Greenwood, who six years ago coauthored 'Clear Intent:
The Government Cover-up of the UFO Experience'. "But we've had a change of
attitude.
We just don't see the government as having any answers. If they knew what
UFOs were all about, I think history would have been a little different than
what we now see."
This argument gains power, oddly enough, from the Roswell incident itself.
"If it was a UFO that crashed in Roswell," says Jacobs, "a whole series of
events would have been set in motion in the government. There would be major
studies of it. Hundreds of scientists would have been involved with it over
the past forty years. The government would be acting very differently about
UFOs than they do now. All of UFO history makes sense if there was not a
crash, and none of UFO history makes sense if there was a crash." Jacobs
adds, "It's still possible that one could have crashed and there's an
entirely different scenario at work."
If the craft at Roswell had been an E.T. craft, insists Klass, then the
United States would have wanted to know just how many of these craft were
passing overhead.
At the very least, he says, we would have established a space-surveillance
system similar to the one that was set up three years after the launch of
Sputnik.
Klass cannot imagine the government doing nothing and simply hoping the
aliens are friendly.
Never in his 24 years of UFO investigation has Klass encountered a
government cover-up of significant information. If you think there's a
cover-up, he says, call your local air base and report that a saucer has just
landed in your backyard and that strange-looking creatures are getting out of
it. If the government really were trying to keep things under wraps, he
says, the voice on the other end would ask for your address and a SWAT team
would be there within minutes.
Instead, what will happen, says Klass, is that the voice on the other end
will simply thank you for calling and suggest that you report your sighting
to the local police department or to one of the national UFO groups.
That's too simplistic, says Bryant. If they really have hard evidence
about aliens and flying saucers, what would they care about what's in your
backyard?
For the past several years Bryant, who happens to be a Pentagon employee,
has been placing ads in military newspapers encouraging anyone with UFO
information to come forth and blow the whistle on the government cover-up.
So far no one has come forward to reveal what he calls the "ultimate secret"
that will motivate the general public, the press, and Congress to resolve the
issue. He's not surprised. "So few people in the government really know about
UFOs," he says.
"And those who don't know are covering up because it's just the way of doing
things. It's the bureaucratic way. When in doubt, don't let it out. Don't
even let out that you don't know."
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