The article titled: "What the Government Isn't Saying About UFO's".
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"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 seen 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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