SUBJECT: WHAT DOES THE GOVERNMENT KNOW FILE: UFO2566
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Date prepared: 08/17/93
Contributed by: Don Ecker/ UFO Magazine
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The following is a colume written for *UFO Magazine by Richard Hall, Chairman
for the Fund for UFO Research. Hall is a former Assistant Director for the
famous NICAP, and worked with and under ledgendary NICAP Directror *Major
Donald Keyhoe.
Don Ecker
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by Richard Hall
What does "the government" know and (the flip side) how big a cover-up is
there? What methods are used in the postulated cover-up? To what extent and for
what purpose have intelligence agencies deliberately manipulated our beliefs?
These are complicated questions with no simple answers, various facets if which
will be explored in future columns. First, let's consider "disinformation."
Back in the 1950s, Civilian Saucer Investigations (CSI) of Los Angeles,
led by scientists and engineers, was a flourishing and highly credible UFO
investigation group. The organization collected and analyzed a lot of sightings
and published a newsletter. CSI was given a big boost when publicized by LIFE
magazine in an article about UFOs. In those days, LIFE was a major force in
society. When CSI went out of business (I forget the year, but in the late
1950s or early '60s), NICAP inherited their files--sightings and
correspondence--and merged them with our own. The letters contained strong
suggestion of a disinformation campaign, the earliest such clues I can recall
seeing.
Several letters from indirect sources ("a friend of a friend told me . .
") described alleged incidents in which someone strayed off a beaten path in
New Mexico, and was suddenly
confronted by MPs wielding submachine guns and was ordered away from the secret
site. But in the background, before they left, they glimpsed a closely-guarded
disc-shaped craft. I think that is exactly what someone wanted the world (or at
least ufologists) to believe.
Who was spreading the stories, and why? Never for a minute did I think the
confrontations actually occurred, and I still don't. Now they fit a much larger
pattern that has emerged over the years. However, at the time (the height of
the Cold War with the Soviet Union) I guessed that it would be in the interests
of the U.S. to hoodwink SovIet authorities into thinking we had secret,
advanced aircraft technology. Or captured alien craft, with the implied threat
of spectacular technological breakthroughs. That may have been the explanation.
In any case, it was one of the earliest--and far from the last--example of
someone in the U.S. intelligence community manipulating the UFO subject for
ulterior motives. I also recall being set up (perhaps in more ways than
one) to meet a man in Washington, D.C. who, according to the story, was a spy
for then-President Sukarno's Indonesian government and wanted to "talk UFOs"
with me. I was told that the FBI had caught up with him and he was being
deported. He said that one of his missions was to find out what the U.S.
government knew about UFOs. Since the government constantly denied that UFOs
were real, he was convinced they had to be secret U.S. devices. He was
skeptical when I tried to explain that NICAP was a private organization, aNd
when I argued that UFOs could not be U.S. secret devices, he suspected NICAAP
was part of the cover-up!
Two strong "rumors" apparently carefully cultivated for effect in the
1950s and 1960s also fit the U.S. secret device notion. One of the oldest and
lamest stories was that, toward the end of World War II, the Germans had
test-flown high-performance, disc-shaped craft. There was a slight core of
truth to this story (as there usually is with disinformation to make it seem
halfway credible): they *had been experimenting with a disc-shaped airframe.
But there were no major technological breakthroughs, no high-performance
flights; NICAP checked with former German scientists and engineers,among other
sources. The "hottest" aviation technology the Germans had at war's end was the
Me-163, the first rocket-powered fighter plane, which saw brief service but was
not truly operational nor very effective.
A little later, a variant on the theme was that "captured" German
engineers had aided the U.S. and Canada in developing disc-shaped craft based
on their late-war research. In blatantly
deceptive news releases, the Air Force announced a joint project with A.V. Roe
in Canada, along with an artist's conception showing a "flying saucer" craft,
suggesting a high-performance aircraft.
When the project was later cancelled, the "AVRO disc" (as it was called)
proved to be a decidedly low-performance machine, nothing but an air-cushion
device similar to a Florida swamp buggy that floated a few feet above the
surface on a cushion of air vented downward from fans.
Does this all sound vaguely familiar? For the past several years we have
heard stories and rumors of high-performance (UFO-like in some respects) secret
aircraft operating in the skies near military reservations in California and
Nevada. Sightings of them are even reported in *Aviation Week and Space
Technology, the editors of which have the reputation of being flacks of the
Defense Department, but nonetheless it is an industry bible. NBC-TV recently
broadcast some film footage of distant "mystery craft" or their contrails in
Nevada.
If we believe that the U.S. has mastered the technology found in "crashed
saucers," then maybe we *are flying around in rebuilt alien craft, or human
craft based on alien technology. But when the Bob Lazars of the world want me
to believe that, my skeptical antennae rise, and I suspect it is disinformation
to cover up the *real story which is something else entirely.
In the old days, it seemed to me, "secret U.S. aircraft" were used as
disinformation to convey the message that UFOs were ours,with the Soviet Union
as the main target. Today it *appears that someone wants us to believe that
reports of UFOs really are sightings of our own technology. Why would someone
want us to believe that?
The only "theory" I can imagine (call it a sneaking hunch until dignified
by more evidence) is that the object of all this disinformation is what would
be the most significant story in the history of humankind, if true, namely, the
1947 crash (or crashes of alien spacecraft in New Mexico. The human testimony
in support of this story has become very strong and persuasive, though concrete
proof still is lacking.
Exactly *why the government or its military arm would feel so compelled to
lie to its citizens about this is a serious and unanswered question, but
probably has to do with the fact that it happened early in the Cold War period.
The crash and its
implications would have been evaluated within that context, and as has been
suggested by others, it must have been obvious that the first to solve the
alien technology would have a giant leg up in the Cold War. After that, it
would become difficult to tell the truth without acknowledging all the lies.
End of File
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