Showing posts with label False Claims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label False Claims. Show all posts

Friday, January 30, 2015

New Web-Site of Air Force UFO Files Shut Down—Black Vault Issues Statement

New Web-Site of Air Force UFO Files Shut Down—Black Vault Issues Statement

John Greenewald By John Greenewald
The Black Vault
1-30-15

     January 29th, 2015 – It is with great frustration to announce, that Ancestry.com, and their subsidiary Fold3, has laid down a claim to copyright on the Project Blue Book material – which has long been labeled as “public domain” by the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). Ancestry.com is claiming ownership to the digital version of this material – despite me having records that Fold3 doesn’t even have in their archive and I received under the FOIA starting back in 1996. They simply claimed it was 100% theirs and I was forced to remove it.

Because of my attempt with properly crediting Fold3 with a DIRECT LINK to their site as partial credit for some of the material, they used that show of proper credit by me to issue a copyright claim under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DCMA). Anyone who knows anything about the law can attest; you are “guilty until proven innocent” so this was the beginning of the end. I never hid from Fold3 as a source, and even brought them up in some media interviews I did take part in, which were all cut out. No one cared about that part of the story – this new archive was what they wanted to report on because it was simple, straight forward, easy and free. And people loved it.

Based on an evidence-less claim I was forced to remove the entire site. That’s right, there was ZERO evidence submitted to my web hosting provider of ownership or copyright or license, but rather, they simply placed the accusation which is all it takes.

In good faith, I took the site down in hopes a compromise could be reached. They already had credit given on the front page of the site for some of the material, and that link alone resulted in a 12%+ increase in their entire statistics since they posted records in 2007, and my link multiplied their weekly hits by 10x, yes ten times, in only 5 days (statistics are posted on their page, so I am not guessing on those statistics but rather took notes).

I stated there was much more information here than is cited to Fold3, but they didn’t care. I offered giving them a full 100% “share of voice” banner ad to advertise Fold3 (in addition to the link already driving them traffic), or to sell ads with no profit share to me, and they didn’t care. I asked if they would work with me on any capacity, because CLEARLY interest was being generated by my audience (and obviously not by theirs) but they didn’t care.

In the end – they offered I become a member of their affiliate program – and offer a link to them in exchange for a portion of sales generated. ie: You have to sign up with them, pay a membership, and they give me a percentage. I quickly declined.

This is public record material, and it should remain so. To lay ‘exclusive’ claim to it in the digital world, when both sites (my site and theirs) offer it for free – is ludicrous and a waste of time and money for everyone.

But at the end of the day, I am proud to have brought attention to information that although has been available for quite some time – the public at large never knew it existed. I will let Google Trends prove my point. Here is the popularity of Project Blue Book, since 2005, and a graph relating to people searching for information on it.

Google Trends Project Blue Book

See that spike? Yes, The Black Vault did that… and I am proud to be the one who caused such an uproar of interest by the public and the media (despite some erroneous facts in the reporting).

Did some media outlets misreport? Yes, and if this page was still up, there was a message on the front page setting the record straight.

But, call it corporate greed, a legal loophole, or a grey area in the copyright law, all of that is gone in the name of getting your personal information, and your credit card, by a corporation that has a wallet much thicker than mine. I’ll let you decide what the right label is to put on this entire mess.

Does all of this upset you? Me too! And I invite you to express your thoughts to Ancestry.com, Fold3, and anyone else you’d like to express your disappointment:

Fold3
355 South 520 West
Suite 250
Lindon, UT 84042
Ph 1-800-613-0181
support@fold3.com

Ancestry Inc. Corporate Headquarters
360 West 4800 North
Provo, UT 84604
Ph 801-705-7000
Fx 801-705-7001
support@ancestry.com

In 18+ years, I’ve never seen anything like this, and it is a sad day for the world of public domain, public information, public record and the idea of “Freedom of Information”.

I have vowed from day 1, never to fall into the pit of desire of placing a price tag on PUBLIC information. It’s a shame I am very much alone in that belief.
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New Air Force UFO Files Site is Mysteriously "Unavailable"


New Air Force UFO Files Site is Mysteriously "Unavailable"

      Editor's Note: For reasons unknown, John Greenewald's extension to his Black Vault web-site, housing copies of the Air Force's Project Blue Book Files is currently inaccessible.

When attempting to access the site (http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com/) we find the following message: "Due to situations out of my control, The Project Blue Book material is currently unavailable."

The news of Grenewald's addition (Project Blue Book files) has been trending with both mainstream media and social networks for over two weeks, albeit with erroneous information. The common theme with almost all the news outlets is that Greenewald made the Blue Book Files not only available, but accessible online for free for the first time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

John himsef stated:
First off, I never, EVER, made it appear these documents were newly declassified. The media created that, and many outlets copied each other. Many of the stories you see, I was never even interviewed for, yet I am quoted extensively.

Second, I went out of my way to say these documents have been available, even in some places online, during the course of the interviews I did do.
We've reached out to John to see what's going on–FW
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Sunday, January 25, 2015

"Corporate Media’s Latest Orgy of Ineptitude Over UFOs — AGAIN"

"Corporate Media’s Latest Orgy of Ineptitude Over UFOs — AGAIN"

At least nobody got killed

By Billy Cox
De Void
1-24-15

     Don’t even waste your time reading this one today, because it’s so inside baseball, so utterly constipated and confounding I want to set my head on fire and swan-dive into a pond of gasoline. Yeah, that’s right, it’s the corporate media’s latest orgy of ineptitude over UFOs — AGAIN — so you guys can just step back and move right along while I ingest an emetic and hurl.

Whoa whoa whoa. Whoa. At ease. Deep breath, visualize world peace. Context first. Remember the context.

Ahem. OK:

In 1970, shortly after shutting down Project Blue Book, the Air Force moved its UFO files to Maxwell AFB in Huntsville, Ala. And just to settle on definitions, these weren’t actually formal studies. As Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla, the Blue Book director, stated in 1968, “Our primary responsibility is to collect data and then check the subjective material to see what the stimulus might be . . . We're not an investigative force. . . . We collect data. It's a misnomer to think we investigate.”

Furthermore: These files were never secret; you had to schedule an appointment, but you could read them yourself. Among the first to comb through the 100,000-plus hard-copy documents was Fund for UFO Research founder Don Berliner. In 1974 or thereabouts, Berliner spent a week at Maxwell, writing down names of the eyewitnesses for potential followup material. Some of those names were found only in newspaper articles; Blue Book was big on collecting and saving clippings.

The files were shipped from Maxwell to the National Archives and Records Administration in 1975 and compressed into 94 spools of microfilm. "A lot of people wanted to see them," says Berliner. "They were really popular.” So, in 1976, reservists Xeroxed the stuff for transfer into public-release microfilm. But with a hitch. A USAF review board ordered the worker bees to black out eyewitnesses' names. “They even censored the names of people mentioned in the newspaper accounts,” says Berliner. “They cited privacy reasons, but that didn’t make much sense to me, considering how the names had been available for so long. What it meant was, if you were a researcher, you couldn’t go back and reinvestigate the cases.”

Nevertheless, even though Berliner — and who knows how many others — had already recorded eyewitness names before the clampdown, FUFOR decided to purchase the entire catalogue of censored Blue Book microfilm. And that was pretty much that, until 1998, when one of Berliner’s associates who was visiting NARA called to say he was actually looking at the raw unedited microfilm records, complete with unredacted names. “I said are you sure? He said yeah, they’re on the original 16 millimeter film. So I told him to use our credit card and order a complete set.” FUFOR sprang for about $3,000. “But we got the original version with all the names.” So much for the embargo..

In 2007, a history website digitized the Archives’ censored version of Blue Book and placed them online. It wasn't newsy enough to rate MSM coverage back then. A year or so ago, just for grins, Berliner called the Archives and asked if he could see the original uncensored 16 millimeter files, “and they said ‘Absolutely not.’ I said ‘Well, would you like a copy? I’ve got one.’ They didn’t think that was very funny.”

So try to imagine the bewilderment, in extremely small hardcore circles, over the MSM clusterf*#! when the Open Minds website announced on Jan. 12 how those Blue Book files — the ones with the censored names, which have been languishing in the public domain online for nearly eight years — were now available in John Greenewald’s Black Vault database without charge. Greenewald, a Los Angeles rez, has been downloading FOIA-acquired government documents — on UFOs and other federal matters — onto his site since he was a teenager in the Nineties. What happened a week after Open Minds produced its piece caught Greenwald off guard, as he states in an email to De Void: “I never claimed this is the first time they hit the web, but rather, I got them compiled then just converted them to a much easier to use format. Crazy how the media works sometimes.”

Crazy? That’s being charitable.

From the New York Daily News to the Washington Post, from Fox News to the Chicago Sun Times, this sucker couldn’t have made a bigger splash if Larry Flynt belly-flopped from the second floor. And the reliable cliches (“The truth is out there — now on the web,” USA Today; “Is the truth out there?”, Christian Science Monitor; “It’s enough to make Mulder and Scully seethe with envy,” CNN) were the least of it. This was a magpie chorus to see who could mangle the most facts with the least effort possible (“Blue Book was shut down in 1985 ...”, Fox31 Denver). Even the Air Force Times screwed it up, calling it the “Air Force’s top secret files on sightings ... by a California man who spent nearly 20 years hounding the government to produce them.”

NBC’s Today Show anchor Natalie Morales alerted the nation with this especially piquant intro: “The U.S. Air Force just released the files to a top secret government program called the Project Blue Book, launched to investigate more than 12,000 UFO sightings ... NBC News has reached out to the Air Force and we are waiting for a response.”

(Psst, Natalie: You're still waiting because they don't take you seriously, girl ...)

Again, just to reiterate, the media had kittens over the Blue Book files sans noms. Were Greenewald's Black Vault database all he had to work with, Minnesota researcher Tom Tulien never would’ve been able, in 2011, to add eyewitness gravitas to his indictment of the arguably most significant and embarrassing UFO incident in the USAF’s official records. This one involved a UFO incursion over the Strategic Air Command base in Minot, N.D., in 1968. Seriously, check it out at minotb52ufo.com This one’s got everything — nuclear missiles, security-team recon, air and ground sightings, radio communications outages, and radarscope confirmation from a B-52 in flight. The brass didn’t know what the hell to make of that one. They officially blamed everything from Sirius to Vega to plasmas to ball lightning. Nearly 50 years later, the USAF veterans who were there remain incredulous over the whitewash.

“The story’s good, it’s remarkable,” says Tulien, “but the real value is what it tells us about Air Force procedures and protocols. Blue Book was always a public relations stunt — you just don’t find SAC investigating UFO cases. But that’s exactly what happened this time because this was serious. And the Minot report fell right through the cracks.”

Minot was so good, with an assist from Tulien, even Peter Jennings took a peek and included it in ABC's “UFOs: Seeing is Believing” in 2005. But Jennings’ cursory report barely scratched the surface. Imagine the impact the media could make if it directed national attention to the night The Great Taboo punctured American security surrounding the most dangerous weapons the world has ever known. But press coverage of real news? That would be even more unbelievable.
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Saturday, January 24, 2015

Air Force UFO Files 'Have Been On-Line for Years'

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Air Force UFO Files 'Have Been On-Line for Years'

By Caitlin Dewey
www.washingtonpost.com
1-23-15

    Thousands of pages of new UFO documents were not just released online. Big news week for UFOs, huh? If you spent any time with a newspaper or cable news channel this week, you may have spotted headlines like these: “Air Force UFO Files Hit the Web,” “U.S. Air Force Releases Thousands of Pages of Declassified UFO files,” “Two decades of mysterious Air Force UFO files now available online.” (That last one’s from The Post. We are not immune!) But while the coverage of the Air Force’s “Project Blue Book” — a government investigation into UFOs — suggested that the files had been newly declassified and digitized, they’ve actually been online for years … and they’ve been declassified way longer than that, available for public perusal at the National Archives.

A spokesman for Fold3, an Ancestry.com subsidiary and one of several sites hosting the Blue Book files, confirmed to The Post that they’ve had the full document available online for free since 2007. . . .
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Thursday, January 15, 2015

“… No Correlation Between … UFO Reports and U-2 Flights”

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“… No Correlation Between … UFO Reports and U-2 Flights”

CIA About UFOs of the 1950s and '60s:
'It Was Us'

By Leonard David
Space.com
1-14-15

"One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished:
It has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue"

      Many of the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) spotted by people in the middle of the last century were actually high-flying spy planes, officials from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency say.

On Dec. 29, CIA officials said the following via Twitter: "#1 most read on our ‪#Bestof2014list: Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the '50s? It was us. "Attached to the tweet was a PDF of "The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974," a report about the United States' manned U-2 spy plane written by agency historians and published in 1998.

That document notes that "high-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)." . . .

. . . The CIA tweet has sparked its own UFO flap: Several analysts dispute the CIA assertion that U-2 flights really caused upward of half of UFO sightings.

"One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished: It has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue," Robert Sheaffer, author and well-known UFO cynic, wrote in a blog post last week. "We might agree on little else, except that this claim is nonsense."

Sheaffer explains that the Project Blue Book files are now public records, allowing anyone to verify when and where sightings were reported.

"The bottom line is: There is absolutely no correlation between the times and places of UFO reports and U-2 flights," he wrote. . . .
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Thursday, January 08, 2015

CIA Falsely Claims U-2 Spy Plane Flights Greatly Increased UFO Reports:

The Agency’s Actual UFO Secrets are Far More Interesting

CIA Falsely Claims U-2 Spy Plane Flights Greatly Increased UFO Reports

By Robert Hastings
www.ufohastings.com
1-7-15

     The spin doctors at the CIA recently trotted out, once again, the long-ago discredited claim that secret flights of its U-2 reconnaissance aircraft led to a massive increase in UFO reports in the U.S.—something the agency says it welcomed, because the misidentifications masked the true nature of the aerial craft being observed, thereby helping to maintain the covert program’s cover.

A CIA-originated tweet on December 29, 2014, read, “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ‘50s? It was us.” The sender then claimed that “half” of UFO reports in the 1950s and ‘60s were due to sightings of the U-2.

Of course, no explanation was offered as to how a secret fixed-wing aircraft, appearing as a mere speck in the sky as it flew at 60,000 feet above the earth, could possibly account for the tens of thousands of UFO reports during that two-decade period involving sightings of saucers, globes, triangles and cylinders that maneuvered and hovered near the ground, stopped car engines, scared livestock and left landing gear marks in the dirt.

No matter. The elite media and small town news organizations alike uncritically picked-up and circulated the agency’s latest UFO-related slight-of-hand, apparently unaware that the CIA’s “admission” has no factual basis and was completely debunked years ago by UFO researchers utilizing credible sighting databases and statistical analysis.

Moreover, after the agency first publicly floated the absurd claim that 50% of UFO sightings could be attributed to the U-2, in 1997, retired U. S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Friend, former chief of Project Blue Book—the USAF’s best known UFO investigations group—said that Blue Book did not notice any appreciable increase in public UFO reports following the implementation of the U-2 program.


This has been more recently confirmed by retired U.S. Navy physicist and UFO researcher Dr. Bruce Maccabee, as discussed his latest book The FBI CIA UFO Connection. Analyzing sighting reports sent to Blue Book 10 months prior to, and ten months following, the first U-2 flights showed no statistically-significant difference.

Okay, so the CIA’s claim about the U-2 program resulting in massive numbers of UFO reports is bogus. What might the agency really know about the mysterious phenomenon? Well, let’s start with the on-the-record statements by retired Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator John Callahan, who says that a CIA officer told him to suppress information about the now-famous November 1986 Alaska UFO sighting case, involving an aircraft carrier-sized UFO that maneuvered near a Japanese Air Lines cargo plane.

According to Callahan, the dramatic incident resulted in a secret meeting at FAA headquarters, attended by scientific advisors to President Ronald Reagan, FBI agents, and persons who flashed CIA ID badges. At the end of it, after radar tapes—confirming the presence of the UFO near the aircraft—and air traffic controllers’ voice tapes had been reviewed, one of the CIA officers ordered the confiscation of the data and told everyone present that the meeting “never happened” and that the UFO incident should be considered Top Secret.

When Callahan objected and asked why the American people could not know the facts about the case, the CIA man said that there would be “public panic” if the truth came out. To his credit, Callahan kept some of the data and released it to researchers after he retired.

During a similar incident, at Vandenberg AFB, California, in the fall of 1964, two CIA officers confiscated the shocking “Big Sur UFO” film, showing an unknown saucer-shaped object using lightning-like beams to shoot down a dummy nuclear warhead in flight, during a missile test over the Pacific Ocean—according to two ex-USAF officers, former Lieutenant Robert Jacobs and retired Major Florenze Mansmann, who were present for the classified, CIA-attended screening of the film.

Mansmann, a photographic analyst, said that his frame-by-frame analysis of the film with a magnifier revealed the UFO to be a domed-disc that pivoted on its vertical axis just prior to the release of each of the four beams of light. After the last shot, the dummy warhead tumbled out of camera frame, falling into the ocean, hundreds of miles short of its test range target. The retired major said that the two CIA officers confiscated the key frames in the film after the screening and told him that the incident was Top Secret.

(UFO debunkers, including Kendrick Frazier, the executive editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, have tried to discredit the testimony of Jacobs and Mansmann, relying on the flawed and easily-rebutted claims of one Kingston George, another member of the photographic team that filmed the bizarre incident. My article on the affair presents the details and asks why editor Frazier was so shy about publicly acknowledging his day job as a Public Relations Specialist for Sandia National Laboratories—one of the U.S. government’s leading nuclear weapons research facilities—at the time he was so stridently attempting to debunk the facts presented by the two former Air Force officers.)

So, here we have two significant UFO incidents involving CIA’s confiscation of the data—motion picture film, radar and air traffic control voice tapes—confirming the presence of a vastly-superior, unidentified aerial craft in each case.
Will the public ever hear a CIA “admission” of these facts? Of course not. As long as the mainstream media are satisfied with parroting the agency’s demonstrably-false claims—such as the classified U-2 program being the cause of massive numbers of UFO sightings—without the slightest bit of skepticism or independent investigation of the facts, the CIA knows that it can continue to dupe the supposedly-savvy media watchdogs who allegedly help keep our democracy strong by facilitating an informed citizenry.

And so it goes.
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"CIA UFO Claim: It Has United UFO Skeptics and Proponents in Proclaiming It Untrue"

CIA's Lockheed U-2 Spy Plane
CIA's Lockheed U-2 Spy Plane

Did CIA U2 flights really cause 50% of UFO Sightings?

By Robert Sheaffer
badufos.blogspot.com
1-6-15

     Once again, the claim has resurfaced that, during the 1950s and 60s, high-altitude CIA manned reconnaissance flights involving the U-2 and the later SR-71 were responsible for half of all UFO sightings.

This claim is now all over the internet, and treated in the usual uncritical manner. . . .

. . . One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished: it has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue. We might agree on little else, except that this claim is nonsense.

The claim is contained in a report issued by the CIA, The CIA and the U2 Program, 1954-1974. The once-secret document was written back in 1998. In it (on PDF (not document) page 84-85):
"High-altitude testing of the U2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects. In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and military aircraft like the B47s and B57s operated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.”
Can that claim be substantiated? Nope. . . .
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Monday, January 05, 2015

Ex Navy Scientist Slams CIA UFO Claims

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Ex Navy Scientist Slams CIA UFO Claims

By Richard Dolan Press
1-1-15

     Claims by the CIA of a ‘tremendous’ increase in reports of UFOs when the U2 spy plane started flying in 1955 are wrong according to a former US Navy optical physicist, Dr Bruce Maccabee.

In a new book containing the formerly classified history of the U2, the writers, Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, claim that the USAF received a greatly increased number of UFO sighting reports from pilots and ground based observers after the U2 began test flights on August 8, 1955.

According to Dr. Maccabee, the numbers of sightings per month received by the USAF’s Project Blue Book, as reported in the Final Report of the Scientific Investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects (Air Force Contract F44620-67-C-0035, E. U. Condon, Director; Bantam Books edition, 1969, pg 514) totally contradict the CIA claim.

According to the Final Report the number of sighting reports in July, before the U2 started flying, was 63. In August, when U2 test flights began, the number was 68, an increase of only 5 or about 8%. Then, in September, there was a decrease to 57 reports, a drop of almost 20%, even though the U2 continued to fly. Averaged over a longer time the statistics show little or no impact of the U2 flights on sighting rate.


In his book, The FBI CIA UFO Connection published last September, Dr. Maccabee shows that the number of UFO sightings reports for 10 months preceding the first U2 flights is the same as the number of reports collected during the ten months following the first flight.

‘These statistics clearly do not support the claim of a ‘tremendous’ increase in UFO reports when the U2 began flying,’ Dr Maccabee said.
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