Archival Interview: A Young George Knapp on UFOs and Government Secrecy

We've all seen so many people in this field where you've, you know, they want to convince you, you've got to believe. Uh I'm more of the opinion you put out the information and and let people make up their minds.

By Eyes On Cinema 9-8-2025

I wrote to President Carter to ask him a couple of questions and uh that that's another that's a whole other line is I never got through to him either. I wrote to virtually every NASA astronaut who has ever been associated with this phenomenon and never got a single response from any of them. You'd figure you'd at least get a form letter back and never got anything. I wrote uh I'm very disappointed with the Freedom of Information Act, how effective that is, too, because I didn't get diddly out of that. Wrote to NASA knowing that they had a certain body of information. I asked for all of it. Well, here it is. Here's all of it. And 6 months later, somebody else asks for all of it, and they got a lot bigger pile of all of it than I got. So, I I think, you know, there's very few checks and balances on that. They give you what they want in that system.

Some of the information is very disturbing. Um, it changes the way you view things. It changes the way you look at everything once this once it hits you, what really is going on? And uh I think the government could be right in a sense that that if the story came out in its entirety, if the president went on television and said, "They're here. We can't do anything about it." That it would shake our foundations. It would shake our belief in religion and shake our belief in in government. Maybe people would stop paying their taxes because it would change the way we view everything.

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Government Secrecy On UFOs – The Real Reasons

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What I believe is really going on here is that the few individuals in the U.S. government who know about this issue believe the phenomena might be a threat. And that they don't know how to deal with it. [...]

By Tom Rogan The Washington Examiner 12-17-19

Because the government's assessment, though they won't admit it, is that the UFOs are popping up near the aircraft carriers due to those carriers being nuclear-powered. Note also that UFOs also like to pop up near nuclear submarines and Air Force nuclear weapons bases. Now recognize that this paradigm has been occurring since the Manhattan Project operations at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and also at nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and Russia.

Oh, and as Robert Hastings documents, these UFOs have sometimes even temporarily shut down U.S. nuclear weapons systems. Interesting, right?

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UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites (#ad)

See Also:

UFOs and Nukes Researcher Reveals His Alien Abduction Encounters

UFOs Visited Nuclear Missile Sites & Bomber Bases According to The Defense Department

UFO Reports at Nuclear Missile Sites and The Pentagon UFO Program

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NSA UFO Docs



Documents declassified by the NSA paint an intriguing picture of interest and activities in the UFO community. Please follow along as we cross reference files that explore UFO-related deception and establish the existence of a report on a UFO symposium authored by an NSA assignee in attendance. I'll also explain my efforts to learn more via the Freedom of Information Act. "Surprise or Deceptive Data" The January, 1997, Volume 43 of The Skeptics UFO Newsletter is available at The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry website. Its author, the late Philip

By Jack Brewer ufotrail.blogspot.com 1-24-17

J. Klass, described a batch of docs released by the NSA due to various efforts, including a lawsuit launched by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS). I point out the work of Klass because not only did he discuss the docs we're going to explore, but primarily because he speculated about the possible author of some of the NSA material. Klass suspected Tom Deuley, a long time MUFON director and former NSA employee, was "almost certainly" involved in compiling a portion of the information held by the NSA. I bring this up not to be overly conspiratorial, but because I find the chain of events interesting, and I suspect some of you will agree. To try to be clear, please allow me to emphasize it is not news that Deuley was employed by the NSA or that he discussed the UFO community with his employer, but it warrants mention in relation to the following material.

A declassified doc available on the NSA site is a draft titled, UFO's and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data. Its author is not disclosed, as is standard policy, and it is undated. However, we know it was obviously composed prior to the info release as described by Klass because he discussed it in the 1997 newsletter, and it is referenced in another NSA doc from the same era. More on that shortly, but let's consider the draft a bit.

"The implications of the UFO phenomena go far beyond the particular phenomena itself," the 7-page doc begins. It goes on to explain that "surprise attack is such a basic ingredient of military success" because "it is able to rely on a most dependable human blind spot: The inability of most men to objectively process and evaluate highly unusual data and to react to the data in a meaningful way."

The author then cites celebrated ufologist Dr. Jacques Vallee while establishing the human response to observations of unusual phenomena "is predictable and graphically depictable." The assault of a person's psychological structure is considered, with the emotional impact of the strangeness of a UFO sighting compared to witnessing a brutal murder, and identified as "the same."

Conditions attributed to trauma are reviewed, including amnesia, and a chart with a "strangeness index" (see right) estimates the likelihood a person will discuss experiences with others in proportion to the perceived extent of peculiarity. It suggests the stranger the incident, the less people the witness will tell, which could also easily be interpreted as the more traumatized and mentally paralyzed they stand to become.

The first of two redacted sections is apparently an example of how human response to perceived unusual phenomena can be detrimental, particularly from a military perspective, as the author concludes, "It is apparent that we cannot allow such a human flaw to leave us blinded to unusual or surprising material. The example indicates that some people are less affected by strange phenomena than others, though still frightened by it, they remain capable of reporting it with a fair degree of objectivity."

It might be interesting to know more about the details of that redacted example. The second redacted section is the author's recommendations to solve the challenge.

Seeking more information about the two redacted sections brings us to another document you've probably heard about or seen around. It's an affidavit of NSA man Eugene F. Yeates in the case of Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. National Security Agency - and there are two affidavits, one public, the other originally classified but later released. Nothing's ever simple in UFO Land.

Fork in the Road

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, once said about UFOs, "Well, it turns out that the government does have something to hide, but it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials." He may very well be right, and he's certainly correct in at least most cases, yet many of us, Mr. Aftergood included, might find the circumstances quite interesting.

CAUS sued the NSA in the early 1980's to release its UFO files. This resulted in a chain of events which included the affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates. The long and short of his statements suggest the reasons the NSA desired to selectively withhold information had nothing to do with the UFO community's popular suspicions and collective definition of UFOs. The concerns, Yeates stated, were about national security involving matters of communications intelligence (COMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT).

Did you notice that fork in the road? Some people always chase aliens, and if there aren't any around, they're not interested. Others always debunk aliens, and if they're convinced they've established there aren't any around, they're not interested anymore either. If, however, you're interested in how the intelligence and UFO communities bump into each other in dark alleys, then thanks for sticking with me and we're well on our way.

There is a public Yeates affidavit and a formerly classified, now available affidavit. The NSA hosts a copy of the public doc, and The Black Vault provides a copy of the declassified doc.

The formerly classified affidavit contains statements from Yeates on the "Blind Spot" document explored above, including comments on the two sections remaining redacted. Yeates explained:

This document was discussed in paragraph 20b of my public affidavit. It is entitled UFO's and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data. In this document, the author discusses what he considers to be a serious shortcoming in the Agency's COMINT interception and reporting procedures -- the inability to respond correctly to surprising information or deliberately deceptive data. He uses the UFO phenomena to illustrate his belief that the inability of the U.S. intelligence community to process this type of unusual data adversely affects U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities. Deletions in this document were made as follows:

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(2) Paragraph three of this document uses a signals intelligence operation against [redacted] to illustrate the author's point. This paragraph contains information about SIGINT activities that is currently and properly classified... The material in this paragraph also concerns the organization and operational activities and functions of NSA directed against [redacted]...

(3) Paragraph four of the memorandum states the conclusions and recommendations of the author. While it talks of the ability of the Agency employees to deal with unusual phenomena it is not responsive to the plaintiff's request regarding UFO or UFO phenomena. In any event, as I stated in my public affidavit (paragraph 20b), the subject matter of that paragraph is exempt from disclosure because it contains the employee's specific recommendations for addressing the problem of responding to surprise material... One specific recommendation suggests an operational approach to solving the problem which reveals NSA activities and is, therefore, exempt from disclosure..

That sounds pretty interesting and potentially relevant to me. I'd like to know more.

The formerly classified Yeates affidavit went on to address a document withheld, once again on the grounds it had nothing to do with actual UFO phenomena, but was instead an "account by a person assigned to NSA of his attendance at a UFO symposium":

In processing the plaintiff's FOIA request, a total of two hundred and thirty-nine documents were located in NSA files. Seventy-nine of these documents originated with other government agencies and have been referred by NSA to those agencies for their direct response to the plaintiff. One document, which I addressed in paragraph 20c of my public affidavit, was erroneously treated as part of the subject matter of plaintiff's FOIA request. It is an account by a person assigned to NSA of his attendance at a UFO symposium and it cannot fairly be said to be a record of the kind sought by the plaintiff.

The same circumstances described by Yeates, yet this time as he stated in the public affidavit:

The third non-COMINT document is a memorandum for the record by an NSA assignee that was originally withheld in its entirety... In my review today I have ascertained, however, that this memorandum is neither in whole nor in part responsive to the plaintiff's request. It does not deal with UFOs or the UFO phenomena. Rather, it is a document voluntarily prepared by the assignee to report an incident that occurred during his attendance at a UFO symposium. It is the assignee's personal account of his activities and does not include reference to any UFO sighting or phenomena.

FOIA

It is apparently the statements about the UFO symposium that led Philip Klass to be most confident Yeates was referring to Tom Deuley, at least in that particular instance. As Klass explained in his 1997 newsletter, Deuley spoke publicly of discussing his attendance at a UFO conference with his employer, the NSA. Regardless, I identify a number of things of potential interest about the documents. I therefore filed a couple of FOIA requests.

In the first, I requested that the declassified draft, UFO's and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data, once again be reviewed with consideration given to releasing the two currently redacted paragraphs. If possible, it might be interesting to know more about the operations, examples and recommendations contained therein and offered by the author.

The second FOIA request was to review the feasibility of now releasing the previously withheld report on the UFO symposium. It could be interesting to read, whether or not composed by Deuley, and it is of potential historic value. I've got a few more requests pending to other agencies on different cases and will be sure and pass along any relevant info as it develops.

Last but not least, I do not consider myself experienced at wading through declassified docs, identifying the latest declassified version (sometimes a doc will be declassified and "more" declassified repeatedly over time) and similar relevant tricks to know of the FOIA trade. If you're aware of docs and material relevant to the above cases or other topics I write about, a heads up is always welcome.

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See Also:

What Does the NSA Know about The UFO-Cover-up Whistleblowership?

Unclassified NSA Document About Decrypting An Alien Transmission

Suing The NSA for Release of UFO Documents; Threats To National Security Claimed (1981)

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Airline Pilots Protest U.S. Government Secrecy on UFOs: the Big Story the Elite Media Buried

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By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 1-3-16

     On December 22, 1958, a New Jersey newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, published the startling article above.

The key passages follow here:

A group of more than 50 top commercial airline pilots, all veterans of more than 15 years with major companies, yesterday blasted as ‘bordering on the absolute ridiculous’ the Air Force policy of tight censorship, brush-off and denial in regard to unidentified flying objects—flying saucers.

One termed the Air Force policy ‘a lesson in lying, intrigue and the Big Brother attitude carried to the ultimate extreme.’ Each of the pilots has sighted at least one UFO, the majority several...‘ We are ordered to report all UFO sightings,’ said one, ‘but when we do, we are treated like incompetents and told to keep quiet...’ This pilot also pointed to a Joint Chiefs of Staff order giving top radio priority to UFO reports anywhere in the world and specifying that any pilot who fails to maintain absolute secrecy afterwards is subject to a maximum of ten years in jail and a fine of $10,000.’

The “order” mentioned was a regulation promulgated by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—the heads of the military services—designated JANAP-146, which required military and commercial pilots who had sighted a UFO to immediately file, while still airborne, a CIRVIS (Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings) report. The purpose of such real-time reporting, including a required mention of the unidentified aerial object’s altitude and direction of flight, was to allow the nearest U.S. Air Force base to launch fighters to investigate the sighting.

The regulation also mandated strict secrecy relating to a given report, warning the pilot involved that he would potentially risk severe penalties if he filed a CIRVIS report and subsequently discussed the sighting publicly.

This rare journalistic breach in UFO-related security—essentially a public protest by dozens of highly respected professional pilots—was quickly bottled-up. No wire service picked up the article—which would have potentially resulted in it being published in hundreds of newspapers nationwide—and there was no investigative follow-up of what was clearly a major story by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME magazine, or any other journalistic heavy-hitter in the U.S.

Indeed, by 1958, the American elite media had essentially ceased to publish/broadcast serious stories about the UFO phenomenon, instead going for dismissive, light-hearted articles and broadcasts which poked fun at persons who reported “flying saucers”, followed-up by pronouncements by U.S. Air Force public relations personnel which assured Americans that UFO sightings were due to misidentified manmade aircraft or not widely-recognized meteorological/astronomical phenomena—and certainly not the result of something as exotic as spacecraft from elsewhere in the universe.

However, beginning in the 1970s, as the result of various Freedom of Information requests, unauthorized disclosures by former military and intelligence agency personnel, and the findings of one U.S. Senate hearing, the public gradually became aware of a concerted, covert campaign by the CIA to use the media to influence public opinion on various national security-related subjects and situations, including UFO sightings. This decades-long propaganda program is thoroughly documented in The Missing Times: Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up,by the late journalist Terry Hansen, which is available as a $2.99 e-book at Amazon.

And, apparently, the CIA’s UFO-debunking media campaign is continuing. As recently as 2013, the agency issued a tweet, alleging that roughly half of all UFO sightings in the late 1950s were the result of its secret U-2 spy plane flights. This absurd claim had already been discredited—the first time it was made—by UFO researchers who published vetted UFO databases which demonstrated that the vast majority of UFO sightings during that era could not even remotely be associated with U-2 overflights. Indeed, the CIA’s claim had even been dismissed by former USAF UFO Project Blue Book chief, retired Lt. Col. Robert Friend, who had gone on-the-record, saying that there was no link.

More recently, the Smithsonian Channel broadcast an episode of its UFOs Declassified series, titled “Pilot Eyewitness” which very obviously tried to discredit UFO sightings by commercial pilots, while at the same time pointedly omitting any mention of the CIA-orchestrated cover-up of one of them—the 1986 Japanese Airlines incident in Alaska—according to retired Federal Aviation Administration supervisor John Callahan, who has openly discussed a CIA-directed meeting at FAA headquarters shortly after the incident.

While the program noted Callahan’s revelations about the existence of the meeting—after all, he had already discussed it in various interviews available on YouTube—it carefully avoided mentioning the lead CIA officer’s admonishment to Callahan and the other attendees, “This event never happened, we were never here, we’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.”¹

And why was such secrecy warranted? According to Callahan, the officer said that if the government “ever came out and told the American public that [the aircraft crew] ran into a UFO out there, it would cause panic across the country.”²

My two previous articles, I’m Not a UFO Expert but I Play One on TV and Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified: Simple Debunking or CIA Disinformation? discuss the network’s biased and inaccurate portrayal of the UFO phenomenon and ask whether incompetent research and prejudice—or, on the other hand, intentional misreporting—is responsible for the glaringly propagandistic series.

Perhaps significantly, a longtime Smithsonian organization employee, Frederick C. Durant III, was a former CIA analyst and the author of the agency’s 1953 Robertson Panel Report in which CIA-sponsored scientists recommended secretly using the mass media to debunk UFO sightings. The previously-mentioned book, The Missing Times,presents several documented examples of covert agency influence on the reporting of UFO-related stories by the elite media over the years and is highly-recommended.

While a number of airline pilots—from various countries—have in recent years begun going on-the-record about their personal UFO sightings, the topic is still largely taboo in the industry and the elite media. Hopefully, in the future, more and more pilots will follow the example set by their predecessors in 1958 and bravely discuss the hidden reality so clearly and defiantly reported in the Newark Star-Ledger article.

References:

1. Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, Harmony Books, New York, 2010, pp. 222-229

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdT_5eCZaRo

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See Also:

Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified: Simple Debunking or CIA Disinformation?

I’m Not A UFO Expert But I Play One on TV: Smithsonian Channel’s New Debunking Series

Thousands of Airline Pilots Witness UFOs

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