The National UFO Historical Records Center is Born

"Our mission is to collect, preserve, and provide historical UFO materials to the general public and interested parties. With the accumulated data, we hope to assist with serious research endeavors and aid in an accurate chronicling of UFO/UAP history for present and future generations regardless of belief or non-belief in the subject."

Subject: Introduction of the newly-established National UFO Historical Records Center (a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization)

PRESS RELEASE The UFO Chronicles

Who: An assemblage of the leading U.S. UFO/UAP Historians and Archivists led by David Marler that includes: Jan Aldrich, Rod Dyke, Barry Greenwood, Dr. Mark Rodeghier, Rob Swiatek, and others.

What: The establishment of the largest historical archive dedicated to the preservation and centralization of UFO/UAP information in the United States.

Where: Physical archive to be based in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area.

Why: Our mission is to collect, preserve, and provide historical UFO materials to the general public and interested parties. With the accumulated data, we hope to assist with serious research endeavors and aid in an accurate chronicling of UFO/UAP history for present and future generations regardless of belief or non-belief in the subject.

Context: In recent years, there have been successive U.S. government disclosures acknowledging the UFO/UAP subject as a genuine phenomenon. Subsequently, multiple U.S. military, intelligence, and scientific agencies have started adopting programs to study the subject such as NASA and the AIAA. In addition, within the civilian sector, there has been an influx of new researchers into this field of inquiry. Many academics and scientists are included in this group.However, most of these parties do not have access to the vast array of historical materials and data sets in the hands of civilian U.S. UFO/UAP historians and researchers.

In conjunction with this new-found respectability regarding the UFO/UAP subject is the growing need to create more space for these historic materials. Individual U.S. researchers and historians have amassed large collections of data over the decades. These have been home-based archives scattered throughout the country. The National UFO Historical Records Center has been created to gather and centralize this historical UFO data in the United States into a singular freestanding facility. With the physical holdings residing in the Albuquerque area, these will be made available to those who visit in-person while efforts will be underway to actively digitize these materials for global accessibility.

A vast array of UFO files and collections are already destined to be added to the growing inventory during the course of the next 1-2 years. Currently, the collection consists of materials from over 25 countries derived from 70+ U.S. and foreign individuals. Some of the largest U.S. collections serve as the cornerstone for this center. This includes diverse materials from The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). We are also interested in anyone wanting to donate historical UFO/UAP materials to us.

Efforts are underway to acquire a building to house this national treasure and make it readily accessible to researchers,academics, and the general public. Funding and donations will be vital to making this vision a reality. Thus, the creation of this non-profit organization to facilitate achieving that goal.

We look forward to working collaboratively with similar free-standing worldwide UFO/UAP archives and those within the university setting. Together, we can preserve the history and, perhaps, gain insights into the mystery.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

National UFO Historical Records Center P.O. Box 15541 Rio Rancho, NM 87174 www.nufohrc.org

David Marler Executive Director dbmarler@outlook.com

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"NBC Didn’t Take the Hillary Clinton UFO Bait..."

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Some ideas about digging

By Billy Cox De Void 1-20-16

     NBC didn’t take the Hillary Clinton UFO bait during Sunday night’s primary debate, staged just a couple of weeks after the former Secretary of State vowed to “get to the bottom of” The Great Taboo. As per tradition, the mainstream media tossed a lot of confetti in the air over her UFO remarks before getting bored and wandering off. But in doing so, they forget – assuming they ever knew – about the formidable and unremitting curiosity of Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta.

In 2002, the former Clinton White House chief of staff joined the ad hoc Coalition for Freedom of Information in a federal lawsuit against NASA for access to files related to the so-called Kecksburg incident of 1965. Although that initiative, spearheaded by independent investigative journalist Leslie Kean, produced no smoking gun, the effort shook loose hundreds of previously unreleased documents, revealed that many others had been destroyed or went missing, and forced the space agency to pay the plaintiff's legal fees.

We may never know what, if anything, Podesta attempted to accomplish on the UFO front during his time as senior adviser in the Obama White House. But he has a roadmap for how to attack the archives on multiple fronts. Or rather, he has access to a strategy promoted by a network of scholars, historians and researchers known as the Sign Historical Group (SHG).

In 2002, with decades invested in clawing through the brambles of federal acronyms stretching back to World War II, SHG says it sent a detailed proposal to Podesta about what to look for, and where. It updated that pitch online in 2014. For member Jan Aldrich, director of the even more specialized Project 1947, the logical – and perhaps only – way to understand the controversy is to toggle the FOIA time machine back to when the U.S. military actually left a paper trail in its efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible. Nearly 70 years later, he argues, the gatekeepers still aren't on top of this mess.

“The government may have better data,” says Aldrich in an email to De Void, “but they are still puzzled.” Want answers? Then forget about drilling into the gold mine using more recent cases. “If there is more definitive information in the government’s possession," he adds, "then I would think it would be [at] some high level government scientific lab or … in the compartmentalized stove pipes of special surveillance programs.”

The way SHG sees it, the “Holy Grail of Ufology” is 68 years old. It's a report whose title is so banal – “Estimate of the Situation,” or EOTS -- it sounds like it was written to be invisible. EOTS was the product of the USAF’s first official inquiry into the “flying disc” phenomenon. The brass called it Project Sign, the namesake of SHG. In 1948, Sign analysts from Wright-Patterson AFB’s Technical Intelligence Division sized up the problem and prepared a draft, or estimate, venturing that UFOs likely had “interplanetary” origins. USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg rejected their best guess and demanded another.

In a November ’48 come-to-Jesus showdown that would probably make a great David Mamet drama, members of the Sign team were assembled in Washington, D.C., and told what to write. Dissenters were reassigned.

“The Estimate died a quick death,” wrote USAF Capt. Edward Ruppelt, who directed the more widely known successor, Project Blue Book, in 1956. “Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of the UFOs." Remaining copies of EOTS have not been located.

But EOTS is just a small piece of the puzzle. SHG’s strategy, broken into categories and subcategories, runs 43 pages and offers numerous leads, most based on existing documents. If a picture paints a thousand words, the payoffs from references from one source alone -- a document called “History of Air Technical Intelligence Center 1 July 1952-31 December 1952” -- could be incalculable. According to that summary, ATIC’s mission was “to investigate and analyse [cq] reports of unidentified aerial objects or of phenomena of possible concern to the air defense of the US” and to “produce air technical and scientific intelligence studies and estimates of alien capabilities to conduct aerial warfare.”

To that end, states a “Technical Requirements Division” paper, “the installation of gun cameras in F-86’s assigned to the Fighter Squadron at Wright-Patterson Air Base was assured. The purpose of these installations is to provide suitable photographs during flights resulting from reports or sightings of unidentified flying objects.” Furthermore, "15 officer Air Attaches, 10 airmen, 27 ATLO’s [assembly test and launch operations personnel] and 37 investigators” received specialized training. They fanned out into three states “to investigate flying object reports. To date, 100 videon stereoscopic cameras, equipped with diffraction gratings over one lens, have been procured and received at ATIC.”

So what happened to the pix?

And SHG isn’t just poking around for military records – what is the CIA hanging onto? SHG takes aim at an “unremittingly pedestrian” narrative published in 1997 by Agency historian Gerald K. Haines. His CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 paper issued the absurd and unsubstantiated claim that more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s could be explained by high-altitude spy planes.

“Following a lawsuit,” writes SHG, “the CIA released about 900 pages of UFO documents. However, this and later releases by the CIA does not represent the total material on the subject, which has been estimated to be at least 16,000 pages. Furthermore, there are documents held by the Navy, Air Force, FBI, Army and others, which give important insight into the CIA’s activities here. Most of these documents were apparently unknown to Haines, and some are little known to many in the UFO field. Also, Haines apparently is unaware of the huge amount of data in multiple copies, which went to the CIA from other agencies, further indicating the whole story has not been made available to the public.”

AFCRL, AMC, SAC, MERINT, CIRVIS, MATS -- the Sign Historical Group's list of data suspects goes on and on. So John Podesta's call for accountability isn't just some vague quirky "X-Files" exhortation. It's a demand for closing the gaps in official history. After all, we did pay for it, so we do own it. Check out SHG’s ideas for getting this stuff back, at http://www.project1947.com/shg/cfi/sfcfiproposal.htm. De Void came away from it with just one question: Why do we still allow the dead WWII crowd who made the original classification decisions to keep telling us what we can and can't handle? [...]

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See Also:

Hillary Clinton Gives Promise To Investigate UFOs

John Podesta: Pulling Back the Curtain on UFOs

"Inside John Podesta’s Head ... Re The UFO Conundrum"

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

The CIA’s Actual Involvement with UFOs: The Agency’s Public Statements are Deliberately Deceptive

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 12-8-15

      Some years after the CIA released what it claimed was its entire collection of UFO-related documents, all of which were classified Secret or lower, it was discovered—as a result of a Freedom of Information request filed by researcher Stanton Friedman—that a National Security Agency (NSA) report referenced Top Secret CIA files on UFOs that had once been shared with NSA. In other words, highly-classified CIA UFO documents, whose very existence is publicly denied by the agency, remain secret to this day.

In view of this revelation, it’s perhaps advisable to examine the history of the CIA’s involvement with UFOs—both officially-acknowledged and recently-exposed. The following is a chapter from my 2008 book, UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites:

~ 26 ~
The Agency

“It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings...Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs, but through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. To hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”

—Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter (Ret.)

Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency

The New York Times, February 28, 1960

     Thank you, Admiral Hillenkoetter. I guess we should be thankful that even one former CIA director chose to be truthful about UFOs after leaving the agency. But that was nearly 50 years ago, so don’t hold your breath waiting for the next one. Unfortunately, Hillenkoetter later reversed himself—under pressure from the agency, according to respected UFO researcher Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.)—and withdrew his support for congressional hearings.

     Fortunately, another former, high-level CIA employee, Victor Marchetti, has also been candid with the public. As noted in Chapter 8, Marchetti wrote the best-selling book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which exposed many of the agency’s counterproductive and sometimes illegal activities. More to the point, he also wrote a lengthy article about the CIA’s interest in UFOs, titled, “How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon”, which appeared in the May 1979 issue of Second Look magazine. Marchetti said,

There are many myths, few facts, and much speculation about what the CIA knows of the UFO phenomenon. These, combined with the public’s distrust of the clandestine agency, have led to a strong popular belief that the CIA is at the center of a government-wide conspiracy to cover-up the truth about UFOs. It usually follows that the cover-up is designed to keep us ignorant, or at least confused and doubtful, about contacts or visitations by intelligent beings from outer space. Thus, if we only knew what the CIA knows, and is covering up, we would be better able to understand and deal with aliens. And that would be a good thing.1

     At first glance, it seems almost as if Marchetti is mildly chastising the public for its widely-held perceptions and occasional myth-making about the CIA’s involvement with UFOs. However, he then finished his thought,

I do not know from my own firsthand experience if there are UFOs. I have never seen one. Nor have I seen conclusive, empirical, or physical evidence that they really exist. But, I do know that the CIA and U.S. Government have been concerned over the UFO phenomenon for many years and that their attempts, both past and recent, to discount the significance of the phenomenon and to explain away the apparent lack of official interest in it have all the earmarkings of a classic intelligence cover-up.2

     Here Marchetti seems to suggest that at least some of the public’s perceptions—as regards an official cover-up—may indeed have merit. And what might the CIA be hiding from the public? Well, that involves a fair amount of guesswork. However, elsewhere in the article, Marchetti writes about the rumors he heard while working at the highest level of the agency, regarding “little gray men whose ships had crashed, or had been shot down.”3 While this statement cannot be taken as proof that the CIA has been involved in the recovery of downed UFOs, or even as evidence that such events have actually occurred—given that Marchetti refers to the reports he heard as “rumors”—it at least confirms that agency employees had discussed, in a serious manner in Marchetti’s presence, the possibility that such recoveries had in fact occurred. But as researcher Mark Rodighier correctly notes, “Rumors are just that, and a serious discussion of rumors is different than a serious discussion of actual documents or knowledge about crashed UFOs.”

     Over the years, the CIA has attempted to portray its own role in the U.S. government’s UFO-related activities as a mostly passive one from the early 1950s onward. However, a number of researchers have doubted this carefully-crafted public image, believing it to be a façade designed to conceal a greater, perhaps central, role in the official cover-up. Over time, certain hints, inadvertent slips, and the rare admission by a former agency employee, like Marchetti, have coalesced in a way which suggests an official interest in UFOs far greater than the CIA is willing to acknowledge.

     Researcher Barry Greenwood writes,

The possible involvement of the CIA in UFO research has long been a hot topic of controversy. Up until the mid-1970s, the CIA’s response to inquiries about UFOs would be either not to answer or to forward the correspondence to the Air Force for attention. This was not very satisfying to individuals who had heard rumors [about], or had even experienced firsthand, [instances] of the CIA collecting and analyzing information on UFO sightings from around the world. There was little that could be done to gain more information. No legal means existed to force the CIA to answer any questions, let alone release documents.

When the Freedom of Information Act became law, this means was finally made available to UFO researchers. Initial attempts were not without frustration, however. One of the first organizations to pursue the CIA for UFO documents was Ground Saucer Watch (GSW) of Phoenix Arizona. Headed by William Spaulding, GSW was at the forefront of document research and made great strides in allowing public access to government UFO activities.

A request was filed on July 14, 1975 by GSW...The letter asked for copies of all UFO case investigations/evaluations by the CIA. After a long delay, the CIA responded on March 26, 1976:

‘In order that you may be aware of the true facts concerning the involvement of the CIA in the investigation of UFO phenomena, let me give you the following brief history. Late in 1952, the National Security Council levied upon the CIA the requirement to determine if the existence of UFOs would create a danger to the national security of the United States. The Office of Scientific Intelligence established the Intelligence Advisory Committee [more commonly known as the Robertson Panel] to study the matter. That committee made the recommendations found at the bottom of page 1 and the top four lines of page 2 of the Robertson Panel Report. At no time prior to the formation of the Robertson Panel and subsequent to the issuance of the panel’s report, has the CIA engaged in the study of the UFO phenomenon. The Robertson Panel Report is summation of the Agency’s interest and involvement in the matter.’

This, then, was the CIA’s only involvement [with] UFOs, according to the CIA. A much protracted legal battle ensued and resulted in the ultimate release of nearly 900 pages of UFO-related documents...4

     In other words, after telling Ground Saucer Watch that it had no UFO files involving its study of the phenomenon, except for the previously declassified Robertson Panel Report, the CIA—once it had been subjected to legal pressure in federal district court—managed to find some 900 documents in its files, which it eventually released to GSW. (Researcher Jan Aldrich notes that prior to the GSW lawsuit, the CIA had listed a handful of UFO documents in its Declassification Index. Some of those documents were used in the lawsuit to ask the agency about other documents referenced in them.)

     Perhaps not surprisingly, at least not to me, a review of these 900 pages leaves one with the impression that, generally, the subject of UFOs was not one the CIA actively pursued, relative to its other intelligence-gathering and analytical activities. And this is precisely the impression the agency wished to convey. The documents included various internal memoranda, a few reports, some low-level files from friendly foreign intelligence services, and even newspaper clippings of UFO sightings overseas. In short, the picture portrayed by this rather paltry collection is that—from its creation in 1947, up to the late 1970s—the agency’s interest in the UFO phenomenon was, with rare exceptions, both peripheral and superficial.

     That said, there was among the files a memorandum, dated December 2, 1952, in which the Assistant Director of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, expressed concern about repeated UFO incursions into restricted airspace above various nuclear weapons-related facilities in the early 1950s. Because the memo does not explicitly identify the sites, referring to them only as “major U.S. defense installations”, it’s possible that the importance and sensitivity of the message was overlooked during the agency’s document declassification review.

     Regardless, once the memorandum was in the public domain, I began highlighting it’s significance during my presentations on the U.S. college lecture circuit. Interestingly, the memo is not available at the CIA’s website, if one searches for the agency’s declassified UFO documents. Perhaps someone eventually realized the apparent error in declassifying it years ago and quietly pulled it back into the shadows. (It will be recalled that the Defense Nuclear Agency once declassified the deck log of the U.S.S. Curtiss AV-4, during the period of the Operation Castle nuclear tests in the South Pacific, in the spring of 1954. One log entry from April 7th revealed that a UFO had silently buzzed the ship at low altitude. Once that revelation was publicized by researchers, the log mysteriously disappeared from the Department of Energy’s public archives.)

     In any case, on the whole, the documents released to Ground Saucer Watch in 1978 suggested that while the CIA had a moderate interest in the U.S. Air Force’s investigation of UFOs, they also seemed to rule out the agency’s involvement in any UFO investigations of its own. Nor was there any evidence to indicate that it had participated in formulating or directing government policies related to the suppression of UFO-related information—i.e. a cover-up. (Even though the CIA’s Robertson Panel Report, released years earlier, had advised implementing a covert program to “debunk” UFOs as a credible topic, using mass media to spread the message, and also recommended a government infiltration and spying operation against UFO research groups.)

     But the self-portrait of CIA non-involvement with UFOs, as painted for GSW, is highly misleading. As I wrote earlier in this book, “The selective declassification of UFO-related information by the U.S. government has been routinely utilized for decades to steer public perception in a certain direction. It’s commonly called ‘spin.’ The purpose of this propaganda tactic is to change the actual story of official interest in the UFO phenomenon, so that it appears as if there exists only minimal concern, or none at all.”

     In this particular instance, all of the documents grudgingly released by the CIA—after the agency initially denied their existence—were classified SECRET or lower. Not a single TOP SECRET, or above, UFO-related document held by the CIA was declassified. “Or above” simply means any file designated TOP SECRET/Code Word, thereby restricting access to it by those CIA employees who hold not only a Top Secret clearance, but who also have a need-to-know about the project or operation with that specific code name.

     One of those directly involved in the effort to access the CIA’s UFO documents, the late W. Todd Zechel, said that in the course of the legal action against the agency, Ground Saucer Watch’s attorney, Peter Gersten, had been informed by the CIA’s attorneys that some 10,000 pages of UFO-related documents been located. Although only an estimate, this number was nevertheless much higher—by a factor of ten—than the 1000 or so pages ultimately released to GSW. In an article written years later, Zechel described the unsatisfying outcome. Referring to himself in the third-person, he writes,

W. Todd Zechel [is the] founder of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) and [a] UFO researcher specializing in government cover-up. Zechel had initiated a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA in September 1977, in conjunction with Peter Gersten, a New York attorney, and Ground Saucer Watch, a Phoenix-based UFO group for which Zechel was Director of Research. In December 1978 the suit resulted in the CIA releasing more than a thousand documents it had claimed didn’t exist prior to the suit…

The CIA had been ordered to search all of its files for UFO-related documents and make a full accounting of them. This Stipulation and Order was in accordance with an agreement Zechel and Gersten had worked out with the CIA’s attorney and a U.S. Attorney at a Status Call hearing on the suit on July 7, 1978. It was then that Zechel had, in a rather forceful manner, threatened to have CIA officials criminally prosecuted for issuing false replies to FOIA requests on UFOs. Faced with this, the CIA had backed down and agreed to cooperate. However, subsequently the CIA only accounted for 1,000 documents and claimed to be withholding a mere 57...

Statements were made by CIA representatives during the course of the suit, [whereby] attorney Gersten was led to believe [that] in excess of 10,000 documents would be made available. There was also a letter to Zechel from the CIA’s FOIA staff asking him to suspend action on a particular request, stating, ‘1,000 pages of additional UFO related documents have just been located’ and were being processed.

It was also clear from analyzing the documents released on December 15, 1978, that the CIA was continuing to be deceptive. Brad Sparks, a researcher with CAUS, found references in the released material to more than 200 other UFO-related documents which the CIA had failed to acknowledge. Moreover, it was evident the CIA had carefully selected the documents it released, even with heavy censorship. The CIA only accounted for documents related to matters Zechel and Sparks had uncovered during their investigation of CIA involvement, and excluded many others such as conclusions of its emergency studies of UFOs in 1952, 1957, 1965, 1967, and others. These studies were carried out in secret, utilizing Domestic Contact Service (a.k.a. Domestic Collection Division) agents, during a number of UFO flaps and in conjunction with the Condon Committee study (1966-68).

A Missed Opportunity

In March 1979, after the CIA filed deceptive affidavits with the court about its purported search of files, Gersten set out to file an Order to Show Cause Why the CIA Should Not Be Held in Contempt of Court. The Show Cause order asked the court to penalize the CIA for failing to comply with the Stipulation and Order agreed to in 1978...

Zechel had [learned in the course of conversations with former agency employees that] the CIA had been conducting secret studies of UFOs since 1952, and perhaps even before that, and had utilized high-tech cameras, sensing devices and a nationwide field staff of agents who became covert operatives in 1973…

The Order to Show Cause was filed one day late and thrown out of court when the U.S. District Court judge upheld the CIA’s Out of Time motion. The CIA had been 88 days late with its filing, surpassing a 60 day extension by 28 days. But that mattered not to Judge John Pratt, whose rulings had been reversed five times in the past by higher courts for decisions unfairly favorable to the CIA...5

     So there the matter rested. Due to a legal technicality, there would be no appeal of the CIA’s very limited and apparently highly-selective release of UFO-related files. The first verifiable confirmation that the CIA did indeed have TOP SECRET or above UFO documents occurred in the early 1980s, after a subsequent legal action against the National Security Agency (NSA) by the group founded but no longer headed by Zechel, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, revealed that the CIA had sent the NSA 23 UFO-related files over the years, some of them classified TOP SECRET/Code Word. In the mid-1980s, researcher Stanton Friedman used the FOIA to access four of them. He writes, “It took me two years to get nine of [the 23 documents]...They were unclassified English translations of Eastern European newspaper articles about UFOs. It took another three years in response to my appeal to get four more, [which were] very heavily censored CIA TOP SECRET/Code Word UFO documents. On two, one could read only eight words that weren’t blacked out. One said ‘DENY in TOTO!’”6

     In short, at the present time, there are for all practical purposes no CIA Top Secret or above UFO-related documents in the public domain. Moreover, there is no real assurance that the CIA actually released all of its SECRET or lesser-classified UFO documents in response to the GSW lawsuit. After all, the CIA initially lied to GSW’s attorney when it told him that the agency had no more UFO documents. Only when legal action was threatened did the CIA finally release a relatively small number of files (after its attorneys admitted that the agency had a much larger number) most of which were thoroughly innocuous. Even then, the agency continued to hide that fact that it had sent a number of TOP SECRET/Code Word UFO documents to the NSA. That fact was not uncovered until years later, and only after another lawsuit. And even then, when copies of those documents were finally released to Stanton Friedman, they were censored to the point of uselessness.

     Regarding the probable futility of another lawsuit against the CIA, UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee has written, “Both the CIA and later NSA lawsuits showed that the government could appeal to ‘national security’ to withhold documents. There was no reason to believe that the same excuses wouldn’t be used again to protect the ‘really good stuff’ we wanted. In other words, [the CIA] might locate some more, even many more, documents and simply refuse to release them all or in part for national security reasons...”7

     Regardless, in view of the agency’s documented track record of denial and obfuscation, should we the public really believe any official CIA pronouncement about its supposedly superficial and intermittent involvement with UFOs?

     This question gets right to the heart of the matter, as regards the nukes-related UFO incidents. In light of the extensive testimony provided by my ex-Air Force sources—regarding UFOs disrupting nuclear missiles or, worse, temporarily activating them—it seems a virtual certainty that the CIA would have been informed of these incidents, given their obvious and immediate impact on the national security of the United States.

     If this contention has merit, and in my view it does, the classification of such information would have been very high, at least SECRET and possibly higher, given its extraordinary sensitivity. I already know that after the Malmstrom AFB missile shutdown incidents in March 1967, the Air Force launch officers involved were debriefed and told that the incidents were classified SECRET. And that was just the initial classification level assigned to the shutdowns. It’s not out of the question that once the debriefing data were evaluated by higher-ups at SAC or the Pentagon, an even higher rating was assigned to the incidents. This last scenario, while admittedly speculative, is neither unreasonable nor unprecedented.

     Some will dispute my contention that the Air Force would have provided the CIA with information about UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites in the first place, either because it was strictly a military matter, or because of the now well-documented inter-governmental rivalries that existed during the Cold War era, which precluded the sharing of vital information on many occasions—often at the country’s expense. (For example the notorious CIA-FBI rivalry during J. Edgar Hoover’s long tenure at the bureau and, more recently, when the two intelligence groups failed to share important information about the Islamic terrorists involved in 9/11, before the attacks occurred.)

     However, considering the many nuclear weapons-related UFO incidents presented in this book—which clearly have national security implications in the most naked, fundamental manner—for one to argue that the CIA would have no documents relating to such events is to suggest one of two things:

1) Either the U.S. military successfully kept this monumentally-important information from the primary agency tasked with collating national security intelligence during the entire Cold War era.

2) Or the CIA—upon being informed about the apparent disruption or temporary activation of our nuclear missiles by those piloting the UFOs—simply shrugged and said, “That’s the military’s problem,” and thereafter circulated no SECRET or TOP SECRET memos about those incidents, and wrote no SECRET or TOP SECRET reports about them to be delivered to, for example, the President during his daily, highly-classified intelligence briefing prepared by the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence.

     While some might be able to accept one of these scenarios as credible, I simply cannot. Therefore, in my view, it is almost a given that SECRET and/or TOP SECRET documents relating to UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites continue to be held by the CIA. Needless to say, if such documents do indeed exist, they will not be available for public scrutiny anytime soon.

     In the interim, American citizens, and the rest of humanity, are left only with the tantalizing statements by two credible sources regarding the CIA’s direct involvement in at least one nuclear weapons-related UFO incident. As noted in an earlier chapter, former Air Force officers, Dr. Bob Jacobs and Dr. Florenze Mansmann, both adamantly insist that CIA agents confiscated an astounding motion picture film showing a UFO shooting down a dummy nuclear warhead with beams of light, during a missile test in September 1964—the so-called Big Sur Incident.

     Nothing in the 1000 or so documents released by the CIA in the late 1970s would indicate the agency’s involvement with, or even knowledge of, that extraordinary case. Nevertheless, the two officers at Vandenberg AFB who were directly involved unequivocally stand by their accounts of CIA intervention. According to then Major Mansmann, there was absolutely no doubt about who was in control, calling the shots, and impressing upon everyone present the importance of absolute secrecy. Mansmann has written that the incident was classified TOP SECRET. Therefore, presumably, the CIA has to have at least one TOP SECRET UFO case document, and the accompanying motion picture film, in its files. Efforts by researchers over the years to access the film have met with blanket denials from the agency about its existence.

     The important point here is that if the CIA’s official stance is factual—regarding its supposedly passive, or even non-role in the ongoing collection and simultaneous suppression of UFO data—then it should not have been interested in the Big Sur incident at all, deferring instead to the Air Force. But the former Air Force officers directly involved in the case continue to say otherwise. For example, in the early 1980s, Mansmann—after confirming in writing, on numerous occasions, former Lieutenant Jacobs’ published account of the UFO incident—also expressed concern about possible repercussions to himself from “the agency involved” in the confiscation of the film because of his willingness to substantiate Jacobs’ story.

     (When considering the CIA’s supposedly limited role in the UFO cover-up, one might also consider the statements of retired high-level FAA official John Callahan, who unequivocally states that a CIA agent confiscated radar tapes and voice communications data relating to the sighting of a huge UFO in Alaska in 1987 and angrily ordered that the incident be kept secret to prevent public panic.)

     In any case, the ongoing controversy among researchers, regarding the degree to which the CIA has been involved in monitoring—and perhaps even coordinating the government’s covert response to UFOs—is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.

     In 1994, the CIA authorized the publication of an official history of its involvement with UFOs, condensed into a 17-page article by the CIA’s own historian, Gerald K. Haines. The piece appeared in Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal accessible to members of the intelligence community. Titled, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” it appeared in the unclassified edition of the journal in 1997.

     If Haines was not ordered to be intentionally disingenuous, it seems evident he was largely kept in the dark by his superiors at the agency, and was given a highly selective cross-section of files from which to construct his “history.” His article was probably intended as an exercise in spin. If so, it succeeded completely, if one reviews the generally uncritical, naïve, almost slavish acceptance by the U.S. media of Haines’ summation as something actually resembling reliable history.

     The sanitized version of history offered by the CIA’s in-house historian is a combination of old news—publicized long ago, at least within ufological circles—and patently ridiculous claims (e.g. CIA officials who worked on the U–2 and SR-71 spy plane projects claimed that over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were the result of manned reconnaissance flights over the United States.)

     Noted ufologist Mark Rodighier’s excellent critique of Haines’ article is available online.8 Rodighier is the Scientific Director for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and, while I disagree with some of his assessments, he neatly dissects Haines’ own naiveté, personal unfamiliarity with the UFO phenomenon, and probably predictable face-value acceptance of the materials he was provided with by agency higher-ups to review. Needless to say, no Top Secret or above UFO-related documents were handed to Haines to include in his “history.” Rodeghier writes,

When the press learned about the Haines study, the attention was dramatic...The media generally focused on two aspects of the Haines article. In a brief section entitled ‘CIA’s U–2 and OXCART as UFOs,’ Haines claims that many UFO sightings in the late 1950s and 1960s were actually misidentified secret American spy planes. Moreover, he alleges that the Air Force’s Project Blue Book was in on this cover-up, purposely misled the public, and falsified (Haines didn’t use that word but that is plainly what the Air Force would be doing) UFO explanations. This is important news if true, and the media rightly played up this angle…Note that the CIA is not accused of deception by Haines; rather, it is the Air Force that willingly concocted the bogus explanations…

     Press coverage focused on the [CIA’s Robertson Panel’s] recommendations that UFO reports be debunked (a policy Blue Book followed assiduously after 1953), that UFO groups be watched, and that there was a danger the Soviets might use UFOs to clog the channels of communication and then launch a nuclear attack. The deception about our spy planes was just a small part of this strategy.9

     Not surprisingly, there is no mention of nuclear weapons-related UFO incidents in Haines’ CIA-authorized history, or any of the “very sensitive activities” involving UFOs alluded to by disaffected CIA official Victor Marchetti—in his far-more-cogent, if way-too-brief 1979 article on the agency’s actual, ongoing, deadly-serious interest in UFOs.

     Even if Marchetti had not resigned from the CIA in 1969, the agency would never have asked him to write a history of its involvement with UFOs. Unlike Gerald Haines, he would have undoubtedly asked too many questions regarding the highly-selective, very limited data he was given to peruse. (I can imagine old Victor asking, “So, guys, where are all of the TOP SECRET UFO documents?”) That said, perhaps Haines can be forgiven for the often misleading article he wrote. After all, he was never privy to the hushed discussions about UFOs that took place at the highest levels of the CIA—the ones later publicly alluded to by Marchetti.

     Speaking of official history versus actual history, another notable article by Marchetti, titled, “Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History”, was published by the Journal of Historical Review, in 2001. He writes,

The CIA is a master at distorting history—even creating its own version of history to suit its institutional and operational purposes...The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA’s euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing—for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy—so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to you about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it...

The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so. I first became concerned about this historical distortion in 1957, when I was a young officer in the Clandestine Services of the CIA.

One night, after work, I was walking down Constitution Avenue with a fellow officer, who previously had been a reporter for United Press.

‘How are they ever going to know,’ he asked.

‘Who? How is who ever going to know what?’ I asked.

‘How are the American people ever going to know what the truth is? How are they going to know what the truth is about what we are doing and have done over the years?’ he said. ‘We operate in secrecy, we deal in deception and disinformation, and then we burn our files. How will the historians ever be able to learn the complete truth about what we’ve done in these various operations, these operations that have had such a major impact on so many important events in history?’

I couldn’t answer him then. And I can’t answer him now. I don’t know how the American people will ever really know the truth about the many things that the CIA has been involved in. Or how they will ever know the truth about the great historical events of our times. The government is continually writing and rewriting history—often with the CIA’s help—to suit its own purposes...

If the public were aware of what the CIA is doing, it might say: ‘We don’t like what you’re doing—stop it!’ Or, ‘You’re not doing a good job—stop it!’ The public might ask for an accounting for the money being spent and the risks being taken.

Thus secrecy is absolutely vital to the CIA. Secrecy covers not only operations in progress, but continues after the operations, particularly if the operations have been botched. Then they have to be covered up with more lies, which the public, of course, can’t recognize as lies, allowing the CIA to tell the public whatever it wishes.

Presidents love this. Every president, no matter what he has said before getting into office, has been delighted to learn that the CIA is his own private tool. The presidents have leapt at the opportunity to keep Congress and the public in the dark about their employment of the agency.

This is what was at the basis of my book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. I had come to the conclusion, as a member of the CIA, that many of our policies and practices were not in the best interests of the United States, but were in fact counterproductive, and that if the American people were aware of this they would not tolerate it...10

     Marchetti was obviously ahead of the curve in exposing CIA abuses and follies, as the public now knows. Over the last few decades, other former intelligence agency employees and government officials have come forward to decry the agency’s questionable policies and practices which clearly deserve public scrutiny and greater congressional oversight. While no ex-CIA official has yet elaborated—at least candidly and at length—on Marchetti’s intriguing comments regarding the agency’s involvement with UFOs, other persons with CIA contacts have.

     W. Todd Zechel, perhaps the person most responsible for the release of the relatively few CIA UFO documents currently available, died in 2006. In one of his last published articles, he summarized his 30-year investigation of the agency’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.

     Zechel’s history, although unofficial and incomplete, is almost certainly closer to the truth than anything offered by the agency itself. He wrote in part,

Although the United States Air Force (USAF) has been a great deal less than candid and forthright about UFOs over the years, especially in view of the fact the Air Force is charged with defending the country’s air space, it appears that it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which orchestrated a policy of deception in order to prevent the American people from learning the truth about UFOs.

A formerly SECRET report (the so-called Robertson Panel Report) released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that CIA officials and consultants thought people seeing and reporting UFOs was more dangerous than UFOs themselves, stating, ‘the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena (UFOs) does, in these perilous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.’

Another ‘danger’ cited by the CIA panel was that acknowledging UFOs could result in ‘...the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and a harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.’ To counter these supposed dangers, the CIA panel recommended a policy of ‘debunking’ and education designed to persuade people that what they were seeing really wasn’t there.

In explaining how this psychological warfare against the American people should be carried out, the report stated: ‘The debunking aim would result in reduction of public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures and popular articles.’

The panel had further ideas on how what was essentially a disinformation program should be mounted, stating: ‘It was felt strongly that psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the program.’ The report went on to name certain psychologists who might be recruited to join the debunking project.

The formation of the CIA panel came about as a sort of compromise worked out by the National Security Council (NSC) after events in the summer of 1952. A major UFO flap had taken place across the country, highlighted by puzzling incidents in July 1952, when UFO intruders were simultaneously tracked on ground radar and observed by jet interceptor pilots over the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. The public, the press, and even President Harry Truman demanded to know what was going on. As a result, the US Air Force held a major press conference on July 29, 1952, the largest press conference since WW II, at which it was suggested the UFOs were temperature inversions—layers of warm air trapped under cold air that, by some giant stretch of the Air Force’s imagination, were tracked on radar and seen as maneuvering flying craft by pilots sent aloft on scramble alert.

In August 1952, as documents released as the result of the FOIA suit filed by the author confirm, the CIA began reviewing the Air Force’s handling of UFOs. Ransom Eng, an official with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, wrote a report in which he characterized the Air Force’s efforts as ‘scientifically invalid.’ Armed with these criticisms, the CIA wanted to take charge of UFO intelligence (the collection and analysis of UFO evidence), and proposed, through CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, that UFOs were much too serious of a matter to be left in the hands of the USAF. The National Security Council, however, would only approve a compromise whereby a CIA-appointed panel would review UFO reports provided by the Air Force to determine if UFOs were a ‘direct, hostile threat to national security.’

...In January 1953 the CIA’s Robertson Panel—mostly consulting scientists of the CIA’s chosen to review the UFO evidence selected by the USAF—rejected the conclusions of the U.S. government’s top photo analysts from the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center (NAVPIC), at Anacostia, Maryland, Capt. Arthur Lundahl and Lt. Robert Neasham, who had concluded the objects in two 8mm UFO films submitted to the Air Force and examined by the CIA Panel were extraterrestrial spacecraft. Both men were reportedly emotionally shattered by the Panel’s rejection of their studied conclusions.

But within a matter of days, Lundahl and Neasham were invited by the CIA to resign their Navy officers’ commissions and come over to the CIA as civilians and establish the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) at 5th and K Streets in Washington, D.C., with Lundahl serving as the founding Director for the next twenty years and Neasham as his top assistant...

The mastermind of what was to become the U.S. government’s UFO policy and author of the CIA’s Robertson Panel Report, which found that UFOs did not pose ‘a direct, hostile threat to National Security,’ was Fred Durant, an officer with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) who at the time was operating under the cover of being a civilian scientist employed by the Arthur Little Co. In fact, in August 1952, Durant, claiming to represent a small group of ‘concerned scientists’ (actually CIA officers) had approached USAF Captain Ed Ruppelt, Commanding Officer of the Air Force’s UFO ‘study,’ Project Blue Book, and USAF Major Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon’s liaison to Blue Book. Most revealingly, the CIA had found it necessary to spy on the Air Force in order to find out what it had collected on UFOs, and Fred Durant had been the perfect man for the secret mission...

The CIA Takes Control

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) began collecting UFO data in mid-1947, shortly after the first civilian sightings of ‘flying saucers’ were reported. The initial study was code-named Project Sign. This was changed to Project Grudge in 1948. In December 1949 the Air Force issued a ‘Grudge’ report in an attempt to have saucer sightings dismissed as post-war or Cold War jitters, then closed down the official study program. However, in early 1951, the Commanding General of Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon, Gen. Charles P. Cabell, secretly requested UFO studies to be reopened, and in 1952 the revitalized UFO study was assigned the code-name Project Blue Book. [Its formal name was] the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon designated a senior officer to be liaison to Project Blue Book.

After the fiasco of July 1952, in which the USAF ‘suggested’ at a major press conference that the multiple UFO chases involving jet interceptors after the UFOs were tracked on ground radar were just ‘temperature inversions’ and the shameful American newspapers ran screaming headlines that (uncritically) proclaimed ‘AIR FORCE DEBUNKS UFOS AS JUST NATURAL PHENOMENA,’ the CIA tried to grab control over UFO intelligence away from what it perceived as an irresponsible USAF. But the National Security Council wasn’t willing to embarrass the Air Force by taking away [its authority to investigate] the UFO problem.

The next big UFO flap started in early November 1957, when landed UFOs as large as 200 feet in diameter were observed near Levelland, Texas, by credible witnesses, including law enforcement officers. After a quick visit, an Air Force Intelligence officer [sic] dismissed the incidents as resulting from ‘ball lightning.’ This absurd explanation angered the local Texas residents and witnesses, many of whom held responsible positions in local government. Powerful U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex), then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was contacted by the outraged Texas citizens from Levelland, and he asked the CIA to conduct a secret investigation, since it was clear the USAF was dropping the ball and just trying to protect its own ass. At one point, in November 1957, CIA Director Allen Dulles phoned Dr. Knox Milsap, then the Chief Scientist at White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, at 4 A.M. (local time), to request an investigation of a reported (to the CIA) UFO landing in the nearby Organ Mountains. According to Dulles, a civilian had reportedly snapped photos of the landed UFO and the CIA had an urgent need to obtain the photos for its emergency study.

As part of the November 1957 emergency UFO study, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) ‘levied a requirement’ (sent out an order) to the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service (DCS), which had offices in 35 to 40 larger cities across America. The Domestic Contact Service was part of the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate (DDI), and agents would normally show CIA IDs and say they were collecting intelligence for the CIA. (As opposed to the CIA’s Directorate of Plans—DDP—which was the clandestine or covert branch and utilized ‘back-stopped’ covers provided by the Central Cover Staff.)

After its emergency study, CIA officials once again came to the conclusion the Air Force was arbitrarily and capriciously explaining away UFO reports that might have important scientific or intelligence value. With Senator Lyndon Johnson’s support, the CIA again proposed to the National Security Council that it be given control of UFO studies.

This time the NSC secretly concurred, reportedly issuing an intelligence directive (NSCID) in early 1958, granting control of all scientific intelligence—which included the collection and analysis of UFO data—to the Central Intelligence Agency. The USAF was in turn relegated to the control of technical Intelligence, such as the collection and analysis of data pertaining to aircraft advances by the Soviet Union.

Although the Air Force continued to operate Project Blue Book until it was disbanded in 1969, Blue Book was not in the loop for classified intelligence reports on UFOs that were originated under JANAP 146E or CIRVIS reporting instructions for American defense forces, whereas the CIA was a primary recipient of such messages and reports...11

     In other words, according to Todd Zechel, the CIA has been running the show since 1958, at least as far as the collection and analysis of scientific intelligence on UFOs is concerned.

     (Researcher Jan Aldrich disputes Zechel’s unequivocal statement regarding Blue Book being out of the loop for intelligence reports originated under JANAP 146E or CIRVIS, saying, “Project Blue Book did receive a large number of CIRVIS and MERINT reports. Maybe they didn’t receive all such reports, but Blue Book and the 4602d AISS have such reports in their files.”12 CIRVIS reports dealt with airborne UFO sightings by military pilots; MERINT reports related to sightings by U.S. Naval personnel.)

     Zechel’s research into the CIA’s covert, UFO-related activities was often augmented by information gleaned from former agency insiders with whom he had developed something vaguely resembling personal relationships. During several visits with him in the 1980s, he provided me with a great many details—far more than I can present here—relating to various conversations he had with those persons.

     To be entirely candid, Zechel audio taped most of those discussions without the other person’s knowledge. His view was that the importance of the information he was gathering outweighed the legal and moral questions surrounding the surreptitious recording of other persons without their prior consent. I am in no way defending or justifying Todd’s actions here; I am simply stating facts.

     Nevertheless, Zechel’s investigations into the extent of the CIA’s actual involvement with UFOs are considered to be without peer by many researchers, including myself. While he was never able to mount a follow-up lawsuit against the agency—in an effort to force the release of the CIA’s TOP SECRET UFO documents—Todd’s initial work in the late 1970s (together with researcher Brad Sparks and attorney Peter Gersten) was a milestone of sorts, and remains a testament to one American citizen’s attempt to learn what his government was hiding from the public on this monumentally-important subject.

     In my view, Zechel’s research convincingly paints a picture of CIA involvement in the collection and analysis of UFO data which is clearly at odds with the official portrait offered by the agency itself. While the CIA’s carefully-reinforced public image is one of occasional agency concern over certain UFO sighting reports—all of them occurring long ago, of course—and involvement in a few low-level studies, Zechel’s work has revealed a much broader and far more authoritative CIA role in the official U.S. government cover-up of UFOs.

REFERENCES:

1. Marchetti, Victor. “How the CIA views the UFO Phenomenon”, Second Look, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 1979

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Greenwood, Barry and Fawcett, Lawrence. Clear Intent: The Government Cover-up of the UFO Experience, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1984, pp. 112-13

5. http://textfiles.vistech.net/ufo/UFOBBS/2000/2535.ufo

6. http://www.v-jenterprises.com/sf-government-lies3.html

7. http://textfiles.vistech.net/ufo/UFOBBS/2000/2535.ufo

8. http://www.cufos.org/IUR_article3.html

9. Ibid.

10. Marchetti, Victor. “Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History”, Journal of Historical Review, Vol.20. No.1, 2001

11. https://web.archive.org/web/20080703175448/http://www.eyepod.org/invstgtr-Zechel.html
12. Jan Aldrich to Robert Hastings, personal communication, May 28, 2008

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See Also:

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

Dr Bruce Maccabee and the CIA

Ex-CIA Official Says Stories of Crashed UFOs and Little Gray Men “on Ice” Discussed at a High-Level

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

NEW BOOK | UFOs And Government: A Historical Inquiry

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Anomalist Books Press Release

UFOs and Government
A Historical Inquiry

By Michael Swords and Robert Powell, with Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, Barry Greenwood, Richard Thieme, Jan Aldrich, and Steve Purcell

Trade Paperback, 594 Pages, 350 Illustrations

Genre(s): UFOs

Governments around the world have had to deal with the UFO phenomenon for a good part of a century. How and why they did so is the subject of "UFOs and Government," a history that for the first time tells the story from the perspective of the governments themselves. It's a perspective that reveals a great deal about what we citizens have seen, and puzzled over, from the "outside" for so many years.

The story, which is unmasked by the governments' own documents, explains much that is new, or at least not commonly known, about the seriousness with which the military and intelligence communities approached the UFO problem internally. Those approaches were not taken lightly. In fact, they were considered matters of national security. At the same time, the story reveals how a subject with such apparent depth of experience and interest became treated as if it were a triviality. And it explains why one government, the United States government, deemed it wise, and perhaps even necessary, to treat it so. Though the book focuses primarily on the U. S. government's response to the UFO phenomenon, also included is the treatment of the subject by the governments of Sweden, Australia, France, Spain, and other countries.

This book is the result of a team effort that called itself the UFO History Group, a collection of veteran UFO historians and researchers who spent more than four years researching, consulting, writing, and editing to present a work of historical scholarship on government response to the UFO phenomenon.

About the Authors:

Michael Swords was the primary author of the United States chapters. The work was coordinated and edited by Robert Powell. Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, and Robert Powell contributed country chapters. Jan Aldrich was the primary content consultant, with additional content consultation and writing coming from Barry Greenwood and Richard Thieme. Steve Purcell was the primary photo illustration editor.

From the foreword by Jerome Clark: "While UFOs and Government revisits an often unhappy history, the reading of it is far from an unhappy experience. The authors, eloquent, intelligent, sophisticated, and conscientious, provide us with the first credible, comprehensive overview of official UFO history in many years… Most of the current volume deals with U.S. military and intelligence responses to the UFO phenomenon, but it also features richly informative chapters that expand the story across the international arena. If you're looking for an example of a nation that dealt productively with the UFO reports that came its official way, you will take heart in the chapter on the French projects… From here on, every responsible treatment of UFOs and government will have to cite UFOs and Government prominently among its sources… this is the real story as accurately as it can be reconstructed in the second decade of the new century. I expect to keep my copy close at hand and to return to it often. While it cannot be said of many books, UFO-themed or otherwise, this is among the essential ones. Stray from it at your peril."

CONTENTS

Foreword by Jerome Clark vii

Preface x

Prologue xii

Chapter 1. World War II and the Immediate Post-War Era 3
Chapter 2. Ghost Rockets 12
Chapter 3. The Flying Disks and the United States 30
Chapter 4. A Formalized UFO Project 48
Chapter 5. Grudge 71
Chapter 6. Duck and Cover 90
Chapter 7. Transition 112
Chapter 8. Tacking Against the Wind 139
Chapter 9. The CIA Solution 170
Chapter 10. Intermission 204
Chapter 11. A Cold War 208
Chapter 12. Something Closer This Way Comes 238
Chapter 13. Battle in the Desert 271
Chapter 14. The Colorado Project 306
Chapter 15. After the Close of Blue Book 336
Chapter 16. The Swedish Military's UFO History 361
Chapter 17. The Australian Military and the Official Government Response 373
Chapter 18. UFO Secrecy and Disclosure in Spain 423
Chapter 19. UFOs and France—Beginnings of a Scientific Investigation 439
Chapter 20. Glimpses of Episodes in Other Countries 456

Epilogue 468

Appendix 472

Illustration and Photography Credits 530
Bibliography 540
About the Authors 559
Name Index 561
Subject Index 569
UFO Event Index 577

See Also:

UFOs and Government: Proposing a New Way Forward

VIDEO | John Ventre of MUFON Talks Government UFO Conspiracy with CNN's Anderson Cooper

"UFOs: Generals, Pilots & Government Officials Go On the Record . . . is a Call to Arms, a Plea . . . for the Renewal of Honest Scientific Inquiry"

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Operation Bird Droppings

The MJ-12 Saga Continues:

By Robert Hastings
ufohastings.com
© 4-2-09

Disinformation Specialists Richard “Falcon” Doty
and Robert “Condor” Collins are still leaving little presents all over the place for the uninformed and unsuspecting. Watch where you step!

     Jeez! It’s not like I don’t have other things to do. With the publication of my book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, and following my July 18, 2008 appearance on Larry King Live, I have received a number of intriguing and seemingly confirmatory leads from former or retired military personnel regarding the reality of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites over the last six decades.

While I would much prefer following up on those apparently legitimate leads, I guess I am going to have to roll up my shirt sleeves and attempt to educate a few well-intentioned but way-too-gullible folks regarding the supposed validity of the MJ-12 “documents” and related disinformation which is still being spread around by Richard Doty and Robert Collins, sometimes in emails or online posts, but most egregiously in their co-authored book Exempt From Disclosure. The first version was published in 2005 and the second in 2008. The Introduction, in each edition, should have opened with these words: “First, before we begin, bend over!”

Ah well, I suppose it’s time for me to counter-attack, before this crap-fest gains even more ground on the Internet and at UFO conventions. (Yes, I do understand that some folks in ufology and among the general public will not benefit from my informed input, preferring instead their own biases and strained theories about MJ-12. That’s not my problem.)

An Early Exposé
Hmmm, where to begin? I guess I should mention that my ground-breaking 1989 paper “The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments” first brought to light UFO researcher Bill Moore’s now-notorious, voluntary involvement in the disinformation and spying operation being run out of Kirtland AFB’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the 1980s. It is now online at:

http://tinyurl.com/d2wzww

The paper also revealed, for the first time, that Moore’s allegedly high-level U.S. Air Force sources for UFO-related disinformation—whom he named “Falcon” and “Condor”—were in reality Sgt. Richard C. Doty and Capt. Robert M. Collins, respectively. While other diligent researchers, including Barry Greenwood and the late Bob Todd, had already developed circumstantial evidence that Doty was Falcon, I was able to divulge that Michael Seligman, the producer of the October 14, 1988 television program UFO Cover up? Live! (the ufological equivalent of Reefer Madness) had blurted out in a taped conversation with researcher Todd Zechel that the two leading UFO “experts” appearing in the program—back-lit and voice-altered to hide their identities and using the pseudonyms Falcon and Condor—were in fact Doty and Collins.

To this day, a disgraced Bill Moore continues to claim that “Falcon” is actually someone else—supposedly an Air Force colonel for whom Doty acted as an intermediary. Moore further claims that Doty only stood in for the colonel during the ridiculously bogus TV show, taking on the Falcon persona only temporarily. Condor/Collins now tells the same convoluted tale to anyone who will listen. The fact remains, however, that none of the original MJ-12 promoters—Moore, Doty, or Collins—has ever produced a shred of evidence for the colonel’s existence. After 25 years, he remains the “man behind the curtain.” (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, Dorothy! He might be much, much less than he first appears to be.)

In any case, at one point during the televised farce, one of the birds told the American viewing audience that aliens—which had supposedly been captured after UFO crashes and were living at Los Alamos—loved ancient Tibetan music and Strawberry ice cream. (Presumably, the back-lit filming on the darkened set, designed to hide their identities, also prevented the audience from seeing Doty and Collins trying to keep a straight face during their interviews.) Condor/Collins now admits to his and Doty’s participation in the easily-discredited program but, in doing so, distorts and justifies the affair with his trademark disinformational spin.

After I circulated my paper to several dozen ufologists in March 1989, Moore showed up unannounced at my front door in an obvious effort to intimidate me into publishing a retraction. I responded by personally sending him a letter in which I threatened to have a court-issued injunction brought against him, to prevent him from physically approaching me in the future. Shortly after receiving that letter, Moore lied about it in his own letter to Caveat Emptor magazine, saying that he had received a letter from my attorney, warning him to steer clear of me. I immediately challenged Moore to produce that non-existent letter.

(It’s now been 20 years, Mr. Moore, but I’m still waiting for a copy of my attorney’s letter to you. Maybe your dog ate it, eh? Or maybe the MJ-12 Retrieval Squad—on one of those slow days when UFOs weren’t falling out of the sky all over the place—came and stole it from you. Was that it, Bill? You can come clean with us. We trust you.)

Anyway, in June 1989, The MUFON UFO Journal published my paper and, shortly thereafter, the bird poop really hit the fan. Several of the journal’s readers came forward with accounts of various suspect tales being offered to them by Moore or Doty. Importantly, Barry Greenwood and Bob Todd produced even more convincing forensic evidence confirming the fraudulent nature of the MJ-12 “documents.” Their findings, still stand as unimpeachable, no matter how many pro-MJ-12 wishful-thinkers tell you otherwise. A good introduction to the many problems found by Greenwood, Todd and other researchers may be found at:

http://tinyurl.com/c56bn8

By July, Moore, undoubtedly sensing the inevitable, finally relented and delivered what has naively come to be known as his “confession” speech to a stunned audience attending MUFON’s International Symposium in Las Vegas. In keeping with the overall situation, Moore’s mea culpa was a combination of fact, disinformation and outright lies.

True, Moore did spill the beans on the spying and disinfo op being run out of Kirtland AFB’s OSI, and his willing participation in it, but he also threw in a bunch of bull—some of it relating to myself, given that my paper had effectively forced his revelations—and generally excused his own abhorrent behavior as justifiable, because it supposedly served a greater purpose.

In other words, while Moore did admit that he had agreed to act as a spy and disinformation agent, targeting other researchers on Doty’s behalf, he left out a lot of relevant facts, and also twisted much of what he divulged to make him look as good as possible under such disgraceful circumstances—saying that he had merely been playing along with Doty so that he could get inside the disinfo operation, as deeply as possible, and hopefully learn the real facts about UFOs from the low-level OSI agent and those to whom he reported.

If that was actually the case, Moore’s fantasy was ridiculously naïve, given the well-documented very high-level, need-to-know secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. government’s handling of the UFO phenomenon. In my opinion, Moore’s “explanation” for his actions was actually designed to portray his own disreputable behavior in the best possible light. (Bizarrely, on at least two occasions during Moore’s speech, without even faintest hint of hypocritical self-consciousness, he urged other ufologists to be more ethical in their actions in the future.)

For those of you who haven’t heard or read it, Moore’s mea culpa, later published in two consecutive issues of the MUFON UFO Journal, may be found at:

http://tinyurl.com/dkxopf

http://tinyurl.com/d8cdro

So, what did UFO researcher Moore specifically confess to that was so repellant to his audience? Well, for starters, he admitted to spying on fellow researchers Coral and Jim Lorenzen, the founders of the seminal Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO), and reporting on their activities to Doty back at Kirtland AFB. Further, Moore said he knew that Doty had sent a hoaxed letter to the pair, as “bait,” but because he was playing along with OSI, did not tell them about it. At the time, Moore was serving as APRO’s Director of Research. (All of this is of course reminiscent of the CIA’s 1953 Robertson Panel recommendation that professional intelligence operatives infiltrate civilian UFO organizations for the purpose of monitoring UFO-proponents’ activities. Civilian Moore did his dirty work for the government voluntarily and for no pay, or so he claims.)

Moore also admitted that he had performed the same shameful service by monitoring the late Paul Bennewitz, who had been provided with OSI-created lies about alleged UFO activity and alien schemes against humanity. According to Moore, Bennewitz had become a target for this disinformation and harassment after he informed OSI, in October 1980, that he had photographed UFOs over the Manzano [Nuclear] Weapons Storage Area, located just east of Kirtland AFB, on several occasions during the previous 15 months. Soon-to-be-released evidence, collected and analyzed by another researcher, will prove that this was indeed true.

Doty and Collins, in their thoroughly unsubstantiated book, Exempted From Disclosure, have come up with a questionable, or at least incomplete, story to explain why Bennewitz was originally targeted. They claim that Bennewitz had also stumbled upon a top secret counter-intelligence program based at a facility south of Kirtland, where the Air Force was attempting to disrupt Soviet satellites by beaming electronic signals at them. Perhaps this was the case, however, as far as I am aware, we have only Doty’s and Collins’ word for it. That, obviously, falls far short of verification.

(Based on my own research into nuclear weapons-related UFO activity, it seems as likely to me that Bennewitz was targeted simply because he began telling anyone who would listen that UFOs were repeatedly hovering over the Manzano WSA. As I mention in my book, UFOs and Nukes, I now know that similar events occurred at the Weapons Storage Areas at Malmstrom AFB in 1975; at F.E. Warren AFB in 1980-81; and at RAF Bentwaters in December 1980. Other researchers had already established that such incidents also occurred at the WSAs at Wurtsmith and Loring AFBs in 1975. Doty himself wrote an OSI report about the 1980 UFO sightings at the Manzano facility, however, certain elements in that document now appear to be suspect. Jeez, whatta shock!)

In his “confession” Moore denied any responsibility for the steep decline in Bennewitz’ mental health, even though he was fully aware of the bogus nature of the OSI-generated stories being directed at Paul, about underground bases where the aliens supposedly known as the Grays were genetically-altering harvested organs from cattle and even humans they had mutilated. At some point during this long disinformational charade, a terrorized Bennewitz took to wearing a sidearm at home to protect himself from the possibility of alien abduction. Mercifully, Paul Bennewitz is now on the other side, wherever that may be, and hopefully has more peace than Doty and the Kirtland AFB OSI ever granted him during his last years on Earth.

According to the current crop of Doty/Collins supporters, although Moore and his birds were lying to everyone in sight in the 1980s, now they’re telling the truth! As I said earlier, if you’re one of those inclined to believe that Falcon and Condor have actually belatedly revealed the facts in their book, you royally deserve the poop they dropped on you!

The Duping of Linda Moulton Howe
Anyway, if all of the were not enough, Moore, together with Doty and Collins, also performed the same kind of disinformation-based operation against the sincere but gullible Linda Moulton Howe, an Emmy-award filmmaker whom OSI had also targeted, apparently with the intention of derailing the HBO-funded documentary on a U.S. government UFO cover-up she had been contracted to produce.

In a series of letters between Howe and HBO, copies of which she later sent to me, Linda repeatedly pleaded for more time to do her work, saying that her Air Force contact (Doty) had promised her film footage of the Roswell UFO recovery and other spectacular documentation, as long as she would cooperate with the government’s own time-table for the film’s release. Of course, these promises were more of Doty’s lies, delaying tactics designed to postpone as long as possible the production’s completion. (Even Moore admitted as much, during his Las Vegas speech, in a frustratingly far-too-rare moment of candor.)

Eventually fed up by the delays, HBO lost interest and let the time-dependent contract with Howe lapse. So, what potentially may have been a worthwhile UFO documentary, had Howe not fallen into Moore’s and Falcon’s clutches, never materialized.

For his part, Condor/Collins now claims that he himself never misled Howe about the legitimacy of the MJ-12 documents and the other information provided to her by Doty. During a February 28, 2009 email exchange with me, which is now posted at http://tinyurl.com/cokk6f Collins indignantly denied that he had ever shown Linda Moulton Howe MJ-12-related “documents” at his home in Albuquerque, in November 1987. “Linda has a hard time getting her facts right,” he wrote, “And [I] never showed Linda anything related to Mj12 when she was at the house in '87.”

However, following that heated exchange, I listened to an audiotape recording I had made of an October 22, 1988 telephone conversation with Howe. The UFO Cover-up? Live! TV show had been broadcast only a few days earlier, on October 14th, and I wanted to get her take on it. The following pertinent excerpts from that tape follow here:

LMH:“Only me. [It had] nothing to do with John Lear.”

RH: “So, John Lear wasn’t associated with that at all then? I thought you’d said that he was trying to get you and John Lear together...”

LMH: “No, but John Lear went with me to see Collins in November, a year ago.”

RH: “That’s what I’m asking about. So, it was November of ’87?”

LMH: “Yeah, we were at Collins’ house because I invited John to go with me...”

RH: “Um, you said that Collins, at his home in Albuquerque, showed you a number of documents.”

LMH: “Yeah, he had a ring binder...”

RH: “Of uncensored documents?”

LMH: “Yeah, of uncensored documents.”

RH: “Including the Eisenhower briefing paper?” (Perhaps the most important of the MJ-12 “documents”)

LMH: “Yeah.”

RH: “What else did he have?”

LMH: “He had some memos allegedly from MJ-5 and MJ-8, one of which I had seen before, in ‘83. So, I assume he got it from Moore.”

RH: “Um, did he lead you to believe, uh, you said before that he made the statement that he was working with Moore. Did he imply that he was one of the sources that was supplying Moore with documents?”

LMH: “No, he never said it in that light. He said he was assisting Bill Moore with research, so I find it interesting that he ended up being “Condor”, if that’s the case, and I think it is.”

RH: “Well, let’s assume for the moment that Collins is “Condor.” Um, the relationship would be, if you take at face value what he’s saying [in UFO Cover-up? Live!], that he’s supplying Moore with information, rather than Moore giving him documents and so on.”

LMH: “Right, right.”

RH: “More specifically, what were the documents, or what were some of the things Collins was saying to you, about the information [he had in his possession]? Does it tie into the alien supposedly at Area 51 and all of that?”

LMH: “Yeah. Oh yeah!”

RH: “How about the underground bases in New Mexico?”

LMH: “In terms of Area 51, I wouldn’t say that Collins was far-ranging [in his comments to me]. Some of the other stuff [he told me] went into underground bases in New Mexico and all of that. But Area 51 is key [and] he knows about Archuleta [Mesa]. He has some questions about what Bennewitz has [claimed] but he’s not denying everything [relating to a supposed underground alien base at the mountain site]. I think Bennewitz’ work is of interest to them.

RH: “Have you heard references to live aliens living at Kirtland [AFB]?”

LMH: “Yeah, Los Alamos.”

RH: “Los Alamos, but not Kirtland?”

LMH: “No. That CE11 (?) electromagnetic chamber is supposed to be only at Los Alamos and at Edwards [AFB]. There’s only supposed to be two of them. Whether we put the aliens in the electromagnetic enclosure to keep them in, or to keep our minds shielded from them, I don’t know. It could be both.”

RH: “Who gave you the information relating to these two locations, Los Alamos and Edwards?”

LMH: “I saw it in one of the memos in the ring binder that Bob Collins showed me.”

RH: “But Doty never made reference to that?”

LMH: “No, nope.”

END OF TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

So, in a taped conversation less than one year after-the-fact, Linda Moulton Howe unequivocally stated that Condor/Collins did indeed meet with her, and John Lear, at his house in Albuquerque, in November 1987—at which time he showed the two of them a number of MJ-12-related documents and memos, and vouched for their legitimacy.

As noted earlier, Collins now denies that such a meeting with Howe ever took place. However, as I mentioned to him in our recent email exchange, it seems to me that a court of law, where everyone would be testifying under oath, may be the best venue to sort all of this out. Of course, in John Lear, we have someone who can presumably support Howe’s version of events.

The bottom line: Robert Collins is now once again lying about his past. He was directly involved in disseminating disinformation related to MJ-12 as early as November 1987—an endeavor he was actively, publicly pursuing a year later, in the guise of Condor, on UFO Cover-up? Live! (And, I will argue, a function he continues to perform today, some 20 years later. He once used a ring binder; now he has email and the Internet.)

While none of us, save Linda Howe and John Lear, were at Collins’ home to observe the little mind games to which she was unwittingly subjected, each of us can nevertheless evaluate the public statements made by Condor/Collins on the television show and judge for ourselves whether or not he was actively engaged in a disinformational game designed to confuse the issue relating to the U.S. government’s involvement with UFOs.

Unfortunately, even after her futile, months-long wait for the “Roswell UFO” film, Linda still spoke glowingly of the supposedly legitimate UFO-related information she was getting from her inside sources at Kirtland, not realizing that she was playing into Doty’s and Collins’ hands by unwittingly assisting in the dissemination of their disinformation, first within ufological circles and eventually to a wider public audience. Indeed, in the late 1980s, newspaper and magazine stories about MJ-12 were rampant for a period of time.

In any case, during another moment of candor during in his Las Vegas speech, Bill Moore said, “Disinformation is a strange and bizarre game. Those who play it are completely aware that an operation’s success is dependant upon dropping information upon a target, or ‘mark,’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it to others as if it were true. Once this has been accomplished, the work of the counterintelligence specialists is complete. They can simply withdraw in the confidence that the dirty work of spreading their poisonous seeds will be done by others. Those of you who want proof of how well the process works only need look at the Bennewitz case, or the Aztec [UFO crash] case. Every time one of you [ufologists] repeats an unverified or unsubstantiated bit of information, without qualifying it as such, you are contributing to that process; and every time you do it, somebody in a need-to-know position sits back and has a horse laugh at your expense.”

What Moore didn’t say, given his obvious intention to project himself as someone who was on top of the situation—someone who was secretly using the users—is that he was arguably as much a victim of OSI’s schemes as were Howe and Bennewitz. His self-confessed willingness to get his “hands dirty” for Doty, as he so aptly put it, has cost him dearly, as well it should.

Anyway, just before I circulated my MJ-12 paper in March 1989, I called Linda Howe a final time and pleaded with her to disavow her endorsement of the claims that Doty, Collins and Moore had made to her. I then wrote her a letter, in which I sincerely praised her cattle mutilation investigations, but warned her of the damage she was creating, both to her own reputation, and to ufology in general, by supporting and spreading around the quite-obvious disinformation she had been given. Howe never responded.

In any case, after his pathetic performance in Las Vegas, Bill Moore was effectively drummed out of legitimate ufological circles and, thankfully, has more or less faded from public view. Alas, unlike Moore, other members of the Kirtland Cabal appear to have still more poop to share with all of us and continue to foul the ufological landscape with their, ahem, “inside” information and allegedly astute insights.

Falcon’s Follies
As bait, Linda Howe had initially been approached and presented with a now-discredited Air Force “report” on a supposed UFO/alien encounter at one of Ellsworth AFB’s nuclear missile sites in 1977. It is now known that Richard “Falcon” Doty was involved in the forging of that “document”—a fact first revealed by UFO researcher Dr. Bruce Maccabee and later alluded to by Bill Moore himself, in his Las Vegas speech. Doty also forged many other UFO-related files, according to an informed source whom I interviewed in February 2004. I will gladly present that individual in a court of law, if circumstances permit.

More recently, Condor/Collins has posted at his website another alleged account of UFO activity at Ellsworth, supposedly occurring in 1970. The title of the posting is “Ellsworth Air Force Base SD UFO Incident 1977—or was it really 1970?” This blatant come-on ignores the fact that the 1977 incident was a hoax, something Collins knows full well, given that his own book’s co-author, Richard Doty, forged the “report” on it. To insure that the new “document” would be noticed, Collins emailed a link to it to a very long list of individuals on March 10, 2007, but wisely covered himself by asking the recipients whether it was real or not.

On his website, Collins has a scan of the newly-discovered “report.” Upon learning of it, I forwarded the alleged Air Force report to one of my retired Minuteman missile targeting team sources, USAF TSgt. John Mills, whose dramatic 1978 UFO encounter in Ellsworth AFB’s missile field I mention in my book, UFOs and Nukes. He quickly found numerous factually-inaccurate statements and format errors in the “report” and calls it an obvious hoax.

For example, Mills writes, “The site [where the incident supposedly occurred] is listed as Delta 4, in the 68th Strategic Missile Squadron. Delta 4 was [actually] in the 66th Strategic Missile Squadron out near Philip. Opposite ends of the spectrum [geographically] and the wrong squadron to boot.” Mills then devoted a full page to identifying the great many technical errors contained in the supposed “report” circulated by Collins. His unequivocal conclusion: “The document is totally bogus.”

So here we have yet another example of Robert “Condor” Collins disseminating a hoaxed document about UFOs, more than two decades after his first disinformational endeavors, which were intended to mislead researcher Linda Moulton Howe and, eventually, the general public. I wonder if Collins’ current publishing partner, Richard Doty, forged this “document” too? As mentioned earlier, I have been told by a highly reliable source that Doty belatedly admitted to forging a number of documents while with OSI. But, once again, it seems to me that this question is best answered in a court of law, where everyone is placed under oath, and where lies become perjury, punishable by fine and/or imprisonment.

In their book, Exempt from Disclosure, on the “About the Authors” page, Condor/Collins and Falcon/Doty summarize their military backgrounds. Mention is made of Doty’s being recruited as an agent by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI or simply OSI) in 1978, his graduation from OSI Academy in Washington D.C., and his subsequent assignment with the OSI District Office 17 at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, in May 1979, where he became involved in a program relating to the “collection of intelligence and counterintelligence [pertaining to] UFOs and other foreign intelligence.”

This last reference is a polite way of saying, and excusing the fact, that Doty secretly spied on American citizens who had an interest in UFOs, recruited at least one civilian researcher (Moore) to assist him in those operations, and disseminated disinformation to those same unwitting persons with the intention of deflecting their interest in false directions, thereby disrupting their ability to decipher the governments’ actual knowledge of, and activities relating to, UFOs.

Unfortunately, some of those OSI-targets themselves naively disseminated that disinformation to an international audience—and, in doing so, polluted the collective understanding of what really has gone on in secrecy—with a mixture of lies, half-truths and paranoid fantasies. A variation of this dissemination process continues to this day, with the release of the latest MJ-12 “documents” and the disinformational rehash, sometimes with new twists, offered up by Doty and Collins, not only in their bogus book, but also in numerous emails and online postings.

Not surprisingly, the bio on Doty that appears in the jointly-authored book neglects to mention that, after being transferred from Kirtland to Wiesbaden AFB, Germany, he got into some kind of trouble allegedly involving the handling of money, according to then-Commander of the 1608th Security Police Squadron, Major Ernest Edwards, who knew Doty in New Mexico. While the available details remain sketchy, it has been confirmed that Doty was subsequently stripped of his agent status, booted from OSI and, upon returning to Kirtland AFB, ended up working in the base’s East Dining Hall, until his retirement on November 1, 1988. I have a copy of Doty’s DD-214—a summary of his military service—which confirms his unglamorous last assignment in the Air Force.

Upon retiring, Doty applied to be a New Mexico State Policeman and was hired. When I mentioned Doty’s troubles in Germany to Gabe Valdez, also a state policeman—who is best known for his cattle mutilation investigations—he told me that his own brother, yet another state policeman, was the individual who had done the background check on Doty during the state police application process. Valdez then added, “I guess we didn’t do a very good job.” Frankly, I agree with that assessment.

Now, Doty will probably deny all of this, as he did to various journalists in 1989—I still have his letters to them—but the facts mentioned here would be verified in court, if it comes to that. When those journalists and others began asking questions about Doty’s whereabouts after leaving the Air Force, in the wake of Bill Moore’s admissions about the OSI disinformation operation at the MUFON convention, Doty tried to lay low by telling some of them that he was on a secret intelligence assignment that he could not discuss. I have those letters too, Rick. In reality, Doty was working at the time as a state policeman in Grants, New Mexico, a fact confirmed to me by Gabe Valdez.

Shortly after I circulated my MJ-12 paper, Doty wrote a nasty letter to me, denying all of my published paper’s revelations about Moore, Collins and himself. Not knowing that I knew of his actual whereabouts, he also once again claimed that he was currently working on a secret intelligence assignment and could not be contacted directly. However, Doty wrote, he had a P.O. box in Grants where he received mail. I quickly responded by sending a certified letter to his attention at the Grants state police office. Realizing that I had caught him in yet another lie, he never responded. I still have both of those letters too, Mr. Doty.

The Serpo Hoax
In 2006, a group of British researchers, operating under the banner of Reality Uncovered (RU), initiated an online exposé relating to another of Richard Doty’s attempts at disinformation. Titled “Project Serpo Uncovered,” their now-reorganized findings open with:

On 2nd November 2005, Victor Martinez, the moderator of a UFOlogy-related electronic mailing list, posted an email from an anonymous source claiming to be a retired official of the U.S. government. The information referred to a top secret exchange program of twelve U.S. military personnel to planet ‘Serpo,’ a planet in the Zeta Reticuli star system, between the years 1965-78.
More messages soon followed and so did a website, all promoting the same general idea; that of ET contact and an extended stay on an alien planet.

The facts however paint a rather different picture to the fantastical ‘Exchange Program’ outlined above. The majority of the information regarding the Serpo Project has either passed through or is directly from Richard Doty, a person well-known in the field of UFOlogy. Furthermore, some of the names brought out to lend support to the story, in particular Paul McGovern, are in reality also none other than Richard Doty. Read on for the real story behind Project Serpo...

All of this may be found at www.realityuncovered.net, where there is an overview of the Serpo hoax investigation by RU.

A detailed discussion on the same website (www.realityuncovered.net) regarding Richard Doty pretending to be Paul McGovern may be found there as well. Bob Collins copied me on a supposed Doty/McGovern email exchange as recently as March 29, 2009. In view of RU’s investigation, Collins’ email should have been titled “Doty Talks to Himself.” In any case, the Serpo hoax is alive and well, thanks to Falcon’s and Condor’s latest online droppings.

One of those posting on the RU forum, Shawnna Connolly, eventually confronted Doty in an email, challenging the claim found in Exempt from Disclosure that Doty had attended law school and passed a New Mexico bar exam, thus sparking an exchange every bit as nasty as those from the late 1980s, when a newly-exposed Falcon/Doty sparred with journalists and researchers, including myself. A summary of the Doty/Connolly exchange currently posted at the RU website begins:

Rick Doty's Blackmail…
This is a continuation of the release of information that has been gathered during the long investigation into the Project Serpo story by Reality Uncovered. This part includes a few examples of the many incidents of unethical behaviour by two of the individuals responsible for ‘delivering’ Serpo to the public domain. The following is updated information we are providing to help make everyone aware of what has really been going on ‘behind the scenes’ of Serpo...

Doty's Harassment of Shawnna
Toward the end of the ‘heated’ argument between Collins & Doty and us regarding the Bar Exam and Law School issues, Richard Doty started privately emailing Shawnna threatening emails. He claimed to have some information about trouble with the law in her past and threatened to make those [sic] public unless she stopped talking about him. He was threatening to use a fabricated criminal past about Shawnna if she wouldn't remain silent about her findings. At one point in the evening, Mr. Doty sent Shawnna 8 emails in the span of one hour.

June 15th, Rick sent Shawnna the following email:

From: "Rick Doty"
Date: June 15, 2006 8:32:43 PM PDT
To: "Shawnna Connolly"
Subject: Re: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: SERPO, SEINU and DISCLOSURE Open Mind -The Progressive Sceptics and Para-Politics Forum - Bob Collins resolves the 'Doty email' issue

Ms. Connolly:

You have falsified several things about me, my occupation and my past. You have hoaxed my email address and my name.

Now, if you wish to see how well I'm versed in law, I'll show you.
-----------------------

Nine minutes later - he sends her the following threat:

----------------------
From: "Rick Doty"
Date: June 15, 2006 8:41:37 PM PDT
To: "Shawnna Connolly"
Subject: Re: Convicted Felon

I was just informed by two people on Victor Martinez's list that you are a convicted felon. You were convicted of forgery and embezzlement.

I will publish this on the forum.
-----------------------

Shawnna - never one to be phased [sic] by threats, calls his bluff:

----------------------
From: Shawnna Connolly
To: Rxxxxxxxxxx@msn.com
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 21:53
Subject: Your threat - "Convicted Felon"

[You] appear to be desperate, Mr. Doty.

I have NEVER done anything wrong in my entire life, much less been charged, or convicted of ANYTHING.

Go ahead and post this - it would be my pleasure to SUE a New Mexico state policeman presenting false information on the internet and fraudulently passing himself off as a lawyer (page 91, second edition of Exempt from Disclosure, and page 96 of the first edition of Exempt from Disclosure).

Always,
Shawnna
-----------------------

But Doty continues using his threatening tactics - I'm sure they've worked before. But apparently he's never met anyone like Shawnna before....

----------------------
From: "Rick Doty"
To: "Shawnna Connolly"
Subject: Re: Your threat - "Convicted Felon"
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 03:57:50 +0000

You'd have to sue the persons who spread the information, mainly Victor's list of people, who forwarded me the email.

Now, you see how things can be spread? Whether its truth or not, it was spread.

Oh, I'll spread it, just like you spread lies about me.

By the way, you can't sue unless you can prove venue, which can't be done on Internet traffic. You might want to check the laws!

Just keep you mouth shut about me and I'll do the same with you.

If not, then things will get very interesting with Internet Traffic.

-----------------------

While the threats were disturbing, Shawnna would not allow Mr. Doty to intimidate her, and she contacted the NM State Police and forwarded this information & evidence of all of the threats to his immediate supervisor.

Shawnna heard back from his supervisor as a result of our report. Capt. Pete Kassetas of the New Mexico State Patrol [sic] assured Shawnna that Mr. Doty had been spoken to and would not be contacting her again. He also said that if for some reason she did hear from Mr. Doty again, she was to contact him right away. Shawnna asked Capt. Kassetas if the department was OK with Doty claiming to have passed the NM State Bar exam and presenting himself to be a lawyer—his response was that he couldn't talk to her about the details but that issue was also being investigated.

Shawnna hasn't heard from Doty since...

END OF WEBSITE POSTING

This exchange is also at www.realityuncovered.net. After reading it, I found the reference to which Ms. Connolly alluded in the 2005 edition of Exempt from Disclosure, regarding Doty’s claims of having passed the New Mexico bar exam. It reads:

Since retiring from the Air Force in November 1988 I have managed to have a successful second career as a New Mexico State Trooper having received many commendations for my outstanding work in the field of law enforcement. During the last few years I have been able to finish my law degree and recently just passed the New Mexico state Bar examine [sic]...

This claim by Doty is absolutely false, as anyone who wishes to check into the matter will discover. In fact, a few members of RU did just that and got written confirmation from the University of New Mexico that Doty’s and Collins’ claims about Doty having graduated from the university’s law school in 2003 were untrue. That discussion may be found by searching: www.realityuncovered.net ([keyword law claims] While the thought of Doty as an attorney is laughable on many levels, I note here his documented 25-year history of rampant misspelling—e.g. “examine” for “exam”—as well as his poor grammar, as evidenced in his many communications with others, not to mention the letters and documents he has forged over the years.)

So, Mr. Doty and Mr. Collins, what kind of excrement will you two birds drop to rebut this illuminating cache of information from the Reality Uncovered folks? Go for it! I have already pulled on my Hi-Top rubber boots.

Regardless, I think Shawnna Connolly—given her sincere quest for the facts and her obvious bravery in the face of intimidation—would make an excellent witness in a courtroom. So would Stephen Broadbent and the other researchers associated with the Reality Uncovered (realityuncovered.net) exposé on Serpo, MJ-12, and related disinformation. A fuller discussion of these topics may be found at: www.realityuncovered.net (keyword "blog")

Aaaargh! Speaking of MJ-12, I must now return to that sordid subject yet again.

MJ-Hell: It Still Lives!
For those of you unaware of this unfortunate development, we now have new-and-improved MJ-12 “documents” to further muddy the waters. Although no involvement with them on the part of Moore, Doty and/or Collins has been proved thus far, both Doty and Collins endorse their authenticity. These bogus papers came out of the woodwork, just as the first batch did 25 years ago, with no verifiable origin—that is, having no provenance, something essential to historical research, not to mention separating fact from fiction. Despite the sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle flaws and fabrications found in the latest batch of MJ-12 papers, a few well-intentioned researchers—who should have learned their lesson the first time around—have taken the new “documents” to heart and have, of their own volition, disseminated them far and wide while vouching for, or at least implicitly endorsing, their integrity. There are several websites devoted to the supposed validity of this MJ-Crap 2.0, but I certainly won’t advertize those fetid flytraps here.

I recommend instead the Fund for UFO Research’s online heads-up about one of the “documents,” the so-called SOM 1-01 field manual, supposedly written for military personnel engaged in the recovery of crashed UFOs:

http://www.cufos.org/ros5.html

The bio for one of the authors of this specially-issued bulletin, veteran UFO researcher Jan L. Aldrich, summarizes his expertise by saying that he “is familiar with protocols for establishing tactical bivouac areas with exclusion areas, operational security, and nuclear weapon accident/incident operations during field deployments. While at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he was with the Directorate of Training Development, where he was tasked with analyzing and developing training manuals and materials.”
In a recent email to me, Aldrich wrote,

Robert,
[Regarding] Robert M. Collins, who had experience in military intelligence, I have difficulty believing anyone with much military experience would endorse SOM 1-01. I understand that the USAF is not generally thought of as a field-operating organization. However, that said, they do have to go out and do crash rescue and recovery, they do have to do technical intelligence on captured enemy equipment and, further, they have to engage in normal operational security and counter-intelligence. Also, the writing of operational and technical manuals has very simple standards for organization, content and maintenance. Even a short exposure to the military, as an officer, should have been enough [for Collins] to see the faults and failings in SOM 1-01...

[The] style of writing and the simple act of updating of the manual, which is not done properly, should give clues that this item was a fake...even a nodding acquaintance with the military should have raised all types of red flags when reading through SOM 1-01...

Jan

In a follow-up email, in response to my request for some specifics relating to the flaws found in the supposedly-genuine 1954 field manual, Aldrich wrote:

I [found] about 50 problems with SOM 1-01 when I quit looking at the manual. If you go into the UFO Update [website] archives, I went into great detail about them. The emails are contained in the first few months of the archive.

Despite that exhaustive effort, Aldrich then generously devoted two full Word document pages to further critiquing the SOM 1-01 for me. For those of you interested in reading his comments, I have placed the full text at the end of this article. At the end of the critique, Aldrich wrote:

When I arrived in Europe [in 1984], I was not sufficiently trained in security and intelligence to do my job. I took every course that U.S. Army Europe had to offer, and dozens of correspondence courses, some of which amounted to over 120 sub-course booklets. One of the things I studied was the history of classified documents and directives from Truman on up to the [then] present day. As a subject-matter expert for Army meteorology, I had to analyze various training, operations, and maintenance manuals. Since the then-current system, at the time of my job, came into the Army inventory in 1947, I am very familiar with 1954 manuals, as the manual for hydrogen-generating equipment was originally written in 1954, and was still in use during my tenure.

[MJ-12 proponents such as] the Woods, Friedman, and Hamilton have an answer for my and others’ objections. [However, while] they all know what they are talking about for manuals, security, and operations in the 1980s, it was different in 1954. They apparently have no idea what was going on then...

I was also in a critical nuclear weapons position for seven years, so I know about sensitive operations and security. Twice, I served as acting Intelligence Officer in a nuclear-capable artillery battalion. I also served for a time as an adjutant, both unusual positions for an enlisted man. Finally, I served on the Special Staff of the Commanding General of the Southern European Taskforce. So I have significant experience in a number of areas related to manuals, operations, and security. I have, at one time or another, had the additional duties of Top Secret Control Officer, Classified Document Custodian, Communication Security (COMSEC) Custodian, Cosmic TS Control Officer, Security Manager, Interviewing Officer for Special Background Investigations, Nuclear Release Authentication Training Officer, etc.

Well, as noted earlier, the man knows his field manuals. Fortunately, the person(s) who forged the SOM-01-I “manual” did not, which makes exposing it easier, at least for knowledgeable and credible military document examiners such as Aldrich.

I will also mention this fact, excerpted from the wikipedia.org webpage on MJ-12, which is at http://tinyurl.com/c56bn8:

A document entitled ‘SOM1-01:Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal’ and found on www.majesticdocuments.com contains paragraphs with subheads set in the sans serif ‘Helvetica’ typeface. The document purports to be from 1954 yet the typeface in question was first designed in 1957 by the Swiss graphic designer, Max Miedinger. The capitalized sans serif letter ‘R’ (and others) found on many pages confirms that this typeface is not the much earlier Akzidenz Grotesk sans serif typeface. This evidence seems to strongly suggest that this document is a fabrication.

The bottom line: As was the case with the earlier batch of MJ-12 “documents” that surfaced 25 years ago, the newly-disseminated MJ-12-related SOM-01-I “field manual” is undoubtedly a forgery.

However, frustratingly, the great majority of folks who so confidently hold-forth on the supposed authenticity of the alleged field manual, and other MJ-12 papers, are not qualified to address these arcane technical issues, which is why Moore, Doty and Collins and their ilk have gotten away with so much over the years, at least in some quarters, when they dress up their disinformation as legitimate history.

While no evidence currently exists to link the bogus “field manual” to Doty or Collins, the fact that both of them promote its legitimacy so vigorously is sufficient cause for concern. Whether this “document’ is eventually proven to be one of the Doty-created forgeries, mentioned to me by my confidential source, remains to be seen.

Finally, in a long-overdue but welcomed follow-up to my 1989 article on MJ-12, researcher Brad Sparks’ comprehensive, well-documented paper on the subject, which he delivered at MUFON’s 2007 International Symposium, only serves to substantiate my initial findings regarding the disinformational underpinnings of the entire, apparently never-ending MJ-12 charade. Sparks’ illuminating paper may be found at:

http://tinyurl.com/2xdpak

In Conclusion

Whether or not Falcon/Doty and Condor/Collins are actually officially-sanctioned disinformation agents these days, or merely habitual liars with an as-yet unknown agenda, if a large feathery creature approaches you with the offer of leaked UFO “documents” or “inside” information about the U.S. government cover-up of same, I would be very, very wary. Better yet—to quote Monty Python—Run away! Run away!

Alas, far too many individuals, confident in their own positions on MJ-12 and Serpo, will never take this advice. It takes two to tango, and Doty and Collins could not have succeeded in their schemes were it not for the seemingly endless supply of sincere-but-gullible ufologists, ufological-wannabes, and the occasional, usually self-appointed document expert. As noted earlier, Bill Moore once said in a moment of candor, “Every time one of you repeats an unverified or unsubstantiated bit of information, without qualifying it as such, you are contributing to [the] process [of spreading the disinformants’ poisonous seeds]; and every time you do it, somebody in a need-to-know position sits back and has a horse laugh at your expense.”

But these unwitting dupes will get no pity from me. Their own lack of due-diligence, at least in most cases, has left them in the untenable position where they now find themselves. No, it’s the millions of people in the general, uninformed, unsuspecting public who warrant my concern. Countless humans worldwide wonder about the merits of the UFO phenomenon and are genuinely seeking credible information upon which to form an opinion. Then come along “conmen” like Fal-con and Con-dor, together with their witting or unwitting civilian stooges, to make things much more difficult for the average person on-the-street, who is simply looking for the facts about UFOs, such as they are, at the present time.

So sue me for libel, Mr. Doty and/or Mr. Collins! I’m ready to take it to the next level. Let’s see how your, and Mr. Moore’s, myriad of lies hold-up in a legal venue. It’s high time we put all of your shenanigans behind us, once and for all. You know where to reach me. The ball is in your court. Until then, I will continue to write articles and emails about your bogus “contributions” to ufology.

Admittedly and understandably, differences of opinion exist about what UFOs are, and what those who pilot them are up to. For example, despite my 35-year investigation of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites—which, unlike the MJ-12 saga, relies on authentic declassified U.S. government documents, as well as the taped testimony of more than 100 USAF veterans who don’t need to hide behind bird names and can be openly identified—a great many people nevertheless remain skeptical about the validity of my findings. That’s entirely understandable and predictable. Paradigm shifts usually take time and the universal acceptance of the UFO reality will be no different.

However, when already-exposed tricksters such as Richard Doty and Robert Collins continue to intentionally confuse the issue, by disingenuously spreading around their poop as if it were real data, worthy of investigation and eventual acceptance—when it is actually worthless, not to mention misleading, as it is intended to be—then the rest of us, ufologists or otherwise, must stand firm and at every opportunity expose these incorrigible liars for what they are.

Those who are “disinforming” us about UFOs are effectively delaying our understanding of the facts by lying about the government’s actual knowledge of the phenomenon. Moreover, these agents’ input is all the more corrosive because it provides free ammunition to the UFO-debunking crowd, who only have to point to Doty’s and Collins’ many bogus utterances, about this or that, to justify to themselves that the whole UFO question is unworthy of their time and attention.

For example, it appears that the Reality Uncovered folks, despite their excellent investigations relating to the MJ-12 and Serpo hoaxes, have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” by mistakenly assuming that the disinformants’ nonsense is the only UFO data worth pursuing. While preparing this article, I contacted two of the website’s moderators and another leading contributor. I first complimented their exposé on Doty and Collins and then mentioned my own, well-grounded research on UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites, and provided them with information pertaining to the testimony from my ex-USAF sources about the UFO-reality. None of them ever responded.

Even prior to my contact with them, the RU moderators had contemptuously referred to persons such as myself as UFO “believers” on their website. I suspect, however, if I were to call them UFO “unbelievers” they would strongly reject the label. That serious people take UFOs seriously seems to have escaped them, to borrow a phrase from researcher Robert J. Durant. (In fact, they probably won’t even get my point here, so I will spell it out for them: Drawing conclusions about something, after first rigorously investigating it, is fundamentally different from blindly “believing” in it.)

While it’s true, alas, that most UFO debunkers are unreasonably biased against the subject at the outset, even before examining the evidence, the disinformation now being spread around by Doty, Collins and their ilk—about pitched gun-battles at underground alien bases, and alien/U.S. military exchange programs between Earth and a distant planet, to mention two of the bogus stories currently in circulation—only further delays serious attention being paid to UFOs by any semi-open-minded scientist or journalist who, among other skeptics, will now have to be convinced even more of the validity of UFO research.

In short, disinformants are serving masters whose goals run counter to humankind’s collective long-term interests and enlightenment. If you who are reading this are blindly repeating and/or actively promoting any one of the many lies that Richard Doty and Robert Collins have posted on the Internet, or have spread around in emails, then you are unwittingly serving those unseen masters too. I think I hear a horse laugh somewhere in the distance.

Jan L. Aldrich’s critique of the SOM 1-01 “Field Manual”
The following items are neither the most important nor vital objections to SOM 1-01, rather some of the problems with it which are easy to understand without a lot of background and extensive commentary. --JLA

1. Posting Changes to Manuals:

In 1954, [one] received changes to a manual generally in the form of a document which had the changes-to-be-made written out, instructing the manual's owner to add, cross out, or change items in the manual. For example, such instructions might be:

Change 1, dated 5 November 1957, to SOM1-01, 1954:

Page 22, paragraph 2.c.2 change the words: ‘send to the nearest ASF collections point.’ To: ‘send to the Centralized ASF collection point, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.’

After the change had been made in the manual, the owner would write on the page ‘Changed by Change 1 dated 5 Nov 57,’ and indicate the date changed and his initials. Generally, the fact that the manual has been changed appears at the beginning of the paragraph changed. As some of these changes could change just about every page in the manual, the absolute minimum annotation would be ‘C-1 12 Nov 57 JLA..’ Most changes in the 1950s were made by hand written annotations, but even back then, there were tear-out pages which required the old page(s) be removed and new pages inserted. The new page would be have the change number indicated on the page.

[Despite these formal Army requirements,] SOM 1-01 indicates in the front cover that a number of changes were made, but nowhere in the manual are any of these changes indicated or annotated. Also, the requirement is that the outside cover of the manual be annotated with ‘Change 1 dated 5 Nov 57 posted 12 Nov 57 JLA.’ Such annotation on the cover indicates to the user who might be different than the manual's owner or custodian, that the manual was up to date with all relevant changes posted.

With a classified manual [like the allegedly genuine SOM 1-01], not posting or properly annotating the postings could be considered a security violation...

2. Manual Style. Paragraphs, Sub-paragraphs:

If you have a sub-paragraph, e.g. 2.a.1 then it must have a paragraph 2.a.2 as a minimum. If you don't, then the subparagraph (or, in this example, the sub-subparagraph) is not required. That is a military style requirement. However, a change could supersede subparagraph 2.a.2, but again, that the change was made should be annotated on the page.

3. Recovery Operations:

The manual instructs that operations be conducted so that the press and public cannot gain access or know what is going on. [But] it does not instruct the recovery team to utilize camouflage nets or tentage to preclude viewing from higher ground or from aircraft such as the press might hire to have a look about what is going on.

4. Recovery Operations and Technical Intelligence:

The manual does not tell recovery teams to set up a grid, photograph the scene and tag each item for future reference. (Identifying material and where it is found is, of course, basic to technical intelligence.)

5. Organization and Equipment:

The manual does not explain what specialized gear, what protective gear, what type of personnel occupational specialties, and what
specific training would be required for recovery teams.

6. Logistics, Transportation, Communication, etc.:

There is no guidance about supply rates, consumables, etc.; material handling gear and transportation, and communications.

7. Chain of command:

Who does the recovery team report to? [There is no mention of any kind.]

8. Special conditions:

How are liquids, gasses, fires and hazardous material handled in he recovery operations. [There is no mention of any kind.]


9. Standards:

The manual says that the site will be cleaned to the satisfaction of the commander in charge of the operation. This goes without saying and is not guidance at all. Military manuals of all epochs, since at least WWII, despite differences in wording and policy at the time, all contain elements of conducting military operations which are readily identifiable: That is ‘Task’ (what is to be done); ‘Conditions’ (under what kind of environment is the task to be preformed); and ‘Standards’ (what are minimum acceptable outcomes of the task). Basically, all military manuals can be analyzed in this manner...

In addition, I offer an opinion that in such [UFO] recovery operations, there would probably be instruction about removing soil from the area of a crash site. Interestingly enough years later, I obtained some information about a case of an explosion over western Maryland in he 1970s. Lou Corbin looked into before he died. The farm in question was showered with metallic fragments after the explosion. The farmer and neighbors picked some up. Corbin found that the military arrived at the farm, scraped off all the soil with earthmoving equipment, carted it off and replaced the farmer's soil. Corbin had the fragments analyzed by a NASA scientist. They were of earthly origin. However, the point is that SOM 1-01 is lacking in details for operations that the military actually engages in.

More . . .

Note-The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various authors here do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of The UFO Chronicles or its principals. Counterpoints are always welcome in the Comments Section."

UPDATE: Tim Cooper Renounces MJ-12 Documents

See Also:

"More BS from CSI on Big Sur"

CSICOP, Now CSI: CSI’s “Scientific” Analysis of UFOs: Thanks, but No Thanks!

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