Old NSA Records Remain Inaccessible to Researchers

Last year, the National Archives (NARA) acquired a large number of historically valuable National Security Agency records. But they remain inaccessible to researchers, at least for the time being.

By Steven Aftergood Secrecy News 7-17-17

David Langbart of NARA described the situation at a closed meeting of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee late last year. According to recently published minutes of that meeting:

“The [NSA] records consist of approximately 19,000 folders without any real arrangement. These records mostly consist of technical, analytical, historical, operational, and translation reports and related materials. Most of the records date from the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, but there are also documents from the 1920s and 1930s and even earlier. The NSA reviewed the records for declassification before accessioning and most documents and folder titles remain classified. Langbart concluded that the finding aid prepared by NSA was the only practical way to locate documents of interest for researchers, but it is 557 pages long and is classified.”

The National Archives confirmed that this description remains accurate today.

So not only are these thousands of half-century-old records still classified or otherwise unavailable, but the finding aid that would enable researchers to locate specific documents of interest is itself a classified document.

[...]

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“Bogey Showed Up On Radar and Was Reported To Have Made ‘Two Landings’”

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Let's just forget this ever happened

By Billy Cox De Void 6-9-15

     The monotone log entries for the 4th Infantry Division’s 14th Battalion units during January 1969 belie the drudgery, confusion and horror endured by U.S. Army grunts in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. They forge an accountant’s dispassionate version of reality, with platoons scouring the jungles for tunnels and spider holes, following blood trails. The narratives are drab and untextured, with notes like “C Co finds 6 foxholes, water point, A Co finds 8 57 recoilless rifle rounds, 8 81mm rounds; D Co has snakebite” and “B Co still digging, finds 14 NVA bodies, 4 Chicom grenades, claymore, B40 warhead and other gear.” Etc., etc.

But then, on Jan. 13, a week before Nixon was inaugurated, something extraordinary happened, although you’d never know it by reading the index line summary of that day’s events: “B Co has early morning movement, engages. D Co hears voices, engages.” Maybe, given the routine deprivations and futility of the mission, it was regarded as just one more damned weird thing in an unending string of weird things. Anyhow, shortly after 1 a.m., a bogey showed up on radar and was reported to have made “two landings,” then a “touchdown,” and yet another landing more than an hour later. The stenographer included no eyewitness descriptions, and North Vietnam wasn't renowned for its whirlybirds. The clerk listed the thing as a “UFO.”

Given the hostile environs, the beleaguered boys on the ground didn’t ask questions and, according to the log, opened up with five rounds of 105mm Howitzer fire. No details available on accuracy, but nobody was taking any chances. “To Bn from Bde,” the account goes on, “Spooky 23 [AC-47 gunship] will be in vicinity of LZ Laura for any possible engagement of UFO’s. Spooky arrived at 0407.” Wisely, the intruder was gone by time the gunnery platform showed up, but the UFO reappeared on the scopes more than half an hour later and stumped the radar guys for another 15 minutes before disappearing.

At sunrise, stated the entry, “DO Brigade wants 1/14 to check out the area where artillery was employed . . . where UFO’s were fired upon this morning.” The platoon evidently found nothing because the rest the day is saturated with recon reports and accounts of skirmishes. Shortly before midnight, radar operators locked in on another UFO for 10 minutes before it went the way of vapor.

The next day, however on Jan. 14, the line summary wasn’t nearly so circumspect: “C Co hears midnight voices, engages. Several reports of UFO visual sightings, radar sightings, electrical interference from area, headlights. Neg results.” Unfortunately, the main body of the log doesn’t give us much else to work with. The UFO lit up the radar again, around 2:30 a.m., and a “visual sighting” followed. Then came word that “there have been 4 landings at 0093124100 also there is ectrical [sic] interference coming from that area.” Followed by more radar paint and another sighting, a “red light W to E and back, the object is far out, they have no estimation of range.”

Four days later, at 6:30 a.m., the duty officer noted this: “To Bn from Radar Radar sighted a UFO at 9362521625 Bn FDC gave the word to fire on grid. The Bde DO informed us that his higher wants us to conduct a sweep of that area. An aerial observation is requested only.” No follow-ups are given, and there is only one other relevant log reference, on the 19th. That’s when “a patrol left to check out a possibility of a UFO at 0900 to return at 1200” with “negative results except for a possible LZ” with “grass blown down.”

End of chapter. Or is it?

These entries are brought to our attention, once again, by veteran researcher Barry Greenwood, who has been sifting through the National Archives for UFO data as the system digitizes reams of ancient paper. In this case, however, Greenwood discovered the preceding logs online from a 4th ID veterans group. And to reiterate, none of this material –radar contact, orders to fire on UFOs, the discharge of artillery rounds, the deployment of a gunship into the fray – can be found in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book files.

The January 1969 UFO reports had to make the brass at least a little dyspeptic, given what happened in the summer of 1968. That’s when a spasm of UFO activity near the DMZ was initially ascribed to enemy helicopters. In fact, the Associated Press coverage of those encounters (also supplied by Greenwood), was quite detailed with its inaccuracies. In quoting largely South Vietnamese sources, the AP on June 17 reported that artillery and F-4 jet fighters had destroyed perhaps as many as 12 Soviet Mi-4 troop transport choppers, with up to six crashing into the Gulf of Tonkin. This blow-up occurred at practically the same time – amid reports of unknown lights drifting near the DMZ and out to sea – that U.S. jets accidentally bombed the Australian destroyer Hobart on the evening of June 15, killing two and wounding seven more. They struck a U.S. warship as well, and blew a friendly patrol boat out of the water, killing five.

Problem: No instigating helicopter wreckage was ever found. A week after Uncle Sam slammed the wrong targets, Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. Forces in Nam, went on record and flatly refuted the enemy helicopter rumor. Even so, troops in the area continued to insist they were seeing the nocturnal helicopters, or at least, as one Marine corporal put it, “six blinking red lights, each about 500 meters apart.” But the mistaken-identity tragedy in the Gulf chilled press coverage of UFOs re-materializing over American forces in the Highlands in January ’69. Then again, there were no calamitous mishaps the second time around, either. Or at least, none that we know of.

You can count on the fog of war to produce stories that don't entirely add up. But maybe this one's bigger than we suspected. Maybe other logs and records will surface as the National Archives presses forward with its data conversions; certainly, official history (Blue Book) is worthless in this case. Maybe veterans' groups can shed more light on this mystery. Again, Barry Greenwood is at uhrhistory@verizon.net

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'...16 UFO Encounters During The Vietnam War...'

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The USAF's Combat Air Activities File holds at least 16 UFO cases that never made it into Project Blue Book; nearly 50 years later, they're still classified./CREDIT: Barry Greenwood

The hunt for missing pieces

By Billy Cox De Void 6-3-15

     The Air Force maintains it shuttered Project Blue Book in 1969 because, among other things, UFOs didn't constitute a national security issue. But we've known that was a snow job since 1979. That's when public-records sleuth Robert Todd excavated the “Bolender memo,” which had been issued a decade earlier. Even while advocating the termination of the USAF’s 22-year-old supposedly transparent data-gathering operation, Brig. Gen. C.H. Bolender was writing through back channels that "reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system."

Oh. OK. That doesn't sound the least bit fishy, thanks for playing it straight. We’ll all just shut our brains off and never ask about it again.

Now, Barry Greenwood, co-author of 1984's Clear Intent, the seminal look at federal UFO documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, appears to have stumbled across some of the cases Bolender was alluding to. While trolling through a recently digitized National Archives database called Combat Air Activities File (CACTA), Greenwood discovered a spread sheet of 16 UFO encounters during the Vietnam war, mostly from early 1969. To be sure, there was a known history of UFO activity during our dismal hearts-and-minds experiment in Southeast Asia; Greenwood and late writing partner Larry Fawcett made note of the war-zone phenomena in Clear Intent. And as far back as 1973, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. George Brown was going on record about it:

“I don’t know whether this story has ever been told or not. They weren’t called UFOs. They were called enemy helicopters. And they were only seen at night and they were only seen in certain places. They were up around the DMZ in the early summer of ‘68. And this resulted in quite a little battle. And during the course of this, an Australian destroyer took a hit and we never found any enemy, we only found ourselves when this had been all sorted out. And this caused some shooting there, and there was no enemy at all involved but we always reacted. Always after dark. The same thing happened up at Pleiku at the highlands in ‘69.”

So, a few weeks ago, as Greenwood noodled through the online nooks and crannies of official memory, he discovered the CACTA stash. Just as Bolender implied, these 1969 cases were categorized as “secret.” The listings offered few details. But in the “Determination” column, investigators inserted conclusions like “UFO,” “SUS[pected] UFO,” and “UFO Chase.” That was surprising. During years of FOIA fishing expeditions for military UFO records, Greenwood assiduously avoided using the dreaded U-word for fear of getting his requests tossed in the screwball bin; now, suddenly, here was the Air Force routinely employing the radioactive acronym. Imagine that. Anyhow, Greenwood cross-checked the CACTA cases against the official Blue Book records and, sure enough, just as Bolender wrote, they were nowhere to be found.

“Most everything we’ve gotten from Vietnam comes from anecdotes and memories,” says Greenwood from his home outside Boston. “This is quite striking because now we have dates, times and locations. It’s a complete reversal of what we’d expect from the Air Force. I can’t imagine more of a national security issue than events occurring in wartime. I’m not in a literal sense suggesting these were spaceships. But what we do know is that this happened, and the records are still classified.”

Furthermore, the 16 cases in question are only from 1967 and 1969. As Greenwood points out, Uncle Sam was invested in Vietnam for a good decade. What else is out there? What are the details behind the summaries of the incidents we now know about? "UFO Chase"? Say what? Greenwood, who published his unexpected findings last month in a limited-distribution newsletter, is filing more FOIAs.

In the meantime, Nam vets, listen up: If you’ve got something to contribute, Barry Greenwood would like to hear from you at uhrhistory@verizon.net

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UFOs and US Military Were In Contact, Claims Vietnam Vet | VIDEO

UFOs Confront Soldiers During War

Intelligence Officer Reports UFOs Over Saigon; J Allen Hynek Chimes In

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

At least nobody got killed

By Billy Cox De Void 1-24-15

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

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

Ahem. OK:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy? That’s being charitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Project Blue Book Declassified - Really?

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By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 1-20-15

"the only 'news' here is that John has provided us with another site where we can see these files"

      I’m watching the ABC Evening News, something I attempt to avoid because there is so little news in the broadcast (but that’s another story) and they tell me that the Project Blue Book files are now declassified and on line. I’m wondering what they mean because they have been on line for quite some time.

They’re referring to John Greenwald’s efforts to post all of these files at his Black Vault website, and his effort is commendable. But NICAP had many of the files on line for years and I have never found a gap in the Fold 3’s Blue Book files also on line. Or, in other words, the only “news” here is that John has provided us with another site where we can see these files.

ABC also seemed to suggest that this was something new. The Air Force had finally released all of the files of its investigation, except, of course, they did that in 1976. I made a trip down to Maxwell Air Force Base and spent time going through the files*. Anyone could have done it but the fact the files had been declassified hadn’t been announced publically. There had been some sort of announcement in an Air Force bulletin that I happened to see, so I made arrangements to take a look.

And once those files were transferred to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., they were more accessible to the public. You could buy the microfilm copies for something like eight or ten dollars a roll back then, but there were ninety some rolls of them. Over the years I actually managed to obtain a full set of the microfilms, so I’ve had all of the Blue Book files in my office for a couple of decades.

The statistics “announced” by ABC didn’t tell the whole story either, and they seemed to think Blue Book began as a result of the Roswell UFO crash (Roswell isn’t even mentioned in the Blue Book files except a short paragraph in a newspaper clipping that is part of another file), but actually the idea for an investigation can be traced back to December 1946 and probably had more to do with the Ghost Rockets of Sweden and some sightings in the US than it did with either Roswell or the Kenneth Arnold sightings. I laid this out in Government UFO Files, along with documentation to support the idea.

They said that 701 cases of the some 12,000 remained unidentified but the truth is that many of the cases are labeled, but not identified. These are labeled as “insufficient data for a scientific analysis.” In many of those cases all the information necessary for a complete investigation is included, but it is labeled that way. This was an attempt to reduce the number of unidentified cases by labeling them as something else and that is all that it was.

In addition to that, many cases that are labeled with a solution are clearly in error. For example, the Portage County UFO chase of 1966. (It was on April 17 and involved several police officers, deputy sheriffs and their supervisors and a stylized version was seen at the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. See also my posting here on May 20, 2014 for more information.). It has been explained as a combination of Venus and a satellite. The police officers saw the satellite in the west and as it passed over them, as they chased it across Ohio and into Pennsylvania; their attention was then drawn to Venus. The trouble here, as outlined in the Project Blue Book files is that there were no satellites visible in that part of the United States at that time of the morning. Letters and other documents in the Blue Book file prove this, yet the satellite portion of the solution is allowed to stand.

To make it worse, drawings made by the police officers show what was visible in the sky. Those drawings mark the position of the UFO, that of the moon, and that of Venus. Or, to put a point on it, the police officers did see Venus and identified it as such. But the label on the case, which is clearly in error, is allowed to stand and the case is shown to have a solution.

There are many such cases in the Blue Book files. Cases in which the solutions are simply not borne out of the documentation available. Yet we continue to hear about only 701 unidentified cases when the number is probably closer to 5000 when the solutions are examined carefully and those labeled as insufficient data are included. Insufficient data is not a solution, but is a label other than unidentified.

It was good to see a news report that treated UFOs seriously. It was not so good to see facts and figures used that were clearly inaccurate. I’m sure John knew the difference but I’ll wager that the reporter looked at a few things on line, misunderstood them, and ran with his story. The best thing about all this is that you don’t have to believe me. You can look it all up in the Black Vault.

*Bob Cornett and I might have [been] the first outsiders to go through the Blue Book files. The first thing we did was list all the unidentified cases complete with the names and locations. When the files were released into the public mainstream the names had been redacted. We could, of course, put the names back in… but the job of redacting was poorly done and in most of the case files you can find the names. A complete listing of the unidentified cases is available in Project Blue Book – Exposed in both hardback and as a Kindle ebook.

I will note that Jack Webb, in preparation for his TV series about Project Blue Book paid to have all the files microfilmed. We all owe him thanks for doing that.

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USAF UFO Project Blue Book Files Go Online for Free

AREA 51: U-2s, UFOs and Operation Blue Book – Recent Declassified CIA Documents

Air Force Investigation into UFOs – Vintage Interview | Project Blue Book | VIDEO - 1966

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Declassification Engine Provides Solution to Processing Declassified Documents

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By Anna Li
www.poynter.org
8-23-13

     At a time when “big data” is in vogue and computational journalism is taking off, reporters need efficient ways to process millions of documents. The Declassification Engine is one way to solve this problem. The project uses the latest methods in computer science to demystify declassified texts and increase transparency in government documents.

The project’s mission is to “create a critical mass of declassified documents by aggregating all the archives that are now just scattered online,” said Matthew Connelly, professor of international and global history at Columbia University and one of the professors directing the project, in a phone interview with Poynter.

The team working on the project, which began in September 2012, is made up of historians, statisticians, legal scholars, journalists and computer scientists.

All the data fed into The Declassification Engine comes from declassified documents, mostly from the National Archives, including more than a million telegrams from the State Department Central Foreign Policy Files. The Declassification Engine database also includes documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. . . .

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Military Witness Affidavits and Declassified Documents Are Now Available Online

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