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

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By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 1-3-16

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

The key passages follow here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

Visit Robert's Site ►

See Also:

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

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

Thousands of Airline Pilots Witness UFOs

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

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

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 12-18-15

     This is the second article I’ve written regarding what is clearly a UFO-debunking series on the Smithsonian Channel. The first one, titled I’m Not a UFO Expert but I Play One on TV, addressed the Smithsonian organization’s longstanding efforts to dismiss the reality of the UFO phenomenon via its publication of factually-inaccurate, propagandistic books and by broadcasting intentionally-biased “documentaries” on the subject.

Perhaps significantly, the late Frederick C. Durant III, who served as an assistant director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum for many years, had also worked for the CIA and authored the 1953 Robertson Panel Report, summarizing a group of agency-sponsored scientists’ recommendations that UFOs be secretly debunked and the mass media utilized to achieve that end.

Regarding Smithsonian’s UFOs Declassified series—which repeatedly engages in the misstatement of facts, the omission of other key facts, and the use of unqualified “experts” to dismiss the reality of UFOs as an anomalous phenomenon—the question is whether this abysmal offering, episode after episode, is merely the product of uninformed, biased network executives and their contracted producers, or instead due to the efforts of hidden instigators covertly working for the CIA.

While skeptics may scoff at the latter suggestion, the agency’s decades-long practice of embedding its employees in legitimate media companies—with or without the knowledge of those organizations’ management—has been firmly established and was briefly investigated by the U.S. Senate, in 1975, during the Church Committee hearings. Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein’s examination of this ominous situation is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand how much clandestine influence the CIA has exerted on U.S. print and broadcast organizations since World War II.

In any case, given the evidence, the Robertson Panel’s recommendations were apparently implemented, and the CIA’s decades-long use of the media to discredit the UFO phenomenon is now well documented in The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-Up, by the late journalist Terry Hansen, available at Amazon as a $2.99 e-book.

For example, as Hansen wrote, “[There is] new evidence that CBS TV was among the CIA's ‘media assets’ that participated in this covert UFO-debunking program. In 1966, CBS broadcast UFOs: Friend, Foe or Fantasy, narrated by Walter Cronkite, as part of its ‘CBS Reports’ documentary series. Cronkite assured his viewers, using false and misleading information, that all UFO reports were due to mistaken perceptions. In short, there was nothing for the public to worry about, he said. A hand-written letter by Robertson Panel member Dr. Thornton Page, discovered in the Smithsonian's archives by Prof. Michael Swords, confirms the CIA's long-suspected role in the program. In the 1966 letter, Page related to a CIA associate that he ‘helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel's conclusions.’”1

This illustration of the agency’s covert efforts to mislead the American public on the UFO topic, using the mass media, is only one of many that have now come to light. Moreover, and importantly, the history of the CIA’s still-classified interest in UFOs, and what appears to be its central role in the official cover-up by various groups within U.S. government, has been exposed by a variety of means, including document releases via the Freedom of Information Act, inadvertent leaks, and the occasional admission by one former agency employee or another. All of these have been examined in a chapter of my book, UFOs and Nukes, which has recently been posted online.

In short, the official version of history—whereby the CIA was only peripherally concerned by the UFO phenomenon, leaving the investigation of it to the U.S. Air Force—has been convincingly exposed as pure fiction. Nevertheless, the mainstream media continue to publish and broadcast stories originating from the agency—as recently as 2014—which serve to cast doubt on the UFO reality while simultaneously downplaying or ignoring CIA’s ongoing, still-hidden interest in the subject.

Regardless, a recent, suspiciously-spun episode of Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified, titled “Pilot Eyewitness”, presents three well-known cases involving commercial pilots who sighted one or more UFOs near their aircraft and, after superficially examining each incident, dismisses two of them as due to errors in human perception, suspect witness testimony and/or the misinterpretation of radar data.

The exception was the 2007 incident over the English Channel, during which Aurigny Air Services pilot Ray Bowyer reported seeing two huge, cigar-shaped UFOs which also appeared on ground-based radar. According to the show’s producers, that case will probably “forever remain a mystery”, which is the safest way to avoid saying that the two enormous craft—observed by the pilots of two different aircraft and all of the passengers in one of them—were, as the evidence strongly suggests, bona fide UFOs.

But the case that caught my attention—the one which best exposes the TV series’ continuing efforts to dismiss the phenomenon’s anomalous nature, while at the same time misrepresenting the real purpose behind extreme military and intelligence community interest in UFOs—is the 1986 Japan Airlines incident over Alaska.

Pursuing the debunking mission that UFOs Declassified so diligently embraces, the producers made a point of mentioning the following, supposedly problematic aspects of the case:

The veteran pilot, Captain Kenju Terauchi, was the only one, in a crew of three, to report a structured craft—a huge, dark, walnut-shaped ship having lights around a central rim—whereas the others only reported the lights.

The inference being that Terauchi only imagined an unlit craft to which the lights were attached—a phantom that didn’t really exist.

But Dr. Richard Haines, a retired psychologist and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) researcher who interviewed Terauchi at length, says, “He was on the left side where the huge object was positioned and I don't believe his First Officer left his seat to come over to look out of that window.” In other words, if Terauchi provided a more detailed sighting report than the others, it was due to his having a better look at the unknown craft.

(The producers mention the planet Jupiter as a potential source for the lights that everyone aboard reported—an obviously inadequate explanation given that Terauchi had been ordered to maneuver his aircraft through a full 360-degree turn, to see whether the lights would still be visible out his window. They were, the whole time, indicating that the lights/object had mimicked the aircraft’s circular maneuver and could not possibly be a planet, which would have instead remained stationary, at a fixed point in the sky, disappearing from view as the aircraft made its turn. Bizarrely, the producers had even mentioned Terauchi performing this maneuver earlier in the show. Consequently, their subsequent suggestion that the misidentification of Jupiter might offer a solution to the sighting was an obvious attempt to baffle the audience with bullshit.)

The show’s producers also attempted to discredit Captain Terauchi by mentioning his having acknowledged that he had seen other unidentified aerial objects during his careers as both a military and a commercial pilot—as if this fact somehow automatically meant that he was an unreliable observer. Terauchi was a “repeater” the narrator solemnly intoned, clearly implying that his testimony could not be trusted: Someone who reports one UFO is suspect; anyone reporting more than one sighting is quite clearly not credible.

In reality, however, large numbers of commercial pilots have reported seeing UFOs, often more than once, but usually only after they had retired, due to the widespread public stigma attached to those who describe seeing strange things in the sky. Indeed, as the pilots themselves have repeatedly said—during interviews appearing in various documentary films in recent years—their careers would probably have been over if they had been as candid as Terauchi.

This very valid concern was dramatically reinforced in 1953, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—the heads of the military services—promulgated regulation JANAP-146, which ordered military and commercial pilots who had sighted a UFO to immediately file, while still airborne, a CIRVIS (Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings) report. The purpose of such real-time reporting, including a required mention of the unidentified aerial object’s altitude and direction of flight, was to allow the nearest U.S. Air Force base to launch fighters to investigate the sighting.

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

Importantly, at least one effort was made by the pilots—those not in the military—to publicly protest the new censorship, as this December 22, 1958 article in the Newark Star-Ledger reports:

- click on image(s) to enlarge -

The key passages follow here:

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

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

Unfortunately, this rare breach in security, by dozens of highly respected professional pilots, was not widely reported. By 1958, most of the elite media had ceased to publish/broadcast stories about UFO sightings, in part due to CIA pressure. (See The Missing Times.)

In any case, according to the newspaper article’s author, journalist John Lester, over 400 commercial pilots later added their names to the 50 interviewed for this published protest. All of the pilots requested anonymity but were to be publicly identified once the Joint Chiefs’ policy of secrecy regarding pilot UFO sightings had been lifted; unfortunately it never was.

Now, if Smithsonian Channel had wanted to do an honest, historically accurate documentary on UFO sightings by commercial pilots, it could have highlighted the explosive revelations mentioned in the Newark Star-Ledger article, which provide insight into the actual, ongoing situation regarding (government-suppressed) airborne UFO sightings. After all, the published piece has been featured in a number of books by UFO researchers over time and, had the producers of UFOs Declassified instructed their research assistants to do a thorough job of investigating the history of pilot UFO sightings, in preparation for the episode, they could not have failed to find references to the article. But, of course, objectively-presented research is clearly not a high priority for this bunch.

Instead, the network spent as much of the episode as possible attempting to discredit most of the pilots in the cases it covered, as well as one retired Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) manager, John J. Callahan, who openly and adamantly supports the reality of a bona fide UFO-involvement in one of them—the 1986 Alaskan UFO incident. At that time, Callahan was the FAA’s chief of Accident Investigation and Prevention and was charged with overseeing an analysis of the case.

I earlier wrote that the show’s producers presented the Alaskan case in such a way as to downplay the nature of the intelligence community’s interest in the incident. True, the episode did mention Callahan’s public admission that he had been ordered to review the aerial encounter with members of President Ronald Reagan’s scientific advisory team, three FBI agents and three CIA officers, among others, at FAA headquarters in February 1987.

So far so good. But given that Callahan has repeatedly discussed this technically-still-classified event in various video interviews, easily accessible on YouTube, it would be difficult for UFOs Declassified not to at least mention it. That omission, were it to occur, would be instantly suspicious to many of the program’s more informed viewers. Nevertheless, a central, very significant portion of Callahan’s public testimony about the meeting was pointedly and very intentionally passed-over by the producers.

Specifically, the former FAA administrator has emphatically noted that one of the CIA officers had forcefully directed the classified briefing, afterward telling those present, “This event never happened, we were never here, we’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.”2 And why was such secrecy warranted? According to Callahan, the CIA officer said that if the government “ever came out and told the American public that [the aircraft crew] ran into a UFO out there, it would cause panic across the country.”3

But does UFOs Declassified mention this very important part of the story? Of course not. If it had, not only would CIA’s central role in the cover-up of the event be exposed—as opposed to the U.S. Air Force or the FBI or any other group—but the reason for the secrecy would also be highlighted—the agency’s deep concern about public panic should the truth emerge.

Instead, the show’s producers very deceptively mention that Callahan had asked the CIA officer, just moments before he swore the group to secrecy, what he thought the unidentified object was. “Why, a UFO!” the officer responded.

Then the producers pounced: “But did the CIA agent mean that the UFO was an extraterrestrial craft or [just] unidentified?” they asked. Well, if these willing/unwitting shills had honestly told the whole story, it would be quite clear to the audience that the CIA would not have been concerned about public panic if the huge, unknown craft were merely unidentified. But, on the other hand, Americans—at least some number of them—might indeed freak-out if the FAA or some other governmental group acknowledged the extraordinary, almost certainly extraterrestrial nature of the case.

This is the kind of very clever, premeditated deception the public can expect from the UFOs Declassified series. While perhaps a few thousand people will read this article, the Smithsonian Channel will garner millions of unsuspecting viewers for its highly-misleading fare. And the CIA, whether covertly involved with this bogus show or not, will be very happy about that.

References:

1. http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_flyingobjects108.htm

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

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

Visit Robert's Site ►

See Also:

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

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

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

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

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

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By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 11-28-15

      Smithsonian Channel’s series UFOs Declassified, which originally aired in January 2015, is currently being rebroadcast. While attempting to appear objective—considering both sides of the UFO controversy—the carefully-crafted overall impression is that “science and logic” have clearly demonstrated that no credible evidence for UFOs as an anomalous phenomenon exists.

However, persons having a detailed knowledge of the cases covered will quickly discern that the impression is disingenuous, shaped by the misstatement of facts, the omission of other relevant facts, faux logic, and a reliance on skeptical “experts” who have never studied UFOs but nevertheless attempt to present themselves as authority figures on the topic.

One episode concerns the events at the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, and nearby Rendlesham Forest, in December 1980. Despite verified reports of radioactivity at one UFO landing site, and authoritative testimony by the two U.S. Air Force air traffic controllers at Bentwaters who say they tracked a bona fide UFO, the program claims that there is “no hard evidence” to support the statements of USAF personnel who have long said that multiple UFOs were indeed present during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. (Radar data are empirical—hard evidence—as are radioactivity readings; the fact that reports detailing those data have been suppressed in no way alters this fact.)

The producers of the Smithsonian series contacted me in 2013 and asked me to participate in the Rendlesham Forest episode, presumably due to my having interviewed several former USAF personnel about their UFO sightings at the twin bases, primarily at the Bentwaters Weapons Storage Area (WSA)—a tactical or “battlefield” nuclear bomb depot—where a spherical UFO maneuvering at close range was observed by guards posted at the facility. I declined the producers’ offer, strongly suspecting a less-than-objective presentation.

Why? Smithsonian’s UFO-debunking track record was established long ago. For years, the only UFO book available at their National Air and Space Museum’s bookstore was Curtis Peebles’ Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth—a notoriously facile assessment of the phenomenon based on U.S. Air Force propaganda, amateur psychoanalyzing and naked bias—published in 1994 by Smithsonian Institution Press.

Given that a long-time assistant director of the museum was Frederick C. Durant III—the CIA consultant responsible for the agency’s 1953 Robertson Panel Report, which secretly recommended that UFOs be “debunked” and further suggested that the media might play a key role toward that end—perhaps the bookstore’s choice of UFO literature is not surprising. More recently, Smithsonian Books published UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. In short, anyone who hoped that the Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified television series might offer an objective assessment of the phenomenon was destined to be disappointed.

Shortly after telling the show’s producers to take a hike, I advised retired Col. Charles Halt—the highest-ranking officer to go on-the-record about UFO activity in Rendlesham Forest and the two bases—not to participate in the program as well. Fortunately, he took my advice. Last week, after I summarized the factually-inaccurate and highly-biased episode for Halt, he responded, “I'm sure you have figured it out—there's a link between the Smithsonian Channel and what I'll call the ‘group’.”1 Halt was referring to the U.S. intelligence community’s use of the mass media to spin or suppress UFO-related information, a practice thoroughly documented by the late journalist Terry Hansen in his book The Missing Times,which is available here (click on title or image of book).

In one article, Hansen wrote, “In my book...I reported on new evidence that CBS TV was among the CIA's ‘media assets’ that participated in this covert UFO-debunking program. In 1966, CBS broadcast UFOs: Friend, Foe or Fantasy, narrated by Walter Cronkite, as part of its ‘CBS Reports’ documentary series. Cronkite assured his viewers, using false and misleading information, that all UFO reports were due to mistaken perceptions. In short, there was nothing for the public to worry about, he said. A hand-written letter by Robertson Panel member Dr. Thornton Page, discovered in the Smithsonian's archives by Prof. Michael Swords, confirms the CIA's long-suspected role in the program. In the 1966 letter, Page related to a CIA associate that he ‘helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel's conclusions.’”2

Armchair Expert Analysis

One of the skeptics interviewed on Smithsonian’s Rendlesham Incident program, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, mocked the idea that alien visitors—if they were indeed aboard the reported UFOs—would be interested in human military activity or show any concern over our possession of nuclear weapons, a great many of which were stored at the RAF Bentwaters Weapons Storage Area at the time, according to a former high-level NATO nuclear security specialist who I interviewed in 1994. This has been confirmed by the Natural Resources Defense Council whose 2005 report, “Nuclear Weapons in Europe”, estimated that Bentwaters’ “hot row” bunkers held up to 100 tactical nuclear bombs.3

Shostak, whose dubious insights into the behavior of alien races is best illustrated by his unshakeable conviction that those civilizations would devote time and effort to communicating with other races across the vastness of the universe via radio waves—a belief for which, after a professional lifetime of searching, he has zero evidence—is currently the go-to-guy for production companies seeking a supposedly astute-but-skeptical authority on the UFO phenomenon.

Referring to Shostak’s participation in the Smithsonian show, Col. Halt wrote, “I served on a panel with Seth. He was the least scientific ‘expert’ I've met in years. I suspect he really knows there's no reason to search the heavens when whatever or whoever is already here! He's obviously part of the problem and realizes his SETI program is a waste of money and the truth will kill it.”4

Regardless, on the program Shostak said that advanced aliens’ alleged interest in humans’ primitive nuclear weapons would be akin to “my going back to the Roman Empire and looking at the area where they make their spears”, a clearly implausible notion in his eyes. If they are “hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us”, he said, “it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Oh yes, Seth, the Romans’ pointy-stick technology is clearly an appropriate analogy for our own potentially civilization-ending, planet-polluting nuclear weapons. Those spears’ impact on humanity’s long-term survival was exactly the same. And there is absolutely no reason why an advanced race of beings would be interested in monitoring a semi-savage, warlike species that suddenly came into possession of nuclear weapons at the same time it began developing space-faring technology. No reason at all.

Shostak’s perpetually clueless attitude toward the revelations contained in hundreds of declassified documents and scores of military witnesses’ statements—regarding a UFO-nuclear weapons link—is well-known, having been smugly expressed in both published articles and private correspondence. Those documents confirm numerous UFO incursions at nukes-related facilities—by aerial craft having capabilities orders-of-magnitude beyond human technology, according to the radar data—decade after decade.

More importantly, the military witnesses who have belatedly gone on-the-record—including former U.S. Air Force ICBM launch officers whom the U.S. government trusted to initiate World War III, if it ever came to that—have implicated UFOs in the shutting down or temporary activation of American nuclear missiles, repeatedly, during the Cold War era.

Furthermore, documents smuggled out of Russia substantiate the occurrence of such incidents at Soviet missile sites. Apparently, someone having advanced technology—an outside third party—is intent on blunting both American and Russian, uh, spear-tips.

Not that any of this is meaningful to Shostak. No, unless there was a scientist sitting in the missile launch capsule taking notes, along with the launch officers, when one of these dramatic incidents occurred, he thinks there is no reason to take seriously anything the witnesses have to say.

As the program’s narrator expressed it, all of these nuclear weapons-related UFO sightings—as reported by military eyewitnesses, including those at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge—can be explained as due to a collective “extraordinary imagination” and a psychological “overreaction” to prosaic phenomena resulting from the witnesses’ anxiety about possible enemy penetration of nuclear sites.

The reason the Air Force suppressed these incidents, the producers claim, stemmed from the tensions of the Cold War whereby the military brass frantically attempted to hide from the Soviets the fact that persons guarding our nukes would so easily freak-out over unexplained events that, according to the narrator, cooler heads would later discover to have ordinary explanations.

Yeah, that might be the reason, Smithsonian dudes, however, the orchestrated cover-up—as confirmed by Col. Halt—was far more likely the result of the Air Force’s now-documented knowledge of, and anxiety over, the great many other UFO incidents at bases involved with nuclear weapons over the previous three decades, during which the mysterious interlopers were often tracked on radar and sometimes chased unsuccessfully by jet fighters, after first hovering at low altitude over ICBM silos, strategic bomber alert pads, and Weapons Storage Areas. Indeed, declassified files and vetted eyewitnesses, presented in my book and at my website, identify no fewer than eleven UFO incursions at such sites during the previous six years alone.

In short, by the time of the Rendlesham Forest incidents, Air Force counterintelligence agents—primarily those assigned to the Office of Special Investigations—had already debriefed hundreds of missile launch and targeting officers, bomber crews, fighter pilots, radar operators and Security Policemen regarding their knowledge of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites. The fact that those persons’ testimony was taken deadly seriously is illustrated, in one instance, by the Air Force implementing a Security Option 3 alert for all nuclear weapons facilities in the fall of 1975, following the so-called “Northern Tier [Base UFO] Incursions.”

Maybe, just maybe, that’s the reason the Air Force chose not to publicize the events at the twin RAF bases and in the nearby forest. Far from being an embarrassing episode for the top commanders—who supposedly attempted to hide what the program’s producers portray as panicky behavior by USAF security forces—the incidents were actually the latest confirmation for those in-the-know at the Pentagon that someone, clearly not the Soviets, was intent on monitoring and even tampering with its nuclear weapons—an ominous situation that would definitely have to be kept from the American public and yes, the Russians, for as long as possible.

More Fallacious Claims

Tim Printy, another self-appointed UFO expert interviewed on the Smithsonian program, is a veteran himself, having been a career U.S. Navy submariner. Obviously confident in the wisdom of his insights, Printy helpfully noted that although the horrific effects of a nuclear blast are dramatic close-up, they would be barely noticeable “from space”. In other words, arriving aliens would surely monitor human activity from afar, perhaps from the Moon or in Earth-orbit, and probably wouldn’t even know that humans had detonated nukes—at least 2,053 times—over the past 70 years.

Printy’s irrelevant, faux-logical statement rests solely on his own steadfast rejection of the testimony of scores of veterans who insist that UFOs have hovered at low altitude over ICBM silos at Malmstrom, Minot, Ellsworth, F.E. Warren and other Air Force Bases—or those I’ve interviewed who say that several UFOs were detected on radar, maneuvering near the huge Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb mushroom cloud in the spring of 1954.

Indeed, the declassified deck log from the U.S.S. Curtiss AV-4, the Navy’s flagship during the Castle series of tests, states that on “7 April…an unidentified luminous object passed over ship from bow to stern, yellowish-orange in color, traveling at a high rate of speed and a low altitude”.5 One of those aboard, former U.S. Marine Joseph Stallings, told me that once the UFO was clear of the ship astern, it suddenly performed a series of zigzag maneuvers before racing away at extremely high speed.

So, visiting aliens would only observe our nuclear testing from space, Mr. Printy? Or perhaps you have another plausible explanation for what your fellow veterans fearlessly report? Rather than dismissing their testimony out-of-hand, as you’ve done for years, can you explain how either U.S. or Soviet technology could account for the many incidents they report? Or were they all just being “overly imaginative” when they sighted anomalous aerial craft penetrating restricted airspace over various nukes-related sites?

Regarding the Rendlesham Forest Incidents, Printy—taking his cue from statements made years ago by skeptics Phil Klass and James McGaha—claims that Col. Halt’s sighting of what appeared to be a winking, eyeball-shaped object moving through the trees, was actually the flashing beam of the nearby Orford Ness lighthouse. Printy says that because Halt’s repeated, tape-recorded exclamations, “There it is again”—when observing the periodic “winking” of the eyeball—occurred at five-second intervals, the same duration between the beam’s flashes, Halt had to have been looking at the lighthouse, not a UFO.

Of course, Printy (and the others) completely ignore the fact that Halt has publicly stated, for decades, that the UFO and lighthouse were both visible at the same time. He said, “The lighthouse was visible the whole time...it was readily apparent, and it was 30-to-40 degrees off to our right.”6 Printy probably isn’t even aware of this fact, given that his, ahem, expertise on the Rendlesham Forest incidents primarily involves repeating the skeptical claims of others while at the same time ignoring those Air Force personnel whose eyewitness testimony undercuts his own knee-jerk rejection of the UFO reality.

Printy also ignores—or is unaware of—Halt’s statements regarding the reflection of another brightly-glowing UFO he saw in the windows of a nearby house, after the Security Police team he was leading moved from the forest into an open field. While the windows were facing Halt and the SPs, they were not facing the coast and the lighthouse and could not, therefore, reflect the Orford Ness’ flashing beam.

If the producers of the Smithsonian program were aware of these facts, which completely refute Printy’s bogus claims, they sure as hell weren’t going to share them with the audience, given their obvious intention to debunk the case.

Piling On

A third naysayer interviewed on the show, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, delivered all of his predictably dismissive lines with his trademark smirk, undoubtedly meant to convey just how silly and pointless any discussion of UFOs is. He did, however, make one arguably valid observation: “We need physical evidence or we just don’t have a case.”

Yes, physical evidence, if it’s available, is indeed important—which is why I earlier mentioned the much-higher-than-background radiation readings taken in the three landing gear impressions found in the forest on December 26th, whose significance has been confirmed by scientists working for the British Ministry of Defence, according to retired MoD UFO specialist Nick Pope.

Although this information has been in the public domain for years, skeptics almost always ignore it or, on rare occasions, try to explain it away. This is a classic case of their moving the goalposts: fervently lamenting the lack of physical evidence in most UFO cases but then ignoring or rejecting that evidence, when it’s available, as inconclusive.

At the other end of the spectrum, one scientist who actually studied the UFO phenomenon for years, the late Dr. James E. McDonald, wrote:

From time to time in the history of science, situations have arisen in which a problem of ultimately enormous importance went begging for adequate attention simply because that problem appeared to involve phenomena so far outside the current bounds of scientific knowledge that it was not even regarded as a legitimate subject of serious scientific concern. That is precisely the situation in which the UFO problem now lies. One of the principal results of my own recent intensive study of the UFO enigma is this: I have become convinced that the scientific community, not only in this country but throughout the world, has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance.6

Courageous visionaries like McDonald are few and far between in the scientific community, while persons incapable of thinking outside of the box, like Seth Shostak, are much more numerous and far more vocal—haughtily dismissing a topic they know little or nothing about. Meanwhile, the very few scientists who have actually investigated UFOs—despite the distain and ire directed toward them by their dubious-but-uninformed colleagues—are almost always ignored by the media.

Consequently, persons such as astrophysicist Bernard Haisch or psychologist Don Donderi—who have analyzed UFO sightings and/or alien abduction reports, and have concluded that they point to anomalous phenomena worthy of study—would never be invited to participate in Smithsonian’s UFOs Declassified farce. However, for those who are interested in facts, not disinformation, their informed findings are available online or by clicking image of book at left, or here.

References:

1. Personal communication, Charles Halt to Robert Hastings, November 16, 2015.

2. http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_flyingobjects108.htm

3. https://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/euro/euro.pdf

4. Personal communication, Charles Halt to Robert Hastings, November 16, 2015.

5. Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Castle Series, 1954, DNA 6035F, United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, p. 341.

6. Col. Charles Halt to A.J.S. Rayl, recorded interview, May 13, 1997

7. McDonald, Dr. James E. “Prepared Statement before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics”, July 29, 1968.

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See Also:

New Bentwaters UFO Witness Goes on the Record: Former USAF Security Policeman Saw Orb Maneuver Over Parked Aircraft

Recent Russian Newspaper Article Discusses UFO Incidents at Soviet and American Nuclear Weapons Sites

Beams of Light
Excerpt From:
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Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites

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