Former CIA Insider’s Disclosures About UFOs: Why is This Link So Difficult to Post?

Well, I initially thought that it had happened again. Every time I had tried to post a link to ex-CIA executive Victor Marchetti’s 1979 article about the agency’s “very sensitive activities” relating to UFOs, my posts disappeared into some as-yet unexplained black hole in cyberspace. Most recently, when I tried to join the conversation at Roswell researcher Dr. Kevin Randle’s blog on the thread titled “Reports of the Roswell Crash before Jesse Marcel's Revelations”, Randle told me that he had not received my post. My comment follows here:

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 4-1-16

Regarding reports of crashed UFOs prior to the re-emergence of the Roswell affair, as recounted by Jesse Marcel in 1978, I offer comments by former CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who left the agency in 1969 and wrote the best-selling exposé,The CIA and The Cult of Intelligencewhich laid bare some of the highly-illegal activities in which the agency engaged during the first two decades of its existence. [He wrote,]

‘During my years in the CIA, UFOs were not a subject of common discussion. But neither were they treated in a disdainful or derisive manner, especially not by the agency’s scientists. Instead, the topic was rarely discussed at internal meetings. It seemed to fall into the category of ‘very sensitive activities’...There were, however, rumors at high levels of the CIA…..rumors of unexplained sightings by qualified observers, of strange signals being received by the National Security Agency...and even of little gray men whose ships had crashed, or had been shot down, being kept ‘on ice’ by the Air Force at FTD (Foreign Technology Division) at Wright-Patterson AF Base in Dayton, Ohio.’

Yes, this was published in 1979, in the May issue of the now-defunct Second Look magazine—well after Marcel’s disclosures—but, again, Marchetti had resigned from the CIA some ten years earlier, therefore, the rumors he had heard had to have been circulating prior to that time.

I will also note that Marchetti’s use of the word ‘rumors’ results from his own non-involvement in the ‘very sensitive activities’ CIA had in play relating to the UFO phenomenon. Consequently, whatever information Marchetti was privy to derived from informal and probably unauthorized conversations he had with others at CIA headquarters.

But if accounts of crashed UFOs and alien bodies in cold storage were indeed discussed at ‘high levels’ within the agency, one might reasonably infer that those stories were being taken seriously.

Again, Randle initially told me that he never received this post via the normal Google Blogger route and was only able to post my comment after I sent a back-up in the body of an email to him. Today, however, he told me that he had eventually located the post. So, in this instance, the difficulties I have had posting Marchetti’s revelations in the past do not seem to apply.

Nevertheless, the issues I described at the beginning of this article did in fact occur—which prompted my sending the back-up message to Randle in the first place. A year or so ago, when I tried to post Marchetti’s exposé at journalist Billy Cox’ UFO blog, I was unable to do so. Although my posting effort was seemingly uneventful, he never received it. After Billy indicated as much, I tried again, but the second attempt met the same fate. Cox subsequently tried to post my comments himself, to his own blog, after I sent them to him in an email. He later told me that he had encountered the same unexplained and unprecedented problem. He eventually ended up posting the full text of Marchetti’s article in a follow-up piece.

In any case, the key point here is that former high-level CIA insider Victor Marchetti’s important revelations about the agency’s “very sensitive activities” relating to UFOs—decades after it had supposedly lost interest in the phenomenon—deserve widespread public attention. Therefore, I am asking persons reading this piece to forward the Cox article containing Marchetti’s disclosures to as many UFO and social media websites as possible.

Visit Robert's Site ►

See Also:

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

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

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

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

UFO Phenomenon and Psychopathology : A Case Study

By Jean-Michel Abrassart

Jean-Michel Abrassart is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain. This paper is covering his lecture at the 58th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association (London, 2015).

Abstract

      The Psychosocial Model explains the UFO phenomenon with the following mechanisms: simple mistakes, elaborate mistakes, hallucinations, false memories and hoaxes. This article will specifically focus on the topic of hallucinations in relation to UFO sightings. If illusions are perceptive distorsions of an objective stimulus, hallucinations are by definition perceptions without any stimulus. Those cases are probably rare, but they do exist. Research in psychology has shown that the prevalence of psychopathologies is not bigger amongst UFO witness than the general population. Nevertheless, we also know today that people can have hallucinations, including visual hallucinations, without suffering from a psychopathology. We’ll present a case study after a brief review of the literature.

The Psychosocial Model

The UFO phenomena is like a haystack: proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis are looking for a needle in the haystack. Even if at some point it was proven that there is after all something truly anomalous inside the haystack (for example extraterrestrial spaceships or a so far unknown kind of thunder), that anomaly would explain a very small percentage of all cases. For that simple reason, this alleged anomaly would not really explain the haystack. In the Psychosocial Model, we are interested in the haystack, not so much by the alleged anomaly inside it.

The Psychosocial Model explains the UFO phenomena with the following mechanisms: simple mistakes, elaborate mistakes, hallucinations, false memories and hoaxes. Most UFO sightings are simple mistakes with mundane stimuli (for example the moon, helicopters, skytracers, sky lanterns and so on). They are the core of the phenomena. In those cases, witnesses can describe reliably what they saw: they only fail to identify what the mundane stimulus they saw was. Elaborate mistakes include subjective distortion of what was seen. The witness don’t describe what they saw reliably. Based on available cultural narratives, those distorsions can happen during the sighting itself (illusion), when the memory is remembered (confabulation) or during discussions with other people (suggestibility). If illusions are perceptive distortion of an objective stimulus, hallucinations are by definition perceptions without any stimulus. Those cases are probably rare, but they do exist. Research in psychology have shown that the prevalence of psychopathologies is not bigger amongst UFO witness than the general population (Spanos & co., 1993). Nevertheless, we also know today that people can have hallucinations, including visual hallucinations, without suffering from a psychopathology. False memories are memories of events that never occurred. It is an extreme form of memory distortion. Finally, hoaxes are false testimonies.

Hallucination and UFO phenomena

Some of the people who listened to Orson Welles’s radio show “The War of the Worlds” in 1938 told psychologists they had strange sensations during the event: they could smell martian gas or see the Heat-Rays. Those cases were documented at the time by Cantril and his team (Cantril & co., 1940). But can the cultural influence really go as far as generate visual hallucinations? It seems that we can answer “yes” to this question. Nevertheless, it is a difficult subject to address since it’s a classical attack against skeptically-minded UFO researchers: “they think the witnesses are crazy”. It is a straw-man argument who is based on dated and naïve conceptions of hallucinations and psychopathology. It is also more of an ethical argument than a scientific one: the argument is, in substance, that the researcher is not respecting the witness by suggesting that they could have had a hallucination, independent of the validity of the explanatory hypothesis. In other words, it is attacking the personality of the researcher and not the real argument.

That being said, it is true that psychologist thought in the past that hallucinations were mostly symptoms of psychoses. The two were almost synonymous: if you had hallucinations, you were psychotic; and the other way around. But recently research have shown that hallucinations are much more common in the general population that we thought before (Bentall, 2013). Subjects who don’t suffer from a psychopathology can have hallucinations. For example, some people have auditory hallucinations but don’t feel the need to seek psychiatric help. Anthropologists also showed that in some cultures hallucinations belongs to the realm of normality (for example in the context of shamanic practices) and not to psychopathology. It is in the Western culture that hallucinations are perceived as a symptom of psychiatric trouble that obviously needs treatment. Another problem is that some psychopathologies, especially schizotypy (Evrard, 2014, p. 203-219), include in their diagnostic criteria elements of paranormal beliefs and exceptional experiences. That overlap makes it more likely to be diagnosed as someone suffering from a psychopathology if someone does believe in the existence of genuine paranormal processes or if someone talks about his or her own exceptional experiences.

There must be UFO cases that are explained by hallucinations. Even if those are rare, it would be the contrary that would be surprising. Unfortunately, we don’t have much information about this topic in the ufological literature. We are certainly here in front of a publication bias: if an ufologist who is a proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis investigate a case that happens to be a hallucination, he may not publish it. Or, and even worse, he will publish it after having remove from his report all the problematic details. The first instance is a filedrawer effect, the second one is more akin to pious fraud. After all, why talk about things that don’t support the idea of extraterrestrial visitations of our planet? Based on our participant observation of the Ufological community, we do know that some cases included witnesses who were probably suffering from a psychopathology, even sometimes under medication for that very reason, but those details were nevertheless omitted from the final publication...

From a strict methodological point of view, one can never completely exclude the hallucination when there is only a single witness. For this reason, competent investigators will give a lot more importance to group sightings, especially when the different witnesses don’t know each other and didn’t talk to each other during the observation. For example, Rossoni & co. (2007, p. 397-401) proposed the hallucination explanation for the Amaranth case, a famous French case that has been presented as robust over the year because of physical elements attached to it. In that sighting, an ovoid object stayed in front of the only witness during (more or less) twenty minutes, floating at one meter above the ground. The witness said that he came very close to it in order to examine it. It is indeed extremely difficult to explain this observation by a mistake, simple or elaborate. What make this case special is that the official French UFO organisation (belonging to the “Centre national d'études spatiales”, or CNES, the French’s equivalent of NASA) found two physical effects on the vegetation: an amaranth plant was dried (hence the name of the case in the litterature) and some grass was straighten up. But Rossoni & co. showed that there were some theoretical and methodological problems with the examination of those physical effects. If those physical effect can indeed be excluded from the discussion, then the hallucination hypothesis becomes extremely plausible for this case.

Collective hallucinations

The concept of collective hallucination is often mentioned in the context of the UFO phenomena, but much more today by journalists than scientists. As we’ll see, this concept is problematic and so for several reasons. We have to distinguish two different usages in the literature: on one side collective hallucinations are sometimes used to talk about the entire UFO phenomena (or at least UFO waves), on the other side they are used only for talking about a group of witnesses in the same sighting. The French psychiatrist George Heuyer (1954) suggested for example that the UFO phenomena was a collective psychosis. We tend to avoid using this vocabulary, as well as the expression “mass hysteria”. The reason is that it presents as pathological a phenomena that is only the by-product of the workings of our societies (at a sociological level) and of our psyche (at a psychological level). On top of that, it gives readers the impression that all UFO sightings are explained by hallucinations: as we have stated before, at this point research on the UFO phenomena has completely refuted this hypothesis. For those reasons, we prefer to talk about a “cultural illusion”, in a similar usage of the concept of illusion used by Freud (1927) to describe religions. Nevertheless, Heuyer’s point is not so far from Carl Gustav Jung’s view that the UFO phenomena is a fruit of the zeitgeist (Jung, 1958). He would indeed argue that the UFO phenomena is born from the spirit of the time of the Cold War, especially the fear of the nuclear destruction of the World. About UFO waves, we think it is preferable to talk about “mass illusions”, like in the case of “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. The sociological dynamic is indeed different during the normal period of the UFO phenomena and during waves. If “mass illusions” describes accurately what happens during waves (Klass, 1986, p. 304), it seems to the contrary inadequate to use to describe the normal phases.

Let’s address now the question of hallucinations shared during one sighting by a group of witnesses. Interactions between the witnesses during the course of a sighting can change the nature of what is seen by suggestions. But can it generate a visual hallucination? We think that proofs in favor of this mechanisms are lacking. We are thus skeptical of the fact that it is possible for a group of subjects to share a hallucination of the same thing at the same moment. There is the shared psychotic disorder (DSM-IV: 297.3), also known as “folie à deux”, in which two related persons can share the same delusion. But the “folie à deux” implies that they should be very close; for example of the same family. And even then, does that really mean that they can share a common visual hallucination? To share a delusion and to share a hallucination is not the same thing. One way to think about this question is to examine marian apparitions, which are often group visions. At Medjugorje, a group of six children (now adults because they have grown up since then) saw the Virgin Mary regularly since June 24th 1981 (Claverie, 2003). After reading the literature, it seems to us that the most economic explanatory hypothesis is that the visionaries lie when they claim to see the Virgin Mary. It is maybe not the most politically correct explanation, but we think that the proofs that they are actually seeing something are inconclusive. On the other hand, if it was possible to prove beyond doubt that they really experience a hallucination all together, aka seeing the same thing at the same moment, we would have good reasons to thing that group hallucinations can occur. We are far from it. During the « miracle of the sun » at Fatima, October 13th 1917, tens of thousands of witnesses shared a strange vision. According to Meessen (2005) and Hallet (2011), those testimonies can be explained by the fact that people looked directly at the sun, without any protection. On top of that, it seems to us, we could be in front of a suggestion effect, because one of the visionaries screamed at the crowd to look toward the sun. People were expecting a miracle. And at the end of the day, not everybody saw the miracle. Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable numbers of the people who saw something by contrast to those who didn’t see anything. We can only speculate that people who saw something were those who were more prone to suggestibility or were more vulnerable when it comes to watching the sun directly without any protection. Anyhow, the “miracle of the sun” seems also to be explainable without making the hypothesis of a common hallucination shared by the crowd. Those two examples show that there are good reasons to be skeptical of group hallucinations. Our own position is that we would not use this concept to explain a UFO case.

Case study: André

With André (this is not the real name of the person: we have changed it in order to preserve his anonymity.), we get to have a look at the extreme of the continuum of witnesses from a psychological perspective. It is the classical methodology in clinical psychology: to try to understand normality by looking at the pathological. That being said, we want to stress that the border between pathology and normality is not something clear and cut. Even though André is beyond the limits of normality, he’s not that far away. We’ll see for example that he expresses doubts concerning the objectivity of his exceptional experiences. Another reason why we wanted to present this case study is that he talks not only about UFO sightings but also about some elements similar to the abduction phenomena. Abductions are a phenomena much more typical of American culture then the European one. There are some abductees in our country, Belgium, but they are quite rare.

Sociologist Ron Westrum (1982, 2011) thinks that there really are lots of abductions everywhere in the world, including in Europe, but that those are hidden events. He claims that they are under reported because the scientific community is not interested in this phenomena. According to him, it is a kind of event that is mostly ignored by the culture. This way of thinking is based on the irreductionnist hypothesis that abductions are objective events. In other words the idea that people are literally taken by aliens. Ron Westrum told us during an informal discussion at the workshop “Collecte et l’Analyse des Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés (CAIPAN)” (Paris, France, 2014) that he was convinced that abductions are for real and cannot be explained by sociopsychological processes. It is difficult for us to agree with him on this point. In the theoretical framework of the Psychosocial Model, the prediction would be that if specialists were looking actively for more abduction reports, the risk would be that they would create more of them by suggestions.

André is typically the kind of witness that doesn’t interest the ufological community. He is at the extreme of the stereotype of the “ideal witness” that ufologists are looking for. He is unemployed and his psychopathology cannot be easily dismissed. Ufologists are primarily interested in witnesses who are “honest and of good faith” (this is the typical expression used in ufological publications), especially individuals which have a social status that lends credibility to their testimonies. Amongst the profession that ufologists really trust, we can find astronauts, airplane pilots, military personnel or cops. The truth is: there are no professions that trains someone to be able to recognize every possible mundane objects someone can possibly see in the sky. Amateur astronomers are the ones who do get close to that profile because they look at the night sky a lot, but even experts can make mistakes. Contrary to what the public often thinks, professional astronomers (by opposition to amateur astronomers) spend much more time looking at their computers than at the night sky. On top of that, the real degree of expertise inside the same profession is obviously variable. At best, one can be warranted to think that airplane pilots have good eyesight or that cops didn’t drink if they had their sightings while working. That being said, the argument the ufologists make is not only in terms of the witness’s objective skills, but also social prestige. It will sometimes take the form of an argument from authority: a General (to take a military personnel example) who would see a UFO would guarantee the objectivity of his sighting by the simple fact of his military rank. On the contrary, ufological books don’t have a lot of witnesses who are homeless people, prostitutes or prisoners. The fact that André is at the opposite of the spectrum of the ufologist’s “ideal witness” is exactly the reason why his testimony interested us.

We found André (28 years old) on an internet forum about ufology and the paranormal. The ufological community became mostly virtual at the end of the 90s. In France for example, the number of amateur research and investigation groups has considerably diminished the last few decades. We find ufologists today mostly on discussion lists, forums, Facebook groups, and so on. André went on this forum to give several testimonies of UFO sighting. Witnesses do this sometimes. Their objectives can vary. For some, the goal will be to search an explanation (mundane or not) for their sightings. They will go testify on a forum in order to find people that they think are “experts” in the UFO field. For others, it will be more about validating the fact that they indeed saw an extraterrestrial spaceship. They are already convinced before asking the question and have as a goal to make ufology “progress” by telling their stories. Others just want to share the emotions they had during their exceptional experiences, without being really interested by the explanation of what they lived.

André frequently talked about a lot of sightings. He went as far as saying that he would see UFOs every single day! His testimony contained, on top of it, unusual elements: he said that sometimes his mind was controlled by aliens. At this point we decided to meet him for an interview in a town in the North of France. He explained to me during our discussion (translated from French):

“(…) Now it’s been a year that I’m on psychiatric treatment and since then I stopped seeing things (things like that and UFO sightings) and having dreams about aliens. So they really got me good with those drugs. It happened during a period of two years: during that time I saw UFOs and I saw aliens in my dreams. It lasted for two years. And it was the last two years. It’s a limit in time if you want.”

There is a complex relationship between psychopathology and exceptional experiences, including UFO sightings, contactees and abductees. It would be tempting in a reductionist theoretical framework to see in a style of personality (psychopathological or not) the cause of exceptional experiences. But with mostly correlative studies it is not possible to determine a causality between a style of personality and exceptional experiences. Kerns, Karcher, Raghavan & Berenbaum (2013) argues that the relationship between psychopathology and exceptional experiences can go as followed: they could be an overlap, exceptional experiences could contribute to psychopathology, the exceptional experiences could contribute to exceptional experiences and, at last, a common variable could contribute to both of them. A study by Spanos & co. (1993) concluded that UFO witnesses don’t suffer from psychopathology more than the general population. This result is not at all surprising. As we have stated above, most UFO sightings are simple mistakes with mundane stimuli. They are the core of the phenomena. There is no good reason at this point to think that only people suffering from a psychopathology would make a (simple or elaborate) mistake. Perceptual mistakes are the by-product of the human psyche. On top of that, as we have discussed before, suffering from a psychopathology and having hallucination is not synonymous.

Let’s briefly talk about some examples in order to illustrate hallucinations in the context of the UFO phenomena. The first observations of Chupacabra are relatively recent. They date back to the 90s. This cryptid has been included by some ufologists into UFOlore. For example, Belgian physicist and ufologist Auguste Meessen (2000) writes (our translation from French):

“Rumor of goat-suckers, spreading all over Latin America, have been refuted by the authorities who assert that goats have been killed by wolves, dogs or coyotes. Why do authorities feel the need to refute this facts for years, instead of looking at them closely? The answer is obvious: if those authorities knew that this “unidentified animal” was from extraterrestrial origin, they would have to change their attitude toward the UFO phenomena as a whole; this link has been spontaneously made by the people and common sense observers. All of this presents again the characteristic of a sociopsychological experiment done by the aliens. What is necessary to make the authority do something about it?”.

The large majority of Chupacabra corpses that have been found, until now, are from canidae (most often coyotes) suffering from scabies. They lose all their fur because of this disease. If it is easy to recognize a coyote with its fur. The fact that the animal is without it makes identification difficult for someone who is not a specialist. According to the investigation done by psychologist Benjamin Radford (2011), Chupacabra’s original sighting is based on the movie “Species” (directed by Roger Donaldson); that came out in 1995 a little bit before the sighting. The witness, Madelyne Tolentino, stated that she saw the film ant that her description of the cryptid matches the look of the monster in the movie. This case is similar to the Loch Ness monster sighting by Spicer in 1933, which is largely based on the original “King Kong” movie (Loxton & Prothero, 2013, p. 130-134). In those two cases, it seems well established that the witness had a visual hallucination based on a movie they saw recently.

André explains to us his main sighting in the following way (our translation from French):

“The most… How do you call it? The closest to me. (…) At Groningen. In the North of Holland. There, I saw the closest UFOs I have ever seen. It was those. They came at (I’m not sure) maybe 20 meters from our car. They were two of them and they were emitting red and blue lights. It was weird. There was a dull sound. I was with my girlfriend, so I have another witness with me for this sighting. We saw them together.”

André uses his girlfriend to legitimate the objectivity his testimony and thus the reality of what he saw that day. We didn’t have a chance to meet her in order to have her version of the event. Talking about this, André adds:

“(…) but she is also sure of what it as, to have seen UFOs. But for her, she saw them far away. She saw them more or less at 200 meters, but me I saw them, I saw them at around 20 meters. So I don’t know if she saw, she didn’t see the same as me, or if she found that… I don’t know. We didn’t have the same distance with the thing.”

It is extremely difficult to estimate the distance of an object in the sky, especially if the object is not identified by the witness. It’s possible that André and his girlfriend just estimated the distance with the UFO widely differently. That being said, it is not rare in sightings with several witness to have the main witness testify a vision with a high degree of strangeness and the others simply confirm what the first one says. That means that they would report a sighting a lot less extraordinary if they were questioned separately. We can think about this group dynamic like a minimalist form of “folie à deux” (or shared psychotic disorder) in which the main witness (the one who as “soucoupised” his sighting) impose his interpretation of the vision to the other people who are there. It seems to us that what André is talking about could be explained by this mechanism. He saw something a lot closer than his girlfriend and she only confirmed that she saw something but from a greater distance.

On top of his UFO sightings, André explains that he had some vivid dreams about Grey aliens. He considers himself a contactee and tells us that he received some telepathic communications from the extraterrestrials:

“(…) I don’t think I was abducted, but I do think I was in contact with aliens. Not abducted or anything. They didn’t make any experiments on me or anything. But I felt them in my dreams. And I saw them very well. I had the dream that was strongly inprinted in my mind. I would wake up and I would remember very clearly of everything. I had sometimes the sensation of being paralyzed when I woke up, you see, and sometimes I was paralyzed like that and I had the sensation like someone was pushing on my belly. And at that moment I saw the head of a Grey alien and – pouf – I woke up! Yeah, it was violent. But maybe it’s my brain who fabricated all that, or I don’t know what.”

He states a little bit later about his experience:

“Not more than thirty seconds. It was short. It was scary. In my case I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed, you see. I don’t know how to describe it. It was… You know : it makes you anxious. You’re there, you can’t move. You have anxiety, anxiety, anxiety building until you’re not paralyzed anymore. »

What André’s talking about here is a typical sleep paralysis episode. Sleep paralysis plays an important role in the abduction phenomena (Clancy, 2007). André isn’t sure about how to explain his experience. Instead of believing that he was physically abducted inside an alien spaceship, he seem to believe that extraterrestrials are somehow controlling him by telepathy. He doesn’t believe that his sleep paralysis is a residual memory of him being aboard a spaceship, but that Grey aliens took control of his dream, and then his body (making his body impossible to move) when he woke up.

It seems thus that Andé is more a contactee than an abductee. Indeed, as we saw, he doesn’t claim to have been inside the alien spaceship and doesn’t talk about surgery operations performed on him by Grey aliens. His contact is, according to him, telepathic in nature. The representation of contactees we generally have is more like George Adamski (Hallet, 2010) and Claude (aka Raël) Vorilhon. Those are individuals who tells about exceptional experiences in order to create a new religious movement around themselves. Nevertheless, psychiatrist Daniel Mavrakis (2010, p. 82-83) examined in his PhD on the UFO phenomena nine subjects who would claim to be in contact with extraterrestrials. One was claiming to be in telepathic communication with visitors from another world, when another believed he was an alien-human hybrid after his mother was made pregnant by them. He writes about them (my translation from French):

“The study of nine contactees that we could examine lead us to conclude that most of them were suffering in fact from obvious psychiatric disorders, often paranoid or paraphrenic delirium. With the exception of two patients who were hospitalized in psychiatric hospital, all the others didn’t have any known psychiatric record. (…) It is possible that they had found an equilibrium in there delirious beliefs.”

At the end of the day, it seems that there is two very different kinds of contactees: those who are trying to create a new religious movement around themselves and those who are suffering from a psychopathology. Their profiles are obviously very different from each other and André belongs to the second category.

Conclusion

Even if rare, there must be UFO sightings that are explained by hallucination. It’s the contrary which would be really surprising. However, we do lack information about those cases in the ufological literature. Based on our participant observation of the ufological community we speculate that this can be explained by a file-drawer effect (UFO sightings explainable by hallucinations don’t get published in the ufological literature) or pious fraud (UFO sightings explainable by hallucinations are published with all the details pointing to this explanation removed from the written case study). We think that more works should be done on the topic of UFO sightings explained by hallucinations. After a discussion about the role of hallucinations in the UFO phenomena, we presented the case of André, a witness who suffers from a psychiatric disorder. He feels like he is a contactee, having telepathic communication with Grey aliens. But his profile is very different from the one of famous contactees like Adamski or Raël. We thus make the hypothesis, based also on the work done previously by Mavrakis (2010) on this topic, that there is actually two different kind of contactees: those who talk about an exceptional experience in order to create a new religious movement around themselves and those who suffer from a psychopathological disorder.

References

Bentall, R. P. (2013). Hallucinatory Experiences. In Cardena, E., Lynn, S. J., Krippner, S. (Eds.). Varieties of anomalous experience – Examining the scientific evidence (Second Edition). Washington, USA: A.P.A., 109-144.
Cantril, H., Gaudet, H. & Herzog, H. (1940). The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press.
Clancy, S. (2007). Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. Cambridge, États-Unis: Harvard University Press. Book Tree.
Claverie, E. (2003). Les guerres de la vierge: Une anthropologie des apparitions. Paris, France: Gallimard.
Evrard, R. (2014). Folie et paranormal: Vers une clinique des expériences exceptionnelles. Rennes, France: Presse Universitaire de Rennes.
Freud, S. (1927). The Future of an Illusion. Hogarth Press, London: Great-Britain.
Hallet, M. (2010). Le cas Adamski. Paris, France : L'Œil du Sphinx.
Hallet, M. (2011). Les apparitions de la Vierge et la critique historique (édition entièrement refondue). Liège, Belgique : Chez l’auteur.
Heuyer, G. (1954). Note sur les psychoses collectives. Bulletin de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine, 138(29-30), 487-490.
Jung, C. G. [1958] (1979). Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press.
Kerns, J. G., Karcher, N., Raghavan, C. & Berenbaum, H. (2013). Anomalous Experiences, Peculiarity and Psychopathology. In Cardena, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). Varieties of Anomalous Experience – Examining the Scientific Evidence (Second Edition). Washington, USA: A.P.A.
Klass, P. J. (1986). UFOs: The Public Deceived. New York, USA: Prometheus Books. Loxton, D. & Prothero, D. R. (2013). Abominable science! Origins of the yeti, Nessie, and other Famous Cryptids. New York, États-Unis : Columbia University Press.
Mavrakis, D. (2010). Les OVNI : Aspects psychiatriques, médico-psychologiques, sociologiques. Sarrebruck, Allemagne: Éditions Universitaires Européennes. Meessen, A. (2000). Où en sommes-nous en ufologie? Inforespace, 101, 4-56.
Meessen, A. (2005). Apparitions and Miracles of the Sun. International Forum in Porto
“Science, Religion and Conscience” October 23-25, 2003 Actas do Forum International, Centro Transdisciplinar de Estudos da Consciência, 2005 Consciências, 2. Fernandes, J. & Santos, N. L. (Eds.), p. 199-222.
Radford, B. (2011). Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore. Albuquerque, USA : University of New Mexico Press.
Rossoni, D., Maillot, É. & Déguillaume, É. (2007). Les OVNI du CNES : 30 ans d'études officielles 1977-2007. Sophia Antipolis, France: Book-e-book.
Spanos, N.P., Cross, P. A., Dickson, K., Dubreuil, S. C. (1993). Close encounters: An examination of UFO experiences. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102(4), 624-632. Westrum, R. (1982, 2011). Social Intelligence about Hidden Events. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 3(3), 381-400.
Westrum, R. (2011). Hidden Events and Close Minds: The Case of Battered Children. Edgescience, 8, 10-18.

* Special Thanks To Jean-Michel Abrassart

See Also:

Truth & Deception: James 'The Amazing' Randi | VIDEO

"Appendix A: The Myth of MJ-12" An Annotated Commentary By Barry Greenwood

The Future of Ufology

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

UFO Sightings: Where is the Proof?

Tweet

By Cheryl Costa
www.syracusenewtimes.com
9-11-15

     [...] Before we dismiss these eye witness reports as pure hooey, we need to consider that in courts of law all over our beloved New York State, eye witness testimonies are highly regarded.

North America has about 400 UFO sightings a month, or approximately 4800 a year. On an average month, New York State residents report about 40 UFO sightings, or about 500 per year.

Experts and experienced investigators will say that only a tiny percentage of sighting reports are hoaxes or delusional people. Some sightings turn out to be natural phenomena and others are simple misidentification of other things. On the other hand there is the rather large body of sightings that just can’t be explained. Ultra conservative numbers say it’s about 3 percent. The experts I’ve spoken with said the number of unexplained sightings sits in the 10 – 20 percent range.

What should also be pointed out is that many experts in the field of UFO investigation say many reports of unusual aerial phenomena are made by trained observers, pilots and law enforcement officers. [...]

Continue Reading ►

See Also:

Skeptic Group Offers $100,000 for Proof of Paranormal

Proof of Aliens or Ancient Civilization?

Proof of Extraterrestrial Life Found in Meteorite, Claim Scientists! | VIDEO

'Ten Million Dollars' Offered for Proof of Bigfoot | VIDEO

Proof of UFOs?

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Scientific Ufology - the Way To Go

Tweet

By Keith Basterfield ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com 2-27-15

     Eddie Bullard

In his 2010 book, "The Myth and Mystery of UFOs," US researcher Eddie Bullard listed his thoughts on categories of people who study UAP. Among his categories were "skeptics," "activists," and "scientific ufologists."

What did Bullard write about "scientific ufologists?" In part he wrote:

"For this group UFOs are a phenomenon accessible to rational inquiry. These people pursue in-depth case investigations, critical examination of the evidence, comparison of collected data and rigorous research projects to determine if any UFO reports describe an unknown phenomenon...Exemplified by Hynek and McDonald, professed by the leading UFO organisations, this scientific approach represents ufology in the purist sense of a scientific or scholarly discipline." (p.15.)

My own approach

In looking at my own approach to the subject, I clearly fit into being a "scientific ufologist." I have conducted in-depth case investigations, and equally as important in my view, I have extensively published my research findings. Readers of my blog will be aware of my numerous "cold case" reviews (for a listing and links to these, click here.) I also have published in-depth reports on current cases I have been involved in, e.g. the 19 March 2014 Perth, Western Australia aircraft near-miss with an "unknown object" (click here to read the NARCAP technical report.) or the 29 May 2014 very unusual incident on the south coast of New South Wales (click here.)

Each of my "cold case" reviews involved a critical re-examination of the evidence, almost always drawn from tracking down and closely looking at original documentation, some of which no-one else had seen before.

"Hot air"

The opposite of my scientific approach to the subject, is to be seen in the work of some "investigators" who also claim to be researching the subject using a "scientific" approach. Here, in my opinion, there is much "hot air," and little or no substance.

Recently, I have tried to locate any written, detailed case reports published by three individuals who claim to be following a "scientific" approach. Two are Australian and one is American. I failed to find a single published, detailed case report of theirs on the Internet, or in UAP Magazines/Newsletters/Journals. This is suggestive that, despite their claim to follow a "scientific" approach, they fail to live up to this approach.

My process

Attracting raw reports via electronic Internet forms on websites, is simply the first step in the process. It is too easy these days for anyone to submit an electronic report to UAP groups. A look at the types of reports being made to various electronic databases, reveals the questionable nature of some of them, e.g. how many are straight out hoaxes?

Once reported to an electronic system, or indeed via telephone, the old fashioned letter, or any other means, the next stage in the process should be to conduct an investigation by contacting the witness. Some raw reports are made anonymously and therefore no follow up is possible. In my opinion, an un-investigated anonymous report has little value.

When contact details are given, it is then necessary to speak to the witness in person. Reporting by someone in Australia, to an overseas database may mean no local interview is performed by anyone.
This face to face interview is critical. Besides taking note of the details of the reported occurrence, an experienced investigator will also gain a "feel" for the genuineness of the reporter and hence the report. My preference is to conduct this face to face interview at the site of the incident, wherever possible.

Analysis

Once details of the event are recorded, the next step is to critically examine of these details. A check for aircraft movements; planets; stars; satellites needs to be made. The weather at the time should be investigated. For a full list of investigative tools, click here. By this analysis, I am looking to see if a mundane explanation could explain the observation. My experience, and that of others, is that 95% of incoming raw reports have conventional explanations.

Publication

As I mentioned above, I rate publishing the details of investigations and research, equally as important as carrying out a detailed investigation. This allows for a scientific "peer review" of both your data and your conclusions, a very important part of the scientific process.

Sometimes, this also attracts the attention of members of the mass media. An example of this are remarks I made at the 2014 Melbourne, VUFOA conference, about the need for an Australian quick response team. The following morning, newspaper and radio items appeared about my remarks. I did not seek this publicity, it simply followed me presenting a conference paper. As a result I was asked to go on a number of radio shows to be interviewed about my thoughts. I carefully selected those on which to appear, and turned other requests down.

Similarly, the mass media picked up on aspects of the research conducted by myself about the 19 March 2014 Perth near-miss, between an aircraft and an unknown object. I did not seek out this publicity, it simply followed publication of my research. I turned down a number of requests to be interviewed about the case. I find it odd, therefore, that an Australian researcher recently has suggested that I am "seeking publicity." This is not so. I reject something like 9 out of 10 mass media requests for interviews, including one recent approach from Channel 9 television to discuss pilot observations.

My process

So, my process is, collect incoming raw reports; conduct a personal interview (on site if possible); document the evidence presented by the witness; followed by an analysis; then preparing a detailed, written case report, and finally publishing it for peer review. This process produces a small, but screened, number of examples of the "core" UAP each year.

The above is how I believe that a scientific investigation of UAP should be conducted. Looking around, both overseas and here in Australia, I see far too many people who state they are following a "scientific" approach, who fall short of the standards I expect of my own research. I realise that this is not something that some people will like to hear, but I tell it as I see it.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

“Symposium on Official & Scientific Investigations of UAP (UFOs)"

"American Scientific Ufology is Dead!"

Science and UFOs: Part 1—The Condon Committee Con Job

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

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

By Robert Hastings www.ufohastings.com 2-28-15

     First, this article has absolutely nothing to do with the bogus claims currently being made by the promoters of the so-called Roswell Slides, which allegedly show the body of a dead alien. (I predict that this latest, regrettable chapter in ufological history will implode in the near future.)

No, my title refers to a far more credible revelation. Although Victor Marchetti, the former Special Assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms, first published intriguing information relating to high-level discussion of recovered UFOs and dead aliens in 1979, in an article published in Second Look magazine, most people are completely unaware of it.

Indeed, an online search for the piece, titled “How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon”, yields very few results. While the Internet provides access to vast numbers of UFO-related documents, books, articles and blogs, one of the most important pieces ever written on the topic, authored by a knowledgeable government insider, has been almost completely overlooked.

Interestingly, when I attempted to post Marchetti’s informed disclosures at a popular blog operated by journalist Billy Cox, my comments and link to the article disappeared into the cybervoid. Repeated attempts met the same fate and, when I subsequently asked Cox to post them for me, he encountered the same problem.

Cox later told me, “I managed to get your post on my blog just now, but it took some doing. When I tried to do it normally, by putting your name and email address in the cue fields, it simply wouldn’t post; I kept getting a message saying it had already been posted, which obviously it had not. And of course when I try to reply to your messages lately, it bounces back as undeliverable. I wound up having to publish it under my name, then going in behind the post and replacing my name/address with yours. Very strange, Robert.”

I told Cox one might argue that efforts had been undertaken, by an unknown party, to block Marchetti’s revelations from being made more accessible online. Lest this charge seem too paranoid, I added that I had often had to endure such anomalies when attempting to communicate with my ex-military sources regarding their involvement in UFO incidents at nuclear weapons sites.

Furthermore, my attempts over the years to post those individuals’ disclosures at various blogs had frequently encountered the same sort of disconnects. Nevertheless, some of those dramatic revelations—involving UFOs shutting down American nuclear missiles—were livestreamed by CNN during my 2010 press conference in Washington D.C.:

In any case, Marchetti’s lengthy article contains important information about the CIA’s secret involvement, as well as its self-proclaimed non-involvement, with the UFO phenomenon. He writes, “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.”

To give you a sense of the author’s importance, the agency once took Marchetti all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to attempt to stop the publication of his tome, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which subsequently became a best-seller in 1974. The disenchanted agency man had resigned from the CIA in 1969; his book was an unprecedented, historic exposé of his former employer’s numerous illegal activities—including spying on Americans, something forbidden by its charter—many of which were later investigated by Congress.

In short, Marchetti was especially dangerous to CIA simply because he knew so much about its operations, legal or not, and was willing to divulge them to the world as a hoped-for partial antidote.

While this same informed-observer status and careful, thoughtful analysis underpins Marchetti’s revelations about the agency’s relationship to UFOs, it must be remembered that CIA’s approach to all subjects is the use of compartmentalization, whereby any given individual’s knowledge is usually limited to one small part of a project or operation, to keep an overall understanding of the situation restricted to a very few high-level managers. The same was/is true with UFOs and, therefore, Marchetti can only report on what he personally knew, given that he was not involved with the agency’s apparent UFO projects/operations and had no need-to-know about them.

Nevertheless, his published comments are noteworthy. He writes:

During my years in the CIA, UFOs were not a subject of common discussion. But neither were they treated in a disdainful or derisive manner, especially not by the agency’s scientists. Instead, the topic was rarely discussed at internal meetings. It seemed to fall into the category of ‘very sensitive activities’...People simply did not talk about the UFO phenomenon.

There were, however, rumors at high levels of the CIA—rumors of...little gray men whose ships had crashed, or had been shot down, being kept ‘on ice’ by the Air Force at FTD (the Foreign Technology Division) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.¹

Please note that Marchetti used the word “rumors”. Again, this is the result of his own non-involvement in whatever “very sensitive activities” CIA had going on relating to the UFO phenomenon. Consequently, whatever information Marchetti was privy to resulted from informal and undoubtedly unauthorized chitchat he had encountered in the corridors of CIA headquarters.

But if stories of crashed UFOs and the bodies of the crews being kept in cold storage were being discussed at “high levels” within the agency, one can infer that those rumors were taken seriously. One might also speculate that information about all of this had been secured by CIA agents, probably by spying on the U.S. Air Force.

One important aspect of Marchetti’s revelation is the timing of the discussion at CIA. Marchetti resigned in 1969, nearly a decade prior to the seminal disclosures by retired U.S. Army counterintelligence officer Jesse Marcel who, during a television interview in 1978, divulged that he had held in his hands wreckage from a craft “not of this Earth” that had crashed northwest of Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947.

Confirmation of this event originates with another credible person, USAF Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, who has stated for the record that one or more plane-loads of that wreckage did indeed arrive at Wright Field (later renamed Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) shortly thereafter and was subjected to intense analysis by aeronautical engineers. During an audiotaped interview with Roswell researcher Dr. Kevin D. Randle, in 1990, Exon said:

...They knew they had something new in their hands. The metal and material was unknown to [everyone] I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the [analytical] results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space. Everyone from the White House on down knew that what we had found was not of this world within 24 hours of our finding it…Roswell was the recovery of a craft from space.²

All of Exon’s published comments regarding the matter may be read at roswellproof.homestead.com/exon.html.

A number of UFO debunkers have claimed that the Roswell UFO crash story is a “modern myth” that originated as a result of public fascination with the writings of Stanton Friedman, Bill Moore, and others in the 1979-80 time-frame, which incorporated Marcel’s candid remarks about his involvement in the discovery of the mysterious wreckage in 1947.

However, in light of Marchetti’s revelations, this simply cannot be true. Given his resignation from CIA in 1969, he had to have heard those high level “rumors” about crashed UFOs and dead aliens stored at Wright-Patterson prior to that time.

In his article, Marchetti theorizes that the primary reason underlying the U.S. government’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of UFOs, if indeed the craft are piloted by alien beings, results from its fear that existing power structures would be fundamentally undermined by such an admission. He writes:

...the U.S. Government, in collusion with other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public. The purpose of the international conspiracy is to maintain a workable stability among the nations of the world and for them, in turn, to retain institutional control over their respective populations. Thus, for these governments to admit there are beings from outer space attempting to contact us, beings with mentalities and technological capabilities obviously far superior to ours, could, once fully perceived by the average person, erode the foundations of the Earth's traditional power structure. Political and legal systems, religions, economic and social institutions could all soon become meaningless in the mind of the public. The national oligarchical establishments, even civilization as we know it, could collapse into anarchy. Such extreme conclusions are not necessarily valid, but they probably accurately reflect the fears of the "ruling class" of the major nations, whose leaders (particularly those in the intelligence business) have always advocated excessive governmental secrecy as being necessary to preserve "national security." The real reason for such secrecy is, of course, to keep the public uninformed, misinformed, and, therefore, malleable.³

Given that so much information, misinformation, disinformation, speculation, and general bullshit about UFOs is available on the Internet, one must of necessity carefully choose which material to ingest. Marchetti’s unique, informed, credible perspective should be added to the short list of must-reads.

References:

1. Marchetti, Victor, "How The CIA Views The UFO Phenomenon", Second Look, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 1979

2. Randle, Dr. Kevin D., Roswell UFO Crash Update: Exploring the Military Cover-up of the Century, Inner Light - Global Communications, February 1995

3. Marchetti, Victor, "How The CIA Views The UFO Phenomenon", Second Look, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 1979

Visit Robert's site . . .

Purchase Robert's Book
Click Here

See Also:

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

Larry King Live: Debate Over Existence of UFOs

UFOs at Defense Sites Told in CIA Documents

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

Tweet

Retro Friday: a blast from the past

By Billy Cox De Void 2-20-15

Whistleblower Victor Marchetti charged the 'Clandestine Services' branch of the CIA with responsibility for keeping tabs on global UFO events/CREDIT: phil-mershon.blogspot.com

Before blowing the whistle on America's illegal covert Cold War activities, Victor Marchetti was a 14-year CIA veteran ultimately promoted to executive assistant to The Agency's Deputy Director. After resigning in 1969, he wrote two exposes -- 1971's The Rope Dancer, and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence in 1974. The latter, which the federal government attempted to ban from publication, was among the many slings and arrows contributing to the formation of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings in 1975.

In 1979, Marchetti stoked yet another controversy by providing a rare if not largely speculative glimpse into the mindset of The Agency's uneasy relationship with The Great Taboo. Titled "How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon," Marchetti's magazine piece took a cautious approach. "The topic was rarely discussed at internal meetings," he wrote. "It seemed to fall into the category of 'very sensitive activities,' e.g., drug and mind-control operations, domestic spying, and other illegal actions. People simply did not talk about the UFO phenomenon."

Thanks to an assist from UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, De Void is posting the article in its entirely. It's a lengthy piece -- you probably won't have time to read it at your work desk. But it's worth your time to see how little has changed, even with nearly 36 years worth of additional data, the collapse of the USSR, and allegations of buried UFO material from yet another former CIA operator three years ago.

How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon

By Victor Marchetti
SECOND LOOK
Vol. 1, No. 7
May 1979

     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. 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. My theory is that we have, indeed, been contacted--perhaps even visited-- by extraterrestrial beings, and that the U.S. Government, in collusion with other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public. The purpose of the international conspiracy is to maintain a workable stability among the nations of the world and for them, in turn, to retain institutional control over their respective populations. Thus, for these governments to admit there are beings from outer space attempting to contact us, beings with mentalities and technological capabilities obviously far superior to ours, could, once fully perceived by the average person, erode the foundations of the Earth's traditional power structure. Political and legal systems, religions, economic and social institutions could all soon become meaningless in the mind of the public. The national oligarchical establishments, even civilization as we know it, could collapse into anarchy. Such extreme conclusions are not necessarily valid, but they probably accurately reflect the fears of the “ruling class” of the major nations, whose leaders (particularly those in the intelligence business) have always advocated excessive governmental secrecy as being necessary to preserve "national security." The real reason for such secrecy is, of course, to keep the public uninformed, misinformed, and, therefore, malleable. During my years in the CIA, UFOs were not a subject of common discussion. But neither were they treated in a disdainful or derisive manner, especially not by the agency's scientists. Instead, the topic was rarely discussed at internal meetings. It seemed to fall into the category of “very sensitive activities”, e.g., drug and mind-control operations, domestic spying, and other illegal actions. People simply did not talk about the UFO phenomenon. There were, however, rumors at high levels of the CIA.....rumors of unexplained sightings by qualified observers, of strange signals being received by the National Security Agency (the US Government's electronic intercept and communications intelligence collector), and even of little gray men whose ships had crashed, or had been shot down, being kept "on ice" by the Air Force at FTD (Foreign Technology Division) at Wright- Patterson AF Base in Dayton, Ohio. And there was the odd case of the lady from Maine who, while in a hypnotic trance, had allegedly communicated with a starship. Most of these rumors, I found to be unimpressive—except for the strange signals from outer space being received by NSA. Perhaps that was because I had once been an NSA officer. Or perhaps it was because I had frequent contact with that agency while serving with the CIA, and the little I learned of the signals was treated with extreme caution even by SIGINT standards. But let us assume that there have been contacts by intelligent beings from beyond the Earth. How would the CIA and US Government respond to such a phenomenon? The first order of business would be to determine whether UFOs were secret weapons of the Soviet Union or some other foreign nation. The task of coordinating this program would be given to the CIA because it is the President's personal intelligence organization and the nation's only non- departmental, or independent, intelligence component. As such, it is charged, among other things, with performing "services of common concern" which relate to "intelligence affecting the national security." However, the military intelligence services, NSA, and other agencies and departments would also participate in the collection and analytical efforts under the program. If it were concluded that UFOs were not of terrestrial origin but, rather, vehicles from outer space, the next step would be to assess their weaponry capabilities and the intentions of the aliens controlling the ships. At this point, the CIA and US Government, aware that the phenomenon was of a worldwide nature, would seek cooperation in the investigation from the Earth's other technically advanced nations, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and even the USSR. The CIA would function as the US Government's agent, just as the KGB would be the USSR's, MI-6 would be the UK's, and so on. These agencies, in addition to specializing in secrecy and deceit, are quite accustomed to cooperating with each other on matters of mutual interest. Cooperation in the intelligence business is not restricted to allies. There are times when the CIA and KGB have found it advantageous to work together. One example is the production and publication of Khrushchev Remembers, the "memoirs" of the former Soviet leader--a ruse on the public which is actively being continued to this day. Furthermore, both the CIA and KGB sometimes "declare," i.e. identify, their officers to each other in order to facilitate the smooth functioning of clandestine intelligence activities. Even the famous U-2 program was conducted with mutual understanding --until the Soviets shot down Francis Gary Powers. According to the Chief of the CIA's Clandestine Services it was an example of two hostile governments collaborating to keep operations secret from general public of both nations. "Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these situations," he said. But before full cooperation on the UFO phenomena was achieved, there might be a period of suspicion and perhaps competition, each government hoping to gain some advantage over the others through the use of aliens and their superior scientific knowledge. It would soon, however, become apparent to all the nations involved that this was not feasible and that the UFO phenomenon was a common problem. Thus, cooperation, secret cooperation, would become a fact. Later, after further study, if it were judged that UFOs were harmless, perhaps even unarmed, vehicles from outer space controlled by aliens seeking merely to observe the Earth and its peculiar inhabitants....like so many galactic Jane Goodall's studying chimps in their native environment....and, therefore, presented no direct, hostile threat to the Earth's power structure, then another collective decision would have to be made. Should the public be told the full and true story of the phenomenon ? It is unlikely, for the reasons mentioned earlier, that any government aware of the UFO facts would deem it necessary or wise to inform its people of the truth. Governments prefer an ignorant and gullible public because an unknowing public is much more easily manipulated. In fact, that is one of the major reasons for so much governmental secrecy and official disinformation. Once the international cover-up had been decided, the CIA and US Government would act pretty much the way they have with regard to the UFO phenomenon. There would be a prestigious scientific group (the Robertson Panel) convened to declare that UFOs were no threat to the national security. The fact that the panel's conclusions were not immediately made public is of no great consequence. Here, the primary consideration would be to turn off the speculation brewing among the military, bureaucrats, and other secondary levels (including the US Congress) of the governmental apparatus. The information would eventually filter down to the news media and public. But, because of the intensity of public curiosity, a formal investigation (Project Blue Book) would be launched, after a couple of false starts. And when public interest continued to build, another scientific panel (the Condon Group) was assembled to assure us that there were no such things as UFOs. With that accomplished the US Government--the Earth's spokesman on the issue--could call off all further official investigations, slamming the lid of secrecy on the problem. But despite governmental proclamations, the sightings--often by astronauts, professional pilots, and even prospective presidents--have continued. Public pressure is again building for an honest, authoritative explanation of UFOs. Of all the evidence that exist with regard to UFOs, the single, most impressive item (to my mind) is the Jimmy Carter experience. One night in Georgia in 1973, the man who was destined to become the President of the US and his son, Jeff, saw what they believed to be a UFO. Three years later when campaigning for the presidency , Carter promised to make "every piece of information the country has about UFOs available to the public." He never fulfilled that pledge. Nor has he ever again spoken out publicly on the subject. Meanwhile, his White House staff has parried all queries on the matter and both his Director of NASA, Robert Frosch, and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, have officially dismissed the UFO phenomenon as nothing more than something that exists only in the public's imagination. This sequence of events can mean only one of three things. What Jimmy Carter saw in 1973 was:

• A) a reflection of a physical event which has since been explained to him:

• B) the testing of a secret weapon to which he is now privy, but for reasons of "national security" it is still a secret: or

• C) a UFO.

If what President Carter saw falls into category "a," there is no reason why he could not publicly say so. As presidents go, he has been relatively humble and honest on other matters of personal embarrassment. If it falls into category "b," there is again no reason why he should not admit to the fact. There is no way that such a weapon system could possibly still be a secret from the Soviets. But if what he saw was a UFO--and there is a secret international agreement among the great powers to withhold this information from the people--then Mr. Carter would act exactly the way he has. He is neither smart enough nor tough enough to override the pressures of the Establishment. Thus, the CIA would be called upon once again. This time to release to the public all the information it has regarding the UFO phenomenon.....after, of course, the usual and long ritualistic procedures of litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. We can safely assume, however, that the CIA would not disclose everything it knows or that it would reveal any data it believes would not advance the UFO cover-up. The CIA, like other intelligence organization, has little respect for the public's right to know. It is an attitude they all consistently display. Ironically, however, among the vast body of circumstantial evidence pointing to the existence of UFOs or contacts from outer space, the FOIA documents recently provided by the CIA have done more to make the public suspect there is an official conspiracy than any of the recent sightings or reports of encounters. In fact, the entire FOIA exercise has the same aroma of the agency's previous messy efforts to hide its involvement in drugs and mind-control operations, both prime examples of a successful intelligence cover-up. The CIA, under the scrutiny of Congress, admitted only to experiments and a few operational indiscretions which occurred mostly in the 1950's and 60's. There was little or no disclosure of the full operational use of drugs and mind control techniques. The stratagem employed by the agency was, as it is known in the business, a "limited hangout," i.e., admitting to a few past errors then declaring the program has ended and, therefore, there is nothing else to tell. With that, all investigations come to a halt. The FOIA/UFO exercise is stained with the same telltale spottiness. Furthermore, the conduct and conclusions of the Robertson Panel (1953) and the Colorado Group (1969) are suspiciously similar to those concerning another great mystery--the JFK assassination. The findings of the Warren Commission in 1964 and, for all practical purposes, those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978/9) differ from the UFO studies only in that the former sought to promote a "lone nut killer" hypothesis while the latter offered a "multiple nut believer" explanation. Regardless of its shortcomings, the recently released CIA information does, however, tell us something...perhaps more than the government thinks. From the very beginning in 1947, the CIA closely monitored UFO reports on a worldwide basis. Although most of the FOIA documents indicate only a routine interest in the problem which was handled largely by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Foreign Documents Division, and the Domestic Contact Service--all innocuous, non-clandestine collection units--they also disclose by inference a standing requirement of the Directorate of Science and Technology for gathering UFO data. This, in turn, indicates other collection components, namely the Clandestine Services, the CIA's main directorate, was tasked with providing information from all over the world on the UFO phenomenon. However, few such reports were released--and that implies a cover-up ! By 1953, the US Government, acting through the CIA and using the vehicle of the Robertson Panel, had clearly decided to cap the persistent public rumors of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial contacts. The panel concluded that UFOs were not a direct or hostile threat to national security but that continued emphasis of the phenomenon could clog the communication channels of the establishment or cultivate a morbid national psychology which enemy propaganda might exploit. For good measure, the panel recommended that the public should be "educated" to recognize real hostile actions against the nation and the UFOs be stripped of their "mysterious aura." Very nifty. The tone and timing of the Robertson Panel were almost perfect. In early 1953, the nation was preoccupied with the Korean War in particular and the Cold War in general. Stalin was not yet dead. There were almost daily confrontations with Communists somewhere in the world. A new terror weapon had just been introduced into the arms race--the hydrogen bomb. General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command was warning of the "bomber gap." And Senator Joe McCarthy was scaring the bejesus out of everybody in Washington, including the CIA. Furthermore, there was no self-respecting accredited scientist prepared to risk his reputation by challenging the government's position on UFOs. Thus, the Robertson Panel provided an excellent opportunity to sweep the phenomenon under the rug of official secrecy. There is one other thing about the Robertson Panel that has always puzzled me. Nowhere in its report does the panel deny the existence of UFOs. The panel only addresses the question of UFOs as a "possible threat to national security" and concludes there is no direct evidence indicating such a threat. Could it be that the evidence showed that UFOs did exist, but the data revealed that the extraterrestrial contacts were of a benign nature, i.e., there were no "foreign artifacts capable of hostile acts" and, therefore no "direct physical threat to national security?" After the Robertson Panel, there was a curious development. The CIA, according to the FOIA documents, apparently faded into the background. The Air Force assumed responsibility for the UFO problem and initiated a series of reviews culminating in Project Blue Book and the Condon's Colorado Study. But the CIA continued "unofficially" to follow developments concerning the phenomenon...and to display an uneasy, overly cautious, even defensive attitude toward outside curiosity about its UFO work. In fact, during the preparation of the Condon Panel's report, the CIA reacted so skittishly in providing aid to the panel that one can only wonder if the agency was attempting to hide something from the Air Force.....not an unusual occurrence in the inter-tribal relations of the US intelligence community. The performance is reminiscent of how the CIA responded to the first public revelations that it was deeply involved in illegal drug and domestic spying operations. In December 1969, the findings of the Condon Panel were made public by the Department of Defense. Again, it was concluded that UFOs were no threat to national security, and we were given the added assurance that those sightings (roughly one-half of one percent) categorized as "unidentified" evidenced no technical capabilities beyond our scientific knowledge. A rather odd commentary. In addition, the panel stated there was no evidence that UFO sightings (not contacts or signals) represented extraterrestrial visitations. A flat statement that was supported by no empirical evidence.....only the panel's opinion. Were the panelists again begging the question? With the release of the Condon Report, Project Blue Book was canceled, and the Air Force, like the CIA , seemed to drop out of the UFO business. The timing of the Condon Report, like that of the Robertson Panel, was, to say the least, interesting. We were fighting--and losing--a war in Vietnam. There was severe domestic turmoil caused by the civil rights and peace movements. Again, the nation was not, at the time, much concerned with UFOs. Perhaps that is why the government opted for a flat denial. It was another excellent chance to stop all the speculation about UFOs and to further sweep the phenomenon under the rug of official secrecy. But ten years have gone by since the Air Force allegedly closed its UFO shop and more than fifteen years since the CIA claims to have lost interest in the subject. The sightings and contacts, however, continue --not only by questionable sources. Even the President of the United States thinks he saw a UFO. Thus, we are left with five possible conclusions.

ONE: The US Government is trying to keep certain super weapon systems secret from the Soviets. In this age of advanced electronic, photographic, and other intelligence sensors, when the testing of a new system begins by any nation, the other participants in the geopolitical game soon learn of it.

TWO: The US Government, in cooperation with its allies, is playing a game with such rivals as the USSR, trying to confuse them with false reports of UFOs. The state of the art in intelligence collection and analysis, as well as science, precludes the possibility of such a ruse.

THREE: The US and its allies are attempting to keep UFOs a secret from the USSR. The Soviets, however, are as astute in space science as we are. If we know about UFOs, so do they...and so do all the technically advanced nations.

FOUR: There are no UFOs, nor have there ever been any contacts from outer space. However, the amount of circumstantial evidence to the contrary (including indications that our planet may have been visited in the distant past by extraterrestrials) argues against this conclusion--or at least for further study of the UFO phenomenon. FIVE: There are UFOs or there have been contacts--if only signals --from outer space, but the evidence reveals the aliens are interested only in observing us. They have no hostile intentions and are no direct threat to any nation. But public knowledge of these facts could become a threat. If the existence of UFOs were to be officially confirmed, a chain reaction could be initiated that would result in the collapse of the Earth's present power structure. Thus, a secret international understanding--a conspiracy -- has been agreed to by the world powers to keep the public ignorant of and confused about contacts or visitations from beyond Earth.

Victor Marchetti was the executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA and is the co-author of "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," the only book ever censored by the US Government prior to publication up to 1979. He lives in suburban Washington D.C.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

THE MARCH 22, 1950 FBI MEMO ON CRASHED FLYING SAUCERS: Livescience.com Spins the Facts

CIA Veteran Claims Knowledge of Roswell-Alien Cover-up

UFOs at Defense Sites Told in CIA Documents

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE