SUBJECT: WHAT DOES THE GOVERNMENT KNOW FILE: UFO2566 This file is provided by UFO Magazine. All rights are reserved. You may distribute this file freely as long as this header remains intact. Date prepared: 08/17/93 Contributed by: Don Ecker/ UFO Magazine ================================================================= The following is a colume written for *UFO Magazine by Richard Hall, Chairman for the Fund for UFO Research. Hall is a former Assistant Director for the famous NICAP, and worked with and under ledgendary NICAP Directror *Major Donald Keyhoe. Don Ecker ================================================================= by Richard Hall What does "the government" know and (the flip side) how big a cover-up is there? What methods are used in the postulated cover-up? To what extent and for what purpose have intelligence agencies deliberately manipulated our beliefs? These are complicated questions with no simple answers, various facets if which will be explored in future columns. First, let's consider "disinformation." Back in the 1950s, Civilian Saucer Investigations (CSI) of Los Angeles, led by scientists and engineers, was a flourishing and highly credible UFO investigation group. The organization collected and analyzed a lot of sightings and published a newsletter. CSI was given a big boost when publicized by LIFE magazine in an article about UFOs. In those days, LIFE was a major force in society. When CSI went out of business (I forget the year, but in the late 1950s or early '60s), NICAP inherited their files--sightings and correspondence--and merged them with our own. The letters contained strong suggestion of a disinformation campaign, the earliest such clues I can recall seeing. Several letters from indirect sources ("a friend of a friend told me . . .") described alleged incidents in which someone strayed off a beaten path in New Mexico, and was suddenly confronted by MPs wielding submachine guns and was ordered away from the secret site. But in the background, before they left, they glimpsed a closely-guarded disc-shaped craft. I think that is exactly what someone wanted the world (or at least ufologists) to believe. Who was spreading the stories, and why? Never for a minute did I think the confrontations actually occurred, and I still don't. Now they fit a much larger pattern that has emerged over the years. However, at the time (the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union) I guessed that it would be in the interests of the U.S. to hoodwink SovIet authorities into thinking we had secret, advanced aircraft technology. Or captured alien craft, with the implied threat of spectacular technological breakthroughs. That may have been the explanation. In any case, it was one of the earliest--and far from the last--example of someone in the U.S. intelligence community manipulating the UFO subject for ulterior motives. I also recall being set up (perhaps in more ways than one) to meet a man in Washington, D.C. who, according to the story, was a spy for then-President Sukarno's Indonesian government and wanted to "talk UFOs" with me. I was told that the FBI had caught up with him and he was being deported. He said that one of his missions was to find out what the U.S. government knew about UFOs. Since the government constantly denied that UFOs were real, he was convinced they had to be secret U.S. devices. He was skeptical when I tried to explain that NICAP was a private organization, aNd when I argued that UFOs could not be U.S. secret devices, he suspected NICAAP was part of the cover-up! Two strong "rumors" apparently carefully cultivated for effect in the 1950s and 1960s also fit the U.S. secret device notion. One of the oldest and lamest stories was that, toward the end of World War II, the Germans had test-flown high-performance, disc-shaped craft. There was a slight core of truth to this story (as there usually is with disinformation to make it seem halfway credible): they *had been experimenting with a disc-shaped airframe. But there were no major technological breakthroughs, no high-performance flights; NICAP checked with former German scientists and engineers,among other sources. The "hottest" aviation technology the Germans had at war's end was the Me-163, the first rocket-powered fighter plane, which saw brief service but was not truly operational nor very effective. A little later, a variant on the theme was that "captured" German engineers had aided the U.S. and Canada in developing disc-shaped craft based on their late-war research. In blatantly deceptive news releases, the Air Force announced a joint project with A.V. Roe in Canada, along with an artist's conception showing a "flying saucer" craft, suggesting a high-performance aircraft. When the project was later cancelled, the "AVRO disc" (as it was called) proved to be a decidedly low-performance machine, nothing but an air-cushion device similar to a Florida swamp buggy that floated a few feet above the surface on a cushion of air vented downward from fans. Does this all sound vaguely familiar? For the past several years we have heard stories and rumors of high-performance (UFO-like in some respects) secret aircraft operating in the skies near military reservations in California and Nevada. Sightings of them are even reported in *Aviation Week and Space Technology, the editors of which have the reputation of being flacks of the Defense Department, but nonetheless it is an industry bible. NBC-TV recently broadcast some film footage of distant "mystery craft" or their contrails in Nevada. If we believe that the U.S. has mastered the technology found in "crashed saucers," then maybe we *are flying around in rebuilt alien craft, or human craft based on alien technology. But when the Bob Lazars of the world want me to believe that, my skeptical antennae rise, and I suspect it is disinformation to cover up the *real story which is something else entirely. In the old days, it seemed to me, "secret U.S. aircraft" were used as disinformation to convey the message that UFOs were ours,with the Soviet Union as the main target. Today it *appears that someone wants us to believe that reports of UFOs really are sightings of our own technology. Why would someone want us to believe that? The only "theory" I can imagine (call it a sneaking hunch until dignified by more evidence) is that the object of all this disinformation is what would be the most significant story in the history of humankind, if true, namely, the 1947 crash (or crashes of alien spacecraft in New Mexico. The human testimony in support of this story has become very strong and persuasive, though concrete proof still is lacking. Exactly *why the government or its military arm would feel so compelled to lie to its citizens about this is a serious and unanswered question, but probably has to do with the fact that it happened early in the Cold War period. The crash and its implications would have been evaluated within that context, and as has been suggested by others, it must have been obvious that the first to solve the alien technology would have a giant leg up in the Cold War. After that, it would become difficult to tell the truth without acknowledging all the lies. End of File ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * ********************************************** -!- Maximus 2.00 ! Origin: Mysteria * Be ye mystic * 818-353-8891 (1:102/943)