UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (17 page)

It still gives me chills to think about it.

PART 2

IN THE LINE OF DUTY

“It is one of the ironies of modern rule that it is far more acceptable today to affirm publicly one’s belief in God, for whose existence there is no scientific evidence, than UFOs, the existence of which—whatever they might be—is physically documented.”

A
LEXANDER
W
ENDT AND
R
AYMOND
D
UVALL

CHAPTER 11

The Roots of UFO Debunking in America

B
ecause all of us have long been exposed to an atmosphere of ridicule and the automatic dismissal of the UFO phenomenon, I suspect that the information presented so far may have been very surprising, even shocking, for some readers. It’s not easy for anyone to come to terms with evidence for the reality of UFOs, and yet we’ve seen that such evidence can’t be dismissed out of hand. In reading about General De Brouwer’s painstaking investigation, or the disc hovering above O’Hare Airport, or the huge, flashing object jumping through the night sky over Tehran, we find ourselves forced to reconcile two radically conflicting paradigms. There is the one position we’ve always known, in which these things are out of the question; they can’t happen, according to agreed-upon laws of physics and cosmology, and therefore they simply
don’t
happen. But then there’s the fact that unknown objects have been seen by thousands of people all over the world, demonstrating these “impossible” capabilities right before our eyes. Most disturbing, of course, is the implied possibility that these UFOs, apparently under some kind of intelligent control,
might
have an origin outside of planet Earth, no matter how unthinkable that idea may be.

The reader may feel bewildered by this possibility, incredulous and hesitant to go on. There may still be that inclination to dismiss it all as foolishness or some kind of psychological aberration that no amount of evidence can change. Some readers might feel defiant at this point, or deeply alarmed. Simple curiosity and an open mind will temper these very natural reactions. Anyone who adventures into this strange realm goes through some level of internal struggle, as I did after discovering and researching the COMETA Report. Like everyone else, I was unnerved by all this, but also, as an investigative journalist, I soon became intrigued by its power and portentousness. As I’ve already described, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the UFO phenomenon—
really
find out if there was anything to it. And after a while I developed a kind of defiance—but this was not because of resistance to accepting UFOs as real. Instead, I was disturbed that something real
was
going on here and nobody seemed to be paying attention. Being naturally rebellious, I felt drawn to the challenge both to my own intellectual boundaries and to the limitations of conventional thinking. Awe and humility softened the more unnerving aspects of the discovery process, because the more I learned, the more convincing the whole thing became. Why should we assume we already understand everything there is to know, in our infancy here on this planet?

My evolution took years, involving much reading, discussion with veteran researchers, review of government documents, and interviews with retired military officials and UFO witnesses. I think that most of us willing to consider this subject, even without this level of intensity, come to a point of transition, a decisive moment when we cross our own deeply ingrained internal barrier. It isn’t easy. After all, we’re dealing with something so far ungraspable: the essential nature of the UFO. We have to come to terms with the recurring appearance of something absolutely unknown and unexplainable by science, something that operates as if it were outside the boundaries of our physical world but
in it
at the same time. To make it even more difficult, we’re burdened by the negativity and denial of the status quo that all of us have absorbed to one degree or another.

To understand that aspect of the problem, we must come down to earth and look at the political and historical roots of the U.S. government’s reaction to the UFO phenomenon, beginning at a time when officials first recognized that they were dealing with something not easily explained. Even if the phenomenon is psychologically hard to confront, that excuse is not enough to explain the inaction, the dismissal, and the ridicule that have been the norm for so many years. Why is there such a strong taboo against taking the subject seriously, when there’s so much evidence for it?

In fact, our government has a policy—a stated position of inaction crafted over fifty years ago—underlying its current approach to UFOs. Certain pivotal events set us on the unfortunate course we find ourselves on today. It all began in the late 1940s, when officials were faced with a sudden influx of UFO sightings in the skies over America, many of which were reported by highly credible observers such as military and airline pilots. Popular interest in UFOs (called “flying saucers” at the time, because of their frequently described flattened-disc shape) was growing as a result of national media coverage and the fact that nobody knew what they were or how to handle them. Initially, the authorities attempted to determine if the objects were either secret foreign aircraft, such as superior technology from the Soviet Union, or possibly some kind of newly discovered atmospheric or meteorological phenomena.

By 1947, things were becoming uncomfortably clear behind the scenes. Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, a major command of the U.S. Air Force, sent a secret memo concerning “Flying Discs” to the commanding general of the Army Air Forces at the Pentagon. The considered opinion, based on data furnished by numerous Air Force branches, he stated, was that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious … The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.” Twining described the objects as metallic or light-reflecting, circular or elliptical with a flat bottom and domed top, sometimes with “well kept formation lights varying from three to nine objects,” and normally silent. He proposed that the Army Air Forces set up a detailed study of UFOs, assigning a security classification and code name to it.
¹

As a result, such a project was set up within the Air Materiel Command, and given the code name “Sign.”
²
The new agency began its operations in early 1948 at Wright Field (now called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) with the mandate to collect information, evaluate it, and assess whether the phenomenon was a threat to national security. As Project Sign became more convinced that the objects were not Russian, divisions grew between those who thought they were “interplanetary”—the term used at the time, when much less was known about our solar system—and those who were determined to find a more conventional explanation. Later that year, some Project Sign staff wrote a top-secret report, an “Estimate of the Situation,” providing data on convincing cases and concluding that, based on the evidence, UFOs were most likely extraterrestrial. The document eventually landed on the desk of General Hoyt Vanderbeng, Air Force Chief of Staff, who rejected it as unacceptable because he wanted proof, and responded by returning it to its authors at Project Sign. From then on, the proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis lost ground, and because of the clear message from Vandenberg and others, the safer position that UFOs
must
have conventional explanations was adopted by the majority of the project’s investigators. It appears they were under pressure to shift their focus. The “Estimate of the Situation” was reportedly destroyed, and no copies have ever been found despite repeated attempts using the Freedom of Information Act.
³

Project Sign was later renamed Project Grudge, which then became the well-known Project Blue Book in 1951, lasting for nineteen years. As time passed, it continued to become naggingly clear that these objects did
not
belong to any foreign government, and we had to face the clear possibility that they did not originate here on Earth. U.S. government documents released through the FOIA show that, as a result, some officials from multiple branches of government continued to assert that they might be interplanetary. As before, other factions stuck to their hope of finding a conventional explanation, no matter what.

In July 1952, the FBI was briefed through the office of Major General John Samford, the director of intelligence for the Air Force, and told that it was “not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars.” Air intelligence was “fairly certain” that they were not “ships or missiles from another nation in this world,”
⁴
the FBI memo reports. Another FBI memo stated some months later that “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of planetary ships.”
⁵

At the same time, national defense concerns were mounting about the preponderance of technologically advanced unidentified objects flying over the United States during the Cold War. One famous series of sightings over the nation’s capitol, in which Air Force planes were sent to intercept brilliant objects picked up by ground radar, made national headlines in July 1952, and necessitated a press conference, the biggest one since World War II, in which intelligence chief General Samford tried to calm the country. He said:

Air Force interest in the problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability, anything in the air that has the possibility of [being] a threat or menace to the United States. In pursuit of this obligation, since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and two thousand reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources. Of this great mass of reports, we have been able adequately to explain the great bulk of them—explain them to our own satisfaction. However, there are then a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of observations that we now are attempting to resolve. We have, as of date, come to only one firm conclusion with respect to this remaining percentage. And that is that it does not contain any pattern of purpose or of consistency that we can relate to any conceivable threat to the United States.
⁶

He told reporters that the Washington, D.C., events were likely mere aberrations caused by temperature inversions—layers in the atmosphere in which rising temperatures affect radar performance—an interpretation disputed by the pilots and radar operators involved.

The increasing numbers of reports were becoming hard to manage along with growing public interest in the phenomenon. In late 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director of scientific intelligence for the CIA, sent a memo about this problem to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). “Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles,”
⁷
he stated.

In another 1952 memo, titled “Flying Saucers,” the CIA’s Chadwell said the DCI must be “empowered” to initiate the research necessary “to solve the problem of instant positive identification of unidentified flying objects.” The CIA recognized the need for a “national policy” as to “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic,”
⁸
according to government documents. It was therefore decided that the DCI would “enlist the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence.”
⁹
As a result of this decision, the CIA arranged a critically important meeting that would forever change both the course of media coverage and the official attitude toward the UFO subject. The results of this meeting help explain the omnipresent disengagement of American officials during the decades to come.

The CIA began its work in January 1953, when it convened a hand-picked scientific advisory panel, chaired by H. P. Robertson, a specialist in physics and weapons systems from the California Institute of Technology, for a four-day closed-door session. Authorities were concerned that communication channels were being so saturated by hundreds of UFO reports that they were becoming dangerously clogged. Even though the UFOs had demonstrated no threat to national security, false alarms could be dangerous and defense agencies might have a problem discerning true hostile intent. Officials were concerned that the Soviets might take advantage of this situation by simulating or staging a UFO wave, and then attack.