UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (38 page)

Some of the anonymous sources I refer to include mainstream scientists, all Ph.D.s with impressive, lengthy resumes, some of whom have worked for the CIA or other intelligence agencies—an astrophysicist, a physicist, an astronomer, among others—and a NASA aerospace engineer. One military source, Commander Will Miller, U.S. Navy (Ret.), has gone on the record while keeping certain specifics confidential. He agreed to reply to a series of questions I presented to him in late 2009 about the question of government secrecy.

Although still very active, Miller, who now lives in Florida, retired from active duty in 1994, the same year he was awarded the Department of Defense Meritorious Service Medal. As a naval officer and decorated Vietnam combat veteran, he had his own sighting from a Navy vessel while serving near Vietnam. He later became a senior Department of Defense command center operations action officer, a senior intelligence analyst, and a program manager for DoD future operations programs such as WWIII planning, nonlethal weapons systems, and future space systems. He was an advisor to U.S. Space Command and U.S. Southern Command and its international counterdrug operations, Joint Interagency Task Force East. As an expert in special contingency operations, Miller held a Top Secret clearance with Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access, meaning he had access to sensitive information whose handling is restricted one step further than the Top Secret classification, including that which is related to topics and programs not publicly acknowledged.

While an officer on active duty throughout the 1980s, Miller did not hide his interest in UFOs. “I was simply a concerned officer who studied the subject, looked at the facts, and talked to people in the military,” he says. “People with personal knowledge would seek me out because they knew I had an interest. I’ve done this for a long time.”

By 1989, Miller had become acutely aware that high-ranking military officers were not properly informed about the UFO phenomenon, and he became concerned, like the COMETA authors, about possible national security issues arising, not from the UFOs themselves, but from a lack of preparedness. He believes that we must assume UFOs have the same right of self-defense to hostile intent or hostile acts as we accord our own military forces. Fortunately, these rights have not been acted upon by the UFOs, as far as we know, when attacked. “Only a small fraction have demonstrated even a remote semblance of hostility, and that was only with severe provocation, usually an attack by military aircraft,” he says. “If the entire body of data were examined, the obvious conclusion would be that UFOs are not hostile. That is precisely what the U.S. military declared after many years of UFO study: that UFOs pose no threat to the national security of the United States.”

After he retired from the U.S. Navy, Miller began taking steps to set up a series of information briefings that culminated in meetings in 1997 with Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, vice director for intelligence on the Joint Staff, and in 1998 with Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). (Wilson later became director of the DIA and Hughes, the corporate vice president for intelligence and counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.) Miller has provided me with a confidential, detailed account of these meetings and those leading up to them, including attendees, preparatory briefings, topics discussed, and reactions from attendees.

He explains that he raised two national security concerns at his briefings: the risk of uninformed human aggression toward UFOs, leading to a possible disaster, and the government’s disregard for public concern about UFOs and its refusal to provide honest answers to legitimate questions. Miller feels strongly that unnecessary secrecy threatens the public’s sense of personal security while eroding trust in the government institutions mandated to inform and protect U.S. citizens. “The officials have universally received these briefings with the same serious consideration as briefings on any other national security issue,” he says.

I first contacted Commander Miller ten years ago, in 1999, through the introduction of a mutual colleague. I was repeatedly struck by the similarity of his conclusions and approach to those expressed by retired French military officers in the COMETA Report, communicated to me before Miller had any idea of its contents. He and the French officers had all been through a similar process to arrive at these positions, but within two different militaries. They were all meticulously careful about what they said, suggesting that they knew more than they could reveal. Of course, Miller has never had the strength-in-numbers of the French group—his is a lone voice in a vast wilderness, by contrast, and a particularly courageous one given the risks to his reputation through association with the UFO subject.

I sent him a confidential copy of the translated COMETA Report while writing my first UFO story for the
Boston Globe
. I then spent many months in substantive telephone interviews with him, and we met in person a year later. Over time, I came to know and trust him as a person of integrity, clarity, and devotion to his country, and have regularly consulted with him about issues involving UFOs and the military. Well connected at high levels within the impenetrable military and intelligence world, Miller is a true “insider” of the highest order. He is one of the few who has persistently taken his concern about UFOs to authorities above him, and has spent many years assessing the official relationship to the phenomenon through his access to American generals, admirals, NSA contacts, and other sources of sensitive information.

“The military officers I talked with were extremely interested in getting factual information on the UFO subject, since even at the flag-officer level, they were unable to get that information through normal military intelligence channels,” Miller told me. Throughout the years, as he continued to speak with his contacts, he became more and more convinced of the existence of a well-concealed, “need-to-know” UFO program, based on statements that he says confirm this fact, made by military personnel attending his Pentagon briefings and others.

I asked him in late 2009 about his overall assessment. He replied in an e-mail:

• It is a fact that there are those in high places in the government who have an interest in this subject (in many cases it is because they or a member of their immediate family has had a sighting or personal experience with the phenomenon).
  

• When the American people say the government is in the middle of a massive cover-up, in most cases that is absolutely NOT the case; those people in positions where you would say “they’ve got to know” absolutely don’t.
  

• I remain firmly convinced that many military and civilian personnel at the highest levels of various agencies, departments and organizations are purposefully kept in the dark so that those leaders may plausibly and honestly deny knowledge of the subject.
  

I asked Miller to elaborate further on who is keeping whom in the dark:

The “control group” cannot allow any information on their closely held UFO research to be accessed by anyone outside of those specially cleared for that Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP). Neither Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence nor the director of DIA himself could get ANY information on the subject; this is a fact. Yet I know that sources within multiple organizations maintain such information. Leadership remains “protected” from such knowledge. As far as I am concerned, the question is answered.

He added further comments on the issue of secrecy:

To the best of my knowledge, members of the Joint Staff in general are only aware of UFOs and any related secrecy issues from what they read and watch on TV. In fact, there are no secrecy issues related to UFOs since the consensus is that they have not been proven to exist and therefore do not hold a place in the list of secrecy topics about which Joint Staff members are forbidden to speak. That said, however, if a person were to encounter documents or other information related to the subject of UFOs that were classified, then that person would be bound not to discuss that classified information.

The phenomenon is ignored as if it was an unproven myth despite the existence of classified information about it. I know for a fact that such information resides within several “three-letter agencies.” That is no surprise, since multiple agencies in the past have tracked these objects, received reports on these objects, and created reports related to military and/or civilian encounters with these objects and/or their effects. Especially where surveillance and detection systems are concerned, a reasonable person might assume that agencies tasked with detecting and monitoring air, space, and sea via various technical surveillance systems would periodically detect these UFOs/crafts or have reports of such sent to them, which they would then disseminate to appropriate authorities/end users with the need to know.

Would it be possible to keep something like this secret? CDR Miller referenced the possibility of an Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) as one potential location for a group controlling access to UFO information. USAPs are one of the known mechanisms in place within the Department of Defense for controlling sensitive information without public knowledge of its existence. An investigative report by Bill Sweetman in
Jane’s International Defense Review
sheds tremendous light on the extent to which the DoD is capable of keeping secrets. These “black projects” within the DoD, officially called Special Access Programs (SAPs), are structured so that those involved in one component do not know what is going on in another, preventing knowledge of the bigger picture. Buried even deeper is the USAP referred to by Miller, a black program so sensitive that the fact of its existence is a “core secret,” defined in U.S. Air Force regulations as “any item, progress, strategy or element of information, the compromise of which would result in unrecoverable failure.” This means that all participants are required to deny the very existence of the program if confronted, since even “no comment” is considered a confirmation.
¹

Cover for these projects is supported by “the dissemination of plausible but false data, or disinformation.” Often, the false information accompanies some truth, so that the two are indistinguishable and the truth is thereby discredited. “Presented with a wall of denial, and with no way to tell the difference between deliberate and fortuitous disinformation, most of the media has abandoned any serious attempts to investigate classified programs,” writes Sweetman. Perhaps, as has been revealed on occasion throughout the decades, some of the leaked “official” documents and shadowy characters with wild claims, emerging from the deep, dark intelligence world, could be part of an official disinformation program, protecting the USAPs exclusive ownership of the truth by confusing those getting closer to it. We simply don’t know.

In 2008, I acquired an extremely interesting document from the UK, quietly released to a researcher through a FOI request. It comes close to verifying the existence of such a secret group in America—the
only
legitimate, confirmed government document to do that, to my knowledge. It so happens that it was written in 1993, during Nick Pope’s tour of duty at the Ministry of Defence’s “UFO desk,” and that he played a role in its conception and execution. Titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Study” and running just over one page, the document is a proposal for a study (which was approved and became Project Condign, described in
chapter 17
). Initiated by the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), it needed the approval of Pope’s department. Written by his counterpart in the DIS, it was addressed to Pope’s superior “Sec(AS)2,” the Air Staff deputy director, and classified “Secret UK Eyes A.”

The key section is paragraph 2, with two parts redacted and replaced with rows of the letter X:

2. I am aware, from intelligence sources, that XXXXX believes that such phenomena exist and has a small team studying them. I am also aware that an informal group exists in the XXXXXXXXXXX community and it is possible that this reflects a more formal organisation.

After careful consideration based on deductive reasoning, I offer the following analysis.

Before spending resources on any study, the first thing a government agency would do is check with its allies and find out what they may already have learned about the subject being considered. It is reasonable to assume that UK intelligence would check with its number one ally, the United States, through its own sources in the intelligence community, since intelligence officers, like the one who wrote this proposal, work directly with their counterparts within other countries. Secondly, it is also logical to assume that UK intelligence would be interested in the work of any major countries of concern, important players that may be adversaries and thus are monitored on a regular basis. In this case, that country would be Russia.

The next step is to go back to the document and see if these countries would physically fit in the spaces with the X’s. The number of X’s used in the redaction process does
not
necessarily correspond with the number of missing letters. Therefore, when seeing what fits, one has to look at the amount of space, not the number of X’s. It just so happens that the word “Russia” fits in the first line, and the words “US intelligence” fit perfectly in the second line in the two spaces provided, when measuring the
length
of the words in relation to the space, and also in keeping the spacing between the words consistent within each line. Replacing the X’s, the document would then read (emphasis added):

I am aware, from intelligence sources, that
Russia
believes that such phenomena exist and has a small team studying them. I am also aware that an informal group exists in the
US intelligence
community and it is possible that this reflects a more formal organization.