UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record

by Leslie Kean

  After my many years studying the most important unexplained cases, I think we have reached a certain level of knowledge about UFOs. They seem to be artificial and controlled objects whose physical characteristics can be measured by our detection systems, radar in particular. They fall under a physics which is by far superior and more evolved than the one we have in our most technologically advanced countries, highlighted by the stationary and silent flights, the accelerations and speeds defying the laws of inertia, the effects on the electronic navigation or transmission systems of aircraft, and the electrical blackouts. These performances have been shown on radar. When military aircrafts are directly involved, these objects are able to anticipate and neutralize the maneuvers of the pilots assigned to security and defense missions, and some remarkable cases show the capacity of the UFOs to seemingly understand a particular situation or to anticipate intentions of escape or military neutralization. The UFO phenomenon is definitely related to something controlled and intelligent.

  The only speculation that I allow myself to make about UFOs is that if they are artificial probes, they cannot be of terrestrial origin and consequently they must come from somewhere else. If extraterrestrial civilizations exist and have the capability to reach us, their motivation might be to monitor our planet because of the concerns raised by human behavior.

  CHAPTER 15

  UFOs and the National Security Problem

  While the French agency under Velasco’s direction was focused on the scientific study of UFO evidence as a program within the National Space Center throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the American government was doing absolutely nothing to address ongoing UFO sightings on the other side of the Atlantic, no matter who reported them or what effect they were having on aircraft or military facilities. Since the termination of Project Blue Book, U.S. public policy seemed to be to deny any interest in UFOs whatsoever, even if it meant obvious evasiveness or a little bending of the truth here and there. Ideally, despite the extraordinary data collected in France and other parts of the globe, the U.S. government clearly hoped that everyone in America would simply forget about UFOs altogether.

  Air Force statements issued at the close of Project Blue Book generated ammunition for UFO denial that is still used today, showing that nothing has changed in America for over forty years. When approached with a question about UFOs, the Air Force still sends out essentially the same form letter—ironically called a “fact sheet”—that it began using when Blue Book was terminated. Stating that UFO investigations have been discontinued, the statement presents three points—exactly the same ones made by the Air Force in its 1969 news release announcing the close of Blue Book. It stated then, as it does today, that the U.S. government will no longer be investigating UFOs for the following reasons:

  No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.

  There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge.

  There has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as “unidentified” are extraterrestrial vehicles.1

  Did this Air Force “fact sheet” really give us the facts at the time, and is it applicable today? In contrast to other government agencies that are represented in this book, a look behind the scenes at how the American government really has behaved toward UFOs since the close of Blue Book—despite its public positioning—shows continuing official duplicity and leaves many questions unanswered about what was actually going on.

  In examining the fact sheet, the second point can be disputed simply by credible, multiple-witness case studies on record at the time, and many others that have occurred since, such as those of General Parvis Jafari and Comandante Oscar Santa María Huertas. Dr. James Harder, a University of California professor of civil engineering, told the House Science and Astronautics Committee in its 1968 hearing2: “On the basis of the data and ordinary rules of evidence, as would be applied in civil or criminal courts, the physical reality of UFOs has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.” UFOs have demonstrated “scientific secrets we do not know ourselves.”3 The question of extraterrestrial origin, the third point, remains an unproven hypothesis, but there was enough evidence at the time to keep this possibility in the running, and certainly no justification for dismissing it altogether. The first point, a claim that UFOs have never threatened national security, however, is the one most relevant to any government, because it absolves agencies charged with defending the nation from any responsibility for paying attention to unidentified objects in the sky.

  However, this first point is simply false. No UFO, not even one, has ever impacted national security? “Threat” may be too strong a word, and it could be that the choice of that particular word, as uttered by General Samford in his 1952 press conference,4 is what allowed the Air Force to get by with the statement that no UFO has ever given even an indication of threat to national security. We still have not observed hostile or aggressive behavior from a UFO. But there is no question that in the years leading up to this statement, UFOs had shown themselves to be of defense or national security concern, impacting our defense capabilities and causing alarm during the Cold War.

  Despite the Robertson Panel intent to diminish public focus on UFOs for national security reasons, former CIA director Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA, who served until 1950, did not agree with the 1953 CIA position that UFOs should be ridiculed in the public arena. In 1960, he issued a statement, as reported in the New York Times. “It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings,” he said. “Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. To hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.” The opening of the article, distributed through United Press International, reads as follows:

  The Air Force has sent its commands a warning to treat sightings of unidentified flying objects as “serious business” directly related to the nation’s defense, it was learned today. An Air Force spokesman confirmed issuance of the directive after portions of it were made public by a private “flying saucer” group. The new regulations were issued by the Air Force inspector general Dec. 24. The regulations, revising similar ones issued in the past, outlined procedures and said that “investigations and analysis of UFOs are directly related to the Air Force’s responsibility for the defense of the United States.”5

  Later that year, Congressman Leonard G. Wolf entered an “urgent warning” from Vice Admiral Hillenkoetter into the Congressional Record, stating that “certain dangers are linked with unidentified flying objects,” particularly since UFOs could cause accidental war if mistaken for Soviet weapons. He pointed out that General L. M. Chassin, NATO coordinator of Allied Air Services, warned that a global tragedy might occur. “If we persist in refusing to recognize the existence of the UFOs, we will end up, one fine day, by mistaking them for the guided missiles of an enemy—and the worst will be upon us,” he said. Based on a three-year study by the well-known National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) with which Hillenkoetter was associated, Rep. Wolf stated that all defense personnel “should be told that the UFOs are real and should be trained to distinguish them—by their characteristic speeds and maneuvers—from conventional planes and missiles.… The American people must be convinced, by documented facts, that the UFOs could not be Soviet machines.”6

  Later, a different type of national security concern was registered that didn’t involve the Russians, but concerned the safety of our own military bases. Just two years before the Air Force told the public that UFOs were not a national security threat, an event occurred which some former military officers believe dramatically contradicts that
conclusion, even though any intent—purposeful or directed action—on the part of the UFO remains impossible to determine.

  On the morning of March 24, 1967, Air Force First Lieutenant Robert Salas, a missile launch officer, received a call from a frightened security guard reporting a glowing red, oval-shaped object hovering directly over the Oscar Flight Launch Control Center at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. With an “above Top Secret” clearance, Salas was stationed there as part of a team in charge of the missile sites and responsible for deploying the nuclear-tipped warhead missiles in the event of a war. Salas immediately went to wake up the crew commander, First Lieutenant Fred Meiwald, who was napping on his break. Then, within one minute of the phone call, the missiles started shutting down, one by one.

  “They went into no-go while the UFO was overhead,” Salas says. “This means they were disabled, not launchable.” There were ten missiles at Oscar Flight, and Salas remembers losing all of them. The missiles were located five to ten miles from the control center where the UFO hovered, and were about a mile apart from one another with independent backup power sources. A week earlier, on the morning of March 16, 1967, about thirty-five miles away from Oscar Flight, UFOs had visited the Echo Flight facility as well, and all of its missiles went down, too. In total, twenty missiles were disabled within the span of a week.

  A formerly classified Air Force telex states that “all ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost strat alert [strategic alert] within ten seconds of each other.… The fact that no apparent reason for the loss of ten missiles can be readily identified is cause for grave concern to this headquarters.”7 Salas learned from Boeing engineers years later that technicians checked every possible cause for the missile failures, but were not able to find any definitive explanation for what happened. At the time, it was suggested that the most likely cause would have been some kind of electromagnetic pulse directly injected into the equipment.8 Whatever force was involved had to penetrate sixty feet underground to do its damage.

  In 1995, when Lieutenant Salas attempted to access government files about the incident, the Air Force sent him its reissue of its 1969 public statement—today’s “fact sheet”—that no UFO has ever given any indication of threat to our national security, with a letter stating that this statement still held true. Given his experience, and subsequent confirmation by other witnesses about the 1967 Malmstrom incident, Salas clearly disagrees with this national security assessment. “It is simply incorrect,” he says. “If you consider the fact that this UFO incident resulted in the loss of twenty missiles during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, this was a national security threat. The Air Force is not telling us the truth.” Salas is not the only former Air Force officer to take this position. Others—missile personnel, security police, radar operators, and pilots—have come forward with similar reports.9

  We can conclude that the Air Force statement justifying the close of Project Blue Book was based on falsehoods about issues of great importance to the American people at the time. The denial of the real picture on UFOs was in itself dangerous. And it doesn’t make sense. Could the U.S. military really have decided to turn its back on UFOs in 1969, when sightings impacting air bases were occurring? It seems inconceivable. This would have been highly irresponsible, a breach of duty. More likely, our government misinformed the public in order to take UFOs out of public view. The escalating public demands for answers to something that the Air Force could not explain in the late ’60s were burdensome, and the CIA’s strategy of “training and debunking” had not been quite enough to take care of the problem. Perhaps the authorities in charge wanted to quell fears about any possible hazards associated with UFOs, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. But it seemed highly unlikely that all official UFO investigations were simply dropped.

  Now we no longer have to speculate about that question, thanks to an explosive government document, once classified, that was later released through the Freedom of Information Act. Issued secretly two months before the 1969 Air Force announcement that all government UFO investigations would be terminated, it shows that, in fact, UFOs were considered to be a national security issue and would continue to be treated as such. The October 1969 “Bolender memo,” as the document has come to be known, illustrates the duplicity of the government’s public stance on UFOs.

  The purpose of the memo, as sent by Air Force Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender, a former World War II night fighter pilot who later became NASA’s Apollo mission manager, was to officially terminate Project Blue Book. In doing so, Bolender made the point that regulations were already in place through which “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security” are made, those reports that are “not part of the Blue Book system.” This suggests that even before the close of Blue Book, the more sensitive reports were already being channeled elsewhere. It goes on to say that “the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book.” And further:

  Termination of Project Blue Book would leave no official federal office to receive reports of UFOs. However, as already stated, reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose. Presumably, local police departments respond to reports which fall within their responsibilities.10

  In other words, the military really didn’t need Blue Book—simply a public relations operation anyway—to continue dealing with UFOs. Instead it would, without public scrutiny, keep the necessary case investigations going, telling the people that there had never been an indication of a national security threat from any UFO. Three important points are made clear in the Bolender memo, unknown to most Americans and likely most government and military officials at the time, which tell us the real government position:

  UFOs can affect national security.

  A “defense function” may be necessary in responding to UFOs.

  Reports affecting national security are “handled” irrespective of Project Blue Book.

  We don’t know to what extent the low-ranking officers staffing Project Blue Book, or the more important Blue Book scientist Dr. J. Allen Hynek, knew that some UFO reports were filed and investigated elsewhere. Dr. Condon, in preparing for the release of his study from the University of Colorado, believed that he had access to all UFO data in the government’s files, and that nothing was kept from him. That appears to be a questionable assumption. Although some Blue Book chiefs had high clearance, it’s possible that some national security cases never reached their desks.

  After Blue Book was closed, we know that the U.S. government continued to have some level of involvement in UFO investigations through a range of agencies. Despite government statements to the contrary, this fact has been revealed in official documents released later through the Freedom of Information Act. Two glaring examples involve the cases from Iran and Peru of attempts to shoot down UFOs, as recounted earlier by General Parviz Jafari and Comandante Oscar Santa María. U.S. government officials were interested in both cases and filed classified reports on them at the time—reports that show they took these cases seriously but wanted to keep that interest secret.

  At home around the same time, in 1975, American officials were still dealing with sensitive UFO activity near Air Force bases in the western United States. The U.S. Air Force scrambled military jets over Montana to chase multiple unknowns, as detailed in the official 24th NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) region senior director’s log. The November 8, 1975, log reports the arrival of two to seven UFOs—one “large red to orange to yellow object” with small lights on it and another with white and red lights. “Conversation about the UFOs; Advised to go ahead and scramble; but be sure and brief pilots, FAA,” the document says. Two F-16s attempted to approach, but as the fighter jets drew closer, the object’s lights went out and came back on only when the
fighters departed. Eventually, the object increased speed to a “high velocity,” shot upward, “and now cannot tell the object from the stars,” the NORAD log reports.11

  This report has interesting similarities to other cases in which the UFO appears to “react” to approaching Air Force jets. Here, according to NORAD, the12 lights went off when the planes approached within close range, and then the pilots couldn’t see the UFO. When they retreated, the lights reappeared. It seems, once again, that some kind of intelligence responded and devised a means of “escape.”

  The American military reported all of this among themselves, but kept it away from the American people. And there was more. The next day the log records the sighting of an “orange white disc object,” resulting in an order for a “mobile security team” to investigate. Two more were seen on November 12; one “appeared to be sending a beam of light to the ground intermittently” and then disappeared.

  Unlike the full reports we have on the Iranian, Peruvian, and Belgian aerial pursuits of UFOs by armed fighter jets, the more abbreviated NORAD logs do not reveal the mission of the U.S. Air Force scrambled jets. Would the pilots have fired at the UFOs if they were close enough and in a position to do so? Did they not consider the objects to be a potential threat to national security? What actions on the part of the objects could have provoked Air Force aggression? Defense Department reports state that UFOs were pursued by U.S. Air Force fighter planes after the objects hovered over three supersensitive nuclear missile launch sites, also in 1975, according to the Washington Post. “A string of the nation’s supersensitive nuclear missile launch sites and bomber bases were visited by unidentified low-flying and elusive objects,” the Post reported. The sightings were recorded on radar over installations in Montana, Michigan, and Maine. The objects hovered, in some cases as low as ten feet off the ground. “In several instances, after base security had been penetrated, the Air Force sent fighter planes and airborne command planes aloft to carry on the unsuccessful pursuit. The records do not indicate if the fighters fired on the intruders,” the Post continues (emphasis added).