by Leslie Kean
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.
The meaning and implications of these two lines, especially the second one, are well worth considering. Line one is actually not surprising, since a great deal is known about longstanding Russian research and military interest in the UFO phenomenon. In line two, the statement “I am aware” means that the writer is stating a fact: the informal group exists. An “informal group” is one which provides nothing in writing and leaves no records behind, one that escapes oversight by House or Senate committees, and might be set up this way because its work runs counter to established policy. It could be part of a SAP. As defined by Nick Pope, “an informal group would be a loose network of individuals, perhaps in a number of different agencies, coming together to discuss a particular issue, but without formal terms of reference.”
The second half of this sentence begins with “it is possible”—unlike “I am aware,” this phrase is not stating a fact, but only a possibility. This too is actually quite revealing. One must question why this intelligence officer could not get more information about the nature of this group from his closest ally. He has not been told much at all about the nature of the “informal group” and was not able to determine whether this reflected any more of a “formal” structure, something properly constituted. This attests to the highly secret, deeply buried nature of the informal group.
If indeed this interpretation is correct, and I have every reason to believe that it is, this document references a secret group within the U.S. intelligence world actively studying UFOs. It is a much more important piece of paper than any new case reports released recently by the MoD, which have received all the attention. The public position of the U.S. government is that they haven’t investigated UFOs since 1970, when Project Blue Book was closed down. But this British document—the provenance of which is beyond dispute—potentially blows this claim out of the water. According to this analysis, the United States is studying UFOs. But by doing so in the way revealed by the UK, the program is operating behind the backs not only of the public and the media, but also of Congress, the Senate, and the president. However, this is in no way “proof” or definitive since we’ll never receive proper confirmation as to the missing words, which remain classified.
I approached Nick Pope hoping to receive some clues, some hidden message. But he is too much of a pro ever to be caught off guard. He acknowledges that he helped his DIS colleague with the drafting of the proposal for the UFO study, and can recall which two countries were redacted from the document. I asked him about my assessment of the two missing words, and whether he could respond in any way to it. “No comment” was his reply.
This material, though intriguingly suggestive, is in no way definitive. Taking a step back, we must reflect once again on what we actually know, in order to move forward. Caution, or even understatement, must be the name of the game when dealing with the unaccepted subject of UFOs. The reality of what we do know is extraordinary enough.
For many, the process of discernment is not easy. Conspiracy theorists and the television media have fueled an intricate, rumor-based mythology around the idea of a cover-up, leading some to write off the whole subject of UFOs as inane science fiction, and others to swallow every morsel offered. Those in the middle have no way of sorting out the valid information from the fanciful, which get all mixed into one big pot of unhealthy soup. (This is essentially self-made disinformation, and no secret agents are needed to disseminate it since the media and large swaths of the so-called UFO community take care of that themselves.) But behind all the extreme reactions is the actual fact that the state doesn’t seem to want us to know UFOs exist. Since we know they do exist, we have to assume that the government knows that, too. If so, why is it hiding this, and what is it hiding? People are desperate for answers, and very frustrated, and they have understandably come to deeply mistrust our government on this issue.
Some take advantage of this situation. So-called whistleblowers at varying levels of psychological health and mental clarity regularly jump into the pot—people who have no relationship to the credible sources I referred to earlier—claiming direct knowledge of some aspect of a sinister government cover-up. Undiscriminating UFO groups have made them or their spokespeople into heroes and trotted them out at press conferences, offering them up like sacrificial lambs to be promptly ridiculed by the few media that bother to take note. And in ma
ny of these clearly unfounded cases, the ridicule is well deserved. Others market themselves as scholars or activists, making baseless accusations and claims about government misdeeds regarding UFOs, based on rumor rather than record. These extremists only serve to muddy the waters and compound the public relations nightmare that UFOs already face within public discourse. Sadly, this is the only kind of UFO information that so many Americans have been exposed to.
Putting the hype aside, serious investigators and retired officials make the legitimate point that the known facts alone, such as those raised so far in this book, do lead to perplexing, unanswered questions about U.S. government secrecy. In 1999, the French COMETA group chastised the United States for what it calls an “impressive repressive arsenal” of tactics protecting UFO information, including a policy of disinformation and military regulations prohibiting public disclosure of sightings. Air Force Regulation 200–2, “Unidentified Flying Objects Reporting,” for example, prohibits the release to the public and the media of any data about “those objects which are not explainable.” An even more restrictive procedure is outlined in the Joint Army Navy Air Force Publication 146, which threatens to prosecute anyone under its jurisdiction—including pilots, civilian agencies, merchant marine captains, and even some fishing vessels—for disclosing reports of those sightings relevant to U.S. security. Fortunately, I am not aware of any cases in which such extreme actions were taken.
But we do know for sure, as shown by the Bolender memo and government files released through the FOIA, that the U.S. government has had some level of involvement in UFO investigations since the close of Project Blue Book, despite claims to the contrary. Nevertheless, officials are usually irrationally unresponsive to unfolding UFO events, as they were during the Hudson Valley sightings in the 1980s, and provide ridiculous and false explanations when pressed.
We also know that UFO documents have been previously classified by government agencies, as shown by their later release through the Freedom of Information Act, and that some information still remains so. National Security Agency UFO files were released in 1997, following a lawsuit years earlier, but they were so heavily redacted (the NSA stated all deletions had to do with protecting sensitive sources and methods) that they were virtually useless. In response to FOIA requests, agencies have initially denied having documents on file which turn up later somewhere else, or are found in a second search. Researchers have discovered that in many UFO cases for which official reports were filed at the time, none can be found later when looking in the logical places. And as also stated in the Bolender memo, UFO reports affecting national security were to be filed outside the Blue Book system. Where are these files, and why can’t they all be released?
Over the years, even senior government officials have made an effort to access hidden UFO evidence. Senator Barry Goldwater attempted to penetrate the vaults at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the home of Project Blue Book, during the UFO “golden age” of the 1960s, and described his efforts in a series of letters he wrote in response to inquiries years later. Goldwater, a licensed pilot and retired major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, had studied reputable pilot reports and had a longtime interest in the subject. He was convinced that a secret UFO program did exist. “About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret,” he wrote in a 1975 letter.2
In a 1981 letter to a researcher, Goldwater said that, regarding this effort, “I have had one long string of denials from chief after chief, so I have given up … this thing has gotten so highly classified, even though I will admit there is a lot of it that has been released, it is just impossible to get anything on it.”3 And in 1983 he wrote: “I have no idea of who controls the flow of ‘need-to-know’ because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it my business since.”4
Finally, when asked during a 1994 radio interview, Senator Goldwater said: “I think the government does know. I can’t back that up, but I think that at Wright-Patterson field, if you could get into certain places, you’d find out what the Air Force and the government knows about UFOs … I called Curtis LeMay and I said, ‘General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Could I go in there?’ I’ve never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out, and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again!’”5
A year later, in 1995, New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff announced the results of a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation, which he initiated on behalf of his constituents, attempting to access records related to events surrounding a mysterious crash in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, which has become famous due to the popular belief that what came down was a flying saucer. “The GAO report states that the outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) for this period of time were destroyed without proper authority,” Schiff explained in his press release. “It is my understanding that these outgoing messages were permanent records, which should never have been destroyed. The GAO could not identify who destroyed the messages, or why.”6 The Air Force had claimed for nearly half a century that the crashed object was a weather balloon. In 1994, while Schiff was waiting for results from the GAO, it retracted that statement and announced that the crash debris actually came from a then-classified device to detect evidence of possible Soviet nuclear testing.7 Naturally, that delayed explanation raised enough new questions to keep the Roswell controversy going, one that includes a volume of compelling witness testimony contradicting the Air Force position. The unsuccessful efforts of both Goldwater and Schiff to obtain information through official channels do not prove a cover-up of knowledge about what UFOs are, as so many would like to believe, but they do reveal how difficult it is to acquire definitive information about UFOs from the U.S. government.
In fact, each component used to argue that excessive government secrecy shows there is an official cover-up of knowledge about UFOs could have a host of possible alternative explanations. We know that the FOIA does not work efficiently, and that the complicated bureaucracy involved with record keeping is overwhelmed and not well organized. UFOs might logically be on the bottom of the list of priorities. And where are all those who would have worked on this deep, black program—hundreds or thousands of specialists, or their surviving family members? Certainly at least a few would feel the moral imperative to share knowledge or discoveries about UFOs with the rest of humanity, and would take the risk of doing so, perhaps even seeking shelter in whistleblower protection programs. And yet there have been, so far as we know, no deathbed confessions or willed documents from any of these government scientists, nor have any wives revealed the truth about a Special Access Program on UFOs. Not even one. And finally, we have not seen the results of any truly fantastic back-engineered military technology that might have resulted from captured UFOs, despite rumors to the contrary.
Directives to military and government employees instructing them to keep sensitive matters quiet are standard operating procedure for a range of issues and a range of purposes. The sudden appearance of an unknown object creating havoc for Air Force pilots at sensitive air bases would not be something any military authorities would wish to make public, especially during the Cold War. If the military was unable to identify that something, it seems even more logical that the event would be kept under wraps. But this does not mean that there is a cover-up specifically of UFOs, or that we ever learned what the nature of these unknowns may have been. A host of national security concerns can compel government secrecy, and the military always prefers to err on the side of excessive secrecy rather than the opposite.
Returning to the easier analysis, perhaps the sensitive research projects hidden within the U.S. government avoid dealing with UFOs simply because even our most spe
cialized intelligence officials actually don’t know much about them and can see that there is nothing to be done one way or the other. The objects haven’t caused us harm and there are many other, more immediately dangerous and pressing issues to be addressed, involving human survival both economical and environmental. This would mean that the only cover-up in place is that which conceals any recognition that UFOs exist, and involves nothing more than that.
And this nonacknowledgment has its own logic. It makes sense that the authorities would have no motivation to announce publicly that there are apparently all-powerful unknown machines flying without restriction in our skies and beyond our control. Would our government want to acknowledge its own impotence in the face of something unidentified yet well-documented? Some authorities may worry about public panic, whether we know what they are or not. Even if the U.S. government acknowledged the presence of an unexplained phenomenon, the extraterrestrial hypothesis would become part of the debate, and if the thinking became that these likely are vehicles or drones from somewhere else, it would appear that they have complete power over us. What official body would want to unload such a bombshell in an already unstable world?