by Dan Wright
The reporter said later, “There were bright globules of light pulsating and expanding, lighting up the foreshore and town of Kaikoura.” Wellington also saw the radar targets, about 13 miles from the plane. A spectacular light display ensued over the next 50 minutes, some of it captured on film. Individual objects' repeated disappearance and reappearance rendered filming difficult, though. 16
The next night, December 31, 2:15 a.m., the special-cargo Argosy left Christchurch for the return to Blenheim. Almost immediately a bright object out of place was observed, confirmed by onboard radar. Over time its distance ranged from 20 miles initially to 10 miles away. The filming went better this time as the object neither faded nor seemed to disappear. Through the lens it had a brightly lit base and perhaps a transparent dome. Soon the pilot decided to turn toward it, but the anomaly kept its relative distance. When he turned to get back on course, it approached and passed beneath the plane. From that point until their landing, the pilots and media crew saw occasional bright pulsating lights in their vicinity. Some of these were picked up on radar. Channel 0 chose NICAP to analyze the film. It was thereafter shown to multiple scientific gatherings. No scientist came forward to explain these radar/visual/photographic sightings as prosaic.17
Chapter 32
1979: Three Decades of Lies
CIA documents acquired by Ground Saucer Watch showed continuous CIA involvement since 1949, despite its repeated claim that it ceased interest in UFOs in 1952. An August 1, 1952, memo to the field called for continued surveillance while ordering that “no indication of C.I.A. interest or concern reach the press or public, in view of their probably alarmist tendencies ...” An October 2, 1952, report had revealed the Agency's concern that UFO sightings could mask Russian air attacks or possibly “psychological warfare.” Several documents detailed Air Force attempts to intercept or destroy UFOs, for example the 1976 incident over Iran. Spaulding of GSW pointed to patterns of sightings around military and research installations. He claimed that two retired Air Force colonels admitted on record the recoveries of crashed UFOs in Mexico (1948) as well as near Kingman, Arizona (1953). A thousand files verified that “the government has been lying to us all these years,” Spaulding added.1
A January 18, 1979, article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press quoted William Spaulding, who declared the Air Force and CIA conspired to cover up UFO surveillance of military bases. He said he could back the charge with 1,000 pages of documents released under the FOIA. Further documents, film, and landing site residue were pending release. “We have information to categorically prove the government is lying and that significant findings have been suppressed.” He added, “We have five ex-intelligence officers who will testify to this cover-up.” Spaulding asserted US embassies were used to gather UFO data and send it to the CIA, NSA, and the White House.2
Likewise, on January 18, the British Parliament's House of Lords debated whether to establish an official government study of UFOs. Lord Davies of Leek was among those who supported the motion to advance a proposal to examine the subject: “If one human being out of the tens of thousands who allege to have seen these phenomena is telling the truth, then there is a dire need for us to look into the matter.” In the end, the House of Lords voted not to pursue the subject.3
The next day, January 19, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that GSW's Spaulding accused the Air Force and CIA of hiding UFO surveillance of military bases. He said documents obtained via FOIA supported his allegation.4
On NBC, host Jane Pauley of the Today Show on January 24 discussed the UFO subject with Spaulding. Pauley said the Defense Department had confirmed that unidentified objects visited nuclear missile and weapons sites in 1975. But unidentified did not necessarily mean saucers. Who was it? The intrusions were kept secret until Ground Saucer Watch used the FOIA. Who saw these UFOs in 1975? Spaulding's reply: The intruders were observed mostly by military security, on radar tracks at the bases, and by NORAD. They were also seen by sabotage alert teams and missile site personnel; people and equipment confirmed the reality of it. The remainder of the transcript was deleted.5
In a March 15, 1979, letter to ABKCO Films, Charles Wilson, Chief of the Agency's Plans and Policy Branch, emphatically asserted, “There is no organized effort to do research in connection with the UFO phenomena, nor has there been an organized effort since the 1950's.”6
In the August 1979 issue of Second Look magazine, two letter writers discussed disparate personalities George Adamski, John Keel, and Jacques Vallee plus the December 31, 1978, New Zealand aerial sighting.7
The New York Times Magazine, in its October 14, 1979, issue, retold the account of October–November 1975 Air Force base intrusions in “U.F.O. Files: The Untold Story.” The author outlined the incidents at Loring, Wurtsmith, Minot, and Malmstrom USAF bases across the northern tier of the United States plus the Falconbridge, Ontario, RCAF base. The unknowns were verified visually and on radar from 200 to 15,000+ feet, sometimes as slow as 7 mph. Officials referred to the Loring and Wurtsmith incidents as helicopters but offered no firm identification. One report said the unknown “demonstrated a clear intent in the weapons storage area.”8
The Joint Chiefs, NSA, CIA, and DIA were informed daily by the Air Force. FOIA-released papers showed that government agencies “remained perplexed about the nagging residue of unexplained U.F.O. sightings”—about 10 percent of all reports. Over three decades, UFOs had concerned the entire military, intelligence, and State officialdom. “But it is the CIA that appears to have played the key role in the controversy, and may even be responsible for the Government's conduct in U.F.O. investigations throughout the years.”9
While you were away from your desk . . .
January 3, 1979
At approximately 7:00 p.m., three adults and a teen were driving near Hialeah, Florida, when the engine died. The driver got out and immediately saw a fast-approaching bright object emitting a buzzing sound. He found himself surrounded by blinding light. Two hours later police found him ten miles away. The others in the car verified the buzzing noise, the bright light, and the driver's disappearance.10
April 11, 1979
At Gormanston Saddle, Tasmania, a taxi driver was on his way to a passenger pickup when he came upon an oddity hovering over gravel by the road. The greenish light, about 30 inches in diameter, was tinged in purple. The light proceeded directly over his vehicle, illuminating the interior. His engine died and the two-way radio was inoperable for one minute until the light slid in front of the taxi and abruptly vanished. The driver was able to continue without further incident.11
July 10, 1979
Near Pinheiro, Brazil, at 1:00 a.m., a wealthy farmer was walking close to home when he was chased by a bright bluish light. He shone his flashlight on it and in turn was struck by a powerful beam that knocked him to the ground. When he regained consciousness in the morning, one arm was completely numb; his spine, kidneys, and right side were painful; his right leg would not support him without a cane. He had no appetite for the next eight days.12
August 27, 1979
At 1:40 a.m., in Marshall County, Minnesota, a deputy sheriff was driving toward a brilliant light near a stand of trees. Still a mile away, the light suddenly rushed and hit the cruiser in an instant. The deputy awoke across the road, his head on the steering wheel and skid marks on the pavement. He radioed in at 2:19 a.m. His windshield, hood, left headlight, overhead light, and two antennas were damaged. Both the dashboard clock and his wristwatch were 14 minutes slow. He was treated for flash burns to his eyes. Extensive investigation could not account for the effects.13
Chapter 33
1980-81: Disclosure at Home and Away
In October 1980 came a translation of “Flying Saucers in China,” a compilation of detailed letters by eyewitnesses of distant encounters years before.1
Translated from Russian, a 1980 edition (no calendar date given) of the voluminous journal Bibliography of Parapsychology included two articles of interest: “Methodo
logy of Search for the Manifestation of the Activity of Space Civilizations on Earth,” by V. I. Avinskiy, 1974; and Sovetskaya Etnograftiya No. 2, “UFO and UFO-nauts in the Light of Folklore,” by Sanarov, March-April 1979.2
On January 26, 1981, a Foreign Broadcast Information Service report included a translation of an article in Nature Journal titled “Preliminary Survey of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in China.” In the previous half-year, nearly 100 eyewitness accounts were collected. The objects could be divided into three shapes:
Disc or globe, including ovular and egg-shaped. In daylight they appeared silvery; at night they emitted a red-orange brilliance. These appeared in about 80 percent of all reports. They were frequently accompanied by a white cloud or vapor mass.
Huge, long objects, even exceeding 1,000 meters. These rarely made an appearance.
Spiral nebula, consisting of a brightly lit central core and revolving arms composed of small points of light radiating from the core. Their volume was sometimes enormous.
Summaries of incidents from the late 1970s involving each type were offered.3
“Prior to 1978, ‘flying saucer’ incidents were virtually unheard of in China,” though numerous reports from earlier time periods were recorded. Eyewitnesses included scientists, technicians, pilots, teachers, and other reliable observers. Frequently tens, hundreds, or even thousands of witnesses were present. “Possibilities that they were fabricated, imagined, or were rare psychological phenomena are not great.” Recognizing all the known objects and phenomena that could be mistaken, applying such resolutions to some cases was “extremely farfetched.” China's UFO reports were “pedestrian” in terms of strangeness: no power outages or interrupted communications, no photos or movies taken, no trace material, no peril to individuals or to social order, and no entity sightings. 4
The assistant director of OSI, Herbert Scoville, drafted a reply to Congressman Joseph Karth for approval by the legislative counsel. OSI had received numerous letters from Leon Davidson in recent years and referred all of them to the Air Force, the executive agent on such matters. In the attached letter, Scoville stated further, “In summary, Mr. Davidson's belief that this Agency is involved in the ‘flying saucer furor’ and is using this as a tool in psychological warfare is entirely unfounded.”5
As reported by The Washington Post on November 3, 1981, the National Security Agency squared off again with a citizen group demanding that its files on the UFO subject be opened to the public. This time the setting was the federal appeals court for Washington, D.C. An NSA spokesperson denied having any related documents: “The US government says it keeps no records on unidentified flying objects, because they don't exist.” Yet, over 10 million Americans claimed to have seen a UFO. The court battle contested 131 specific NSA files claimed to be UFO-related.6
Would disclosure hurt NSA eavesdropping? District Judge Gerhard Gesell, upon privately reading a 21-page NSA summary of the contested files, ruled they were too sensitive to release. In federal appeals court, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) argued that the Agency, having for years argued UFOs posed no security risk, “cannot have it both ways.” The FOIA suit challenged NSA, CIA, and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) policy “to withhold virtually anything they want under the guise of national security.” The 1978 FOIA release of USAF and CIA documents revealed 1975 intrusions of missile sites and nuclear storage sites by unconventional objects unsuccessfully pursued by Air Force fighters.7
In a November 3 CBS Radio Network report, Peter Gersten of CAUS said UFOs pose “a real military threat.” In 1977 he had argued in federal court that intelligence agencies must open their UFO files to the public. In 1979, the CIA released 900 UFO-related documents. In its file search the Agency found 131 documents originating in the NSA and thereafter returned them. The newest CAUS lawsuit was seeking those.8
In a “Viewpoint” opinion in the Fairfax Journal, November 30, 1981, Larry W. Bryant of CAUS followed up Peter Gersten's earlier remarks. Critics simplistically demanded infallible proof of UFOs, he said, but private investigative groups had no resources to provide it. Accepted legal proof was a valid substitute. Gersten, at the 12th annual MUFON International Symposium, detailed FOIA court actions to counter “a systematic effort by the federal government to suppress its hard-core evidence of UFO reality.” The CIA might have been excused from FOIA rules. The National Security Agency declined in court to release 131 documents via FOIA “on the grounds that to do so would jeopardize national security.” Earlier, government agencies had said UFOs posed no security threat. Bryant thus invited principals in the cover-up to please come forward.9
While you were away from your desk . . .
US District Judge Gerhard Gesell signed a court decision supporting the refusal by the National Security Agency to declassify and release 131 UFO-related documents that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Judge Gesell remarked that such a release “could seriously jeopardize the work of the agency and the security of the United States.” The judge himself had seen only a 21-page summary of the documents, prepared by the NSA for his review. In response to a later FOIA request for a copy of that summary, the NSA blacked out the great majority of the verbiage then allowed its release.10
Chapter 34
1982-85: Habeas Corpus and Hudson Valley
On June 24, 1947, the modern UFO era began. In the same week 35 years later, Fred Whiting of the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) said, “There is considerable evidence to support the theory that some of these unidentified flying objects are extraterrestrial spacecraft, but there isn't any proof of it.” FUFOR had sued both the CIA and NSA and obtained 3,000 pages of government documents.1
In a September 30, 1982, letter to CIA Deputy Director John McMahon, Sid Zins of MGM/UA Entertainment invited McMahon to a showing of the film “Endangered Species,” which addressed the topic of ongoing cattle mutilations. Some ascribed responsibility to UFO involvement.2
In July 1983 Larry Bryant, for Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C., federal district court, demanding that the Air Force release “the remains of the extraterrestrial being or beings” allegedly held in secret custody. Said captives, if they were still alive, were allegedly subjected to “unwarranted deprivation of their right to travel.” Bryant named the Pentagon, Air Force, Army, attorney general, CIA, and other national security agencies in the action.3
The year 1984 was devoid of any official CIA involvement in the UFO controversy.
Calendar year 1985 began quietly in terms of the frequency of UFO events reported. One incident in January raised eyebrows, however. At 4:10 a.m. on an undetermined date sometime before January 30, an Estonian airliner 120 km from Minsk, Belarus, encountered a bright light in the distance which, momentarily, shone a cone of light toward the ground, then a second and third. Then it appeared to become a green cloud. After first hesitating, the flight engineer contacted ground control. Immediately the unknown approached the plane, shining a blinding beam onto it. The controller on the ground said he found nothing on radar.
The unknown suddenly stopped in the air, dropped below the plane, then rose vertically, darted about, and finally paced the airliner at 10,000 meters and 800 km/hr. Lights within the cloud now twinkled. A tornado- like tail came out of it before it changed from elliptical to quadrangular in shape, then to a sharp-nosed “cloud airplane.” The crew discussed what to tell the passengers—surface lights, the aurora, or something else normal? There were simply no easy explanations.4
An airline crew approaching from the opposite direction first saw nothing then described the cloud precisely. As the targeted plane passed over Riga and Vilnius, ground controllers detected the tandem of plane and cloud. They passed by two lakes and the nucleus within the cloud shone a beam toward the ground, allowing the crew to determine its size as equal to one of the lakes.
After the plane's safe landing came a statement by the deputy chairman of the Co
mmission on Aerodynamic Phenomena of the [Soviet] All-Union Council of Scientific and Technical Societies:
The fact that the object instantly changed its movement to the opposite direction and reached the ground with a beam of light from a very high altitude is unquestionably atypical. It was really very huge. It was natural to assume that somewhere distant, many thousands of kilometers away, a global atmospheric or geophysical process of a type still unknown to science is taking place (emphasis added). But it seemed to the aviators only that it was somewhere close by—a typical optical illusion, so to speak.5
What can one say? Wow.
In March of 1985, Ernest Volkman wrote an article for Penthouse magazine about the United States and high-tech espionage. He began the article with a recap of the June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold sighting. Volkman drew his own conclusions, asserting: “[O]nly a handful of people knew exactly what Arnold had seen. They knew that he had inadvertently spotted America's most secret intelligence operation.” As part of an intercontinental aerial spying program called Moby Dick, Skyhook balloons had been outfitted with cameras. Arnold witnessed a Skyhook test flight, the author claimed. The remainder of the article covered advancements in spy planes and satellites. Note: Arnold recalled counting nine objects in a line. Nine stories-tall balloons in such close proximity—indeed formation—is highly improbable.6