In 1961, regardless of the differences in the Roswell story from the many different sources who had described it, the top-secret file of Roswell information came into my possession when I took over the Foreign Technology desk at R&D. My boss, General Trudeau, asked me to use the army’s ongoing weapons development and research program as a way to filter the Roswell technology into the mainstream of industrial development through the military defense contracting program. Today, items such as lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests are all commonplace. Yet the seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell and turned up in my file fourteen years later.10
Even as late as 2010, former air force officers were coming forward with incredible stories of UFO encounters at air force bases. One of them, Captain Robert Salas, stated at a press conference on September 23, 2010, “The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases, and we can prove it.”11 Salas and six others claimed that UFOs were regularly interfering with U.S. nuclear missile sites. “The group plans to distribute declassified U.S. government documents at the event (press conference) that they claim will substantiate the reality of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites extending back to 1948. The press conference will also address present-day concerns about the abuse of government secrecy as well as the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.”12
Following the tremendous Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, the Ford administration tried to rebuild public trust in the presidency by exposing previous administrations’ secrets and purging the presidency of its secrets. Unfortunately, this only exposed the public to more than it had ever asked for, and trust of the government reached the lowest levels ever. Combined with the Freedom of Information Act, the documents of exposed government activities throughout history inundated the public with the idea of a secret, rogue government that was not working for the people’s best interests. Exposure of J. Edgar Hoover’s massive wiretapping programs, Kennedy’s use of mafia hit men to make assassination attempts against Castro, and the CIA’s random drugging of civilians to test the efficacy of LSD and other hallucinogens fueled the fire of distrust and discontent.
Then, in typical conspiracy form, mysterious documents were suddenly making the rounds in UFO groups. Known as Majestic 12, they were first discovered in 1984 and became public in 1987. The UFO conspiracy raged on simultaneously and, in many ways, in confluence with the exposure of political/military conspiracies.
In May of 1987, as dramatic testimony before the Iran-Contra investigating committee dominated headlines, three authors announced an informant had provided them with proof of the Roswell conspiracy … Stamped ‘Top Secret: Majic Eyes Only,’ the memo allegedly briefed the president on a complex plot involving a flying saucer crash at Roswell, the military’s recovery of four decomposed alien bodies, the weather balloon cover story, and a massive governmental cover up, code named Operation Majestic 12, or MJ-12.13
And as reported in the New York Times, “Enthusiasts are now even charging that for 40 years the Federal Government has harbored evidence of an encounter with extraterrestrial creatures, including their lifeless bodies and damaged spacecraft. That startling report, dismissed by skeptics and Government officials as laughable, is contained in what purport to be top-secret Government papers from the Eisenhower era.”14
As the government’s lies and indiscretions over the past decades became exposed, the UFO conspiracy theory became even more entrenched. Likewise, popular culture’s focus on these conspiracies and their exposure fueled films such as All the President’s Men. The UFO conspiracy theorists had their own “Deep Throat,” someone who was passing top-secret documents to them, and former air force officials who were telling them, point blank, that the government was conspiring to cover up the wreckage of a flying saucer.
Belief systems can often be about role-playing. Indeed we all role-play to some extent in our lives, but belief systems involving conspiracies or the paranormal can often spin wildly out of control or become an all-encompassing role in which the individual sees him- or herself as the sole possessor of knowledge that will somehow change the course of human history. Certainly the knowledge of extraterrestrials is something that would alter our understanding of the world in which we live. However, playing the role of savior of humanity can often lead the individual down paths of logic to illogical outcomes. Their need to expose the “truth” can oftentimes lead them to purport such “truths” that are impossible to verify and thus actually obscure the process of revelation. But the exposure of actual political conspiracies by the government, journalists, and the public has had its effects in the paranormal world. The assassination of JFK and the democratization of expertise and investigation, combined with the Freedom of Information Act, opened the door for believers in UFOs to investigate and document for themselves the inconsistencies of government public policy and to debate the conclusions reached by their investigatory panels. The UFO community is awash in conspiracy—secret documents, hoaxes, government denial, cover stories, whistle-blowers, men in black, government espionage, and inexplicable witness testimony. The UFO believers find themselves in possession of a truth with various forms of evidence, but they are up against a massive entity that has quite successfully labeled them as kooks and laughed off their accusations as paranoid delusions. However, they’re not all paranoid…
One of the elements to any conspiracy or suspicion of conspiracy is the government involving itself to a greater or lesser extent. Often, that government involvement is disruptive, deceptive, resistive, and anonymous. Some of J. Edgar Hoover’s exposed activities involved disinformation and government involvement in several social movements, which Hoover considered communist or detrimental to the United States. Similarly, the CIA was exposed as being involved in the deceptive manipulation of different groups both in and outside of the United States. Subsequently, UFO believers were apt to believe that the government was also engaged in manipulation of their cause. And they have not been altogether mistaken.
“Any legitimate analysis that tries to explain beliefs about UFOs must recognize that the UFO subculture is awash in disinformation spread by government personnel, and that has played an enormous role in shaping the subculture … Virtually all UFO investigators who make regular public presentations are from time to time approached by people who claim to have seen materials or documents while in military service that confirmed that the government has UFO projects.”15
Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood authored a 1984 account of government involvement in UFO research entitled Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. The account, however, is not a compendium of UFO kookery, but rather an exhaustively researched work that uses the Freedom of Information Act to bolster its assertions and show that the government really does know more than it is revealing, just as it did in the JFK assassination, in Watergate, and in any number of other conspiracy-riddled government flashpoints. Working in conjunction with Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), and Ground Saucer Watch (GSW), Fawcett and Greenwood lobbied the Air Force, the CIA, and the NSA for all of their records concerning UFO activity. Naturally, these organizations resisted; however, CAUS took its case to court and was almost heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. The organizations finally remitted some of their documentation, which revealed numerous studies, incidents, and interactions between the U.S. government and Unidentified Flying Objects, including many intrusions into protected U.S. airspace and restricted airspace over nuclear weapons facilities. There were also many instances of air force fighters being scrambled to intercept the UFO but coming up with nothing. For instance, the following is part of a message from the commander in charge of NORAD, dated November 11, 1975:
Missile Site Personnel, Security Alert Teams, and Air Defense Personnel at Malmst
rom, Montana report an object between 9500 ft. and 1500 ft. which sounded like a jet aircraft. FAA advised there were no jet aircraft in the vicinity. Malmstrom search and height radars carried the object from 0807532 thru 09002 Nov. 75. F-106s scrambled from Malmstrom could not make contact due to darkness and low altitude. Site personnel reported the object as low as 200 ft and said that as the interceptors approached, the lights went out. After the interceptors had passed, the lights came on again, one hour after they returned to base. Missile site personnel reported the object increased to a high speed, raised in altitude and could not be discerned from the stars.16
This is only one of many incidents that would never have been revealed or known, had CAUS not fought for the right to view the information. So obviously, yes, the government knew more than it told the public, and its repeated assertions that it was not interested in the UFO phenomenon were rendered inaccurate by the records. Certainly, one would hope the government would be interested in anything that could so easily thwart its defenses.
Perhaps even more fascinating was the National Security Agency’s assessment of the UFO phenomenon. It offered five possible explanations, none of which is very comforting. First, it postulates that all UFOs are hoaxes, but then determines this cannot be the case because the phenomena have been witnessed all over the world from ancient times. Moreover, if they were all hoaxes then it would signify a “mental aberration of alarming proportions.” Second, it postulates that UFOs are hallucinations; however, this assertion would also have serious repercussions for humanity if it were true: “The negative effect on man’s ability to survive in an increasingly complex world would be considerable…” Third, it offers the possibility that UFOs are natural phenomena; however, if this is the case, “the capability of air warning systems to correctly diagnose an attack situation is open to serious question” because of UFOs being recorded on radar and missile tracking systems. The fourth option is that UFOs are secret terrestrial projects, which would obviously not be good for the U.S. military dominance. Lastly, the NSA postulates that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin. This is the most disconcerting of the NSA’s assessments because “History has shown us time and time again the tragic results of a confrontation between a technologically superior civilization and a technologically inferior people. The inferior is usually subject to conquest.”17 Presented with these options, the government would have no choice but to take seriously the reports of UFO activity around the world.
However, as intriguing and revealing as these documents were, “conspiracy-think” took over the judgment within the UFO communities. Similar to past instances of government revelation, the groups began to suspect that what the government had chosen to show them was merely the tip of the iceberg. It is certainly true that some top-secret documents were not allowed to be revealed, and many others had been blacked out so extensively that the document amounted to nothing more than a date and a signature. Naturally, the government must have its secrets, but this has caused many in the UFO circles to ask the question, “What haven’t they told us?” The logical determination is that the government must have truly earth-shaking information, which it will not reveal for security purposes. Hence, the Roswell conspiracy fits quite well into the history of UFO research and their use of the Freedom of Information Act.
Also, the belief that the government is not revealing the truth creates belief in a “secret government” which is ultimately pulling the strings on world events, all with the backdrop of secret UFO knowledge. Considering the time during which Fawcett and Greenwood published their work and the discovery of the Majestic-12 documents, however, the idea of a secret government had a factual basis. As indicated previously, this was during the Reagan administration and the Oliver North/Iran-Contra hearings in which it was revealed that a subset of the U.S. government had acted on its own and traded with Iranian militants and armed Nicaraguan Contras. The CIA had used money from the sale of Nicaraguan drugs (which probably flowed across the border into the United States, further fueling the drug epidemic) to purchase weapons from the Iranians to give to the Contras. With all this being revealed on Capitol Hill, the idea of a secret CIA/NSA-dominated government cabal did not seem all that impossible. The idea of a rogue, secret government stirred a sense of paranoia. Take, for instance, a man who reported the following about his friend, an air force radar intercept officer who had told him about the disappearance of two F-4 Phantoms as they pursued a UFO. “The last thing I had heard was that he had been killed in action someplace near Da Nang … He was part of a special unit in 1969. I’m trying to remember what it was. He had been trained by the NSA, but the group he was working with specifically had their own special radar set up. It was probably sponsored by the NSA…”18 The implication is, of course, that the officer’s revelation of the UFO incident led to the NSA moving him to Vietnam and orchestrating his death. A rogue government does not adhere to common laws, and acts with extreme prejudice in its own interests.
In 1980, Linda Moulton Howe won an Emmy Award for her hour-long documentary entitled A Strange Harvest,19 which gave a detailed look at the cattle mutilations that had been occurring in the United States and in other parts of the world since the late sixties. Along with many of these reports of cattle mutilations were coinciding reports of UFO activity and sightings of black, military-type helicopters. UFO groups, who had been tracking the reports for quite some time, quickly pounced upon the film. The cattle were usually found with their blood drained, sexual organs removed, and colon removed with supposedly surgical-like precision. No tracks were found around the bodies, including the tracks of the cattle themselves. Furthermore, reports of mysterious, unmarked black helicopters with armed men dressed in black arriving at the scenes of UFO sightings and cattle mutilations abound in UFO literature. The black helicopters, manned by military-type personnel, appeared to be both in pursuit of UFOs and engaged in an effort to silence witnesses and remove all evidence before it could be made public. All the conclusions reached by the UFO groups appear to point toward a rogue, secret government actively trying to keep the most important discovery in the history of mankind under tight wraps. The idea of a secret rogue government was born out of the Kennedy assassination where, for the first time, the public fear was not that the U.S. government was being subverted by outside forces, but rather that the government itself was acting independently of checks and balances—working in secrecy, committing acts of murder, kidnapping, and worse, all to keep the American public in the dark. This belief was reinforced by Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to quickly close the JFK investigation, and by the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. Furthermore, it was Johnson’s effort to make the government more transparent in order to preserve democracy that enabled these groups to confirm some of their suspicions and to speculate even more fantastically as to the extent of government subversion of the American people. The UFO conspiracy was born out of actual conspiracies, in combination with the mystery of things seen in the sky by ordinary people and a government that continued to deny the reality of those sightings, while privately investigating and cataloguing them.
An obvious example of the influence of government conspiracies on the culture of ufology is the terminology employed by the various groups and individuals: “…one of the four major conclusions to which I have arrived, after 50 years of study and investigation, is that the subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate.”20 Stanton Friedman concludes that there are people within the government who know that some UFOs are controlled by intelligent beings, but not everyone in government is aware of this. Thus, it amounts to a conspiracy, modeled after the Watergate scandal.
One of the arguments lobbied against conspiracy theorists is that the very same government officials and agencies thought to be so efficient and secretive as to have kept this information secret and simultaneously discredited investigators through a vigorous disinformation campaign are the same goof-ups that somehow allow information such as the Majestic-12 documents t
o be leaked. While the argument is true in principle, it does not account for some of the secrets the government has successfully kept throughout the years. The atom bomb, despite its blinding blast, was successfully hidden from the public along with the health effects on local residences; and the stealth bomber was kept under wraps until its unveiling during the first Gulf War. In fact there are many cover-ups and conspiracies that have only come to light when the government determined that it was acceptable. As the CIA often says, “people only hear about our screw-ups, they will never know of our successes.” It is conceivable that certain factions of the government could be holding information now that is deemed too important to be divulged at this time. There have been government leaks in the past: take, for instance, the aforementioned press release concerning former military officials stating that UFOs were regularly causing disturbances to nuclear missile sites, something that is documented in Fawcett and Greenwood’s work. Or take Lt. Col. Philip Corso’s assertion that he was given the task of feeding alien technology into the private sector for development. Government officials have come forward in the past, and some may come forward in the future. If these men were whistle-blowers of a giant corporation asserting that the corporation had engaged in a massive cover-up, such as the Enron case, the press would immediately be investigating, as would the government. Or if there were mysterious insiders detailing how the president was engaged in a massive spying and subversion ring in order to discredit his opponents, there would be front-page coverage and films starring Robert Redford. However, in the case of UFOs, the pleas and testimonies fall on deaf ears of a public and media that either don’t want to hear it or believe that these are merely lies and hoaxes perpetrated by publicity hounds and tricksters.
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