Hynek died of brain cancer in April 1986. The year before, wracked by the physical pain of the disease that was destroying him, he had a tumor removed from his brain. In the recovery room as the anesthesia began to wear off, his thoughts were elsewhere, his pain more emotional than physical. In a frail voice, he was overheard by his wife Mimi asking a question that had nagged at him for decades. “Why can’t they tell me?” he asked. “Even now?”
By the time Hynek passed away, the “they” that would not level with him were no longer exclusively within the United States, nor were they all taking orders from a military chain-of-command. In the same way that the UFO phenomenon is worldwide, the concealment of this explosive information had moved beyond the U.S. governmental structure.
Let us now examine this element of the cover-up, widening our sweep while going deeper at the same time.
An International Cover-Up
Through the years, and with increasing speed, other nations have made public statements about UFOs and released their own data. The nations of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and many others, have either made important statements about UFOs, or released sighting information that is available for anyone to examine.
Britain, France, Brazil, Sweden, and New Zealand, for instance, have released thousands of pages of UFO reports. Even if some of these were for purely bureaucratic reasons (for example, to relieve government agencies from the burden of answering individual requests from citizens), there is no question that their data will be studied by many researchers for some time.
There is also the fact that key leaders of several nations have made statements about baffling UFO cases. This has happened in Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain, Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. Each time, however, the spokesperson has stopped short of admitting that UFOs represent something truly alien (unless giving a private opinion, which has happened many times).
Some official statements have come close, though. Case in point: the 1999 French COMETA Report. This was a government-sponsored study of UFO data that made the startling admission that UFOs strongly appeared to belong to an alien intelligence. Yet, the report was not considered an official statement of the French government, and became an orphan. It generated no public policies. No major political figure followed up.17
So, yes, there have been “disclosures” of varying types. But these are not Disclosure.
When we zoom out from merely a U.S. perspective to a global one, we can see that an international UFO phenomenon needs a coordinated international cover-up. It may seem difficult enough to control and manage this story within a single country, but it feels impossible to do so on a global level. Yet, this is what has happened.
A good analogy of how this international cooperation might work can be seen in the program known as Echelon. Echelon is a global intelligence operation involving, at the least, the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States, in cooperation with the NSA-equivalents of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Only Australia has admitted its participation, and America’s NSA refuses even to answer inquiries from Congress about its activities.
The program involves a comprehensive electronic sweeping and sharing of information among its members. This includes all forms of electronic communication, most notably e-mails, text messages, and telephone voice communications. Anyone, anywhere, can be monitored by Echelon.
Echelon’s significance in relation to the UFO cover-up is two-fold: it appears to be independent of national laws, and the American NSA holds the rank of first among equals.
In the same way that the Manhattan Project clarifies how Roswell could be swept under the rug, Echelon helps us understand how Majestic can operate successfully and maintain anonymity, even while controlling a global team of secret-keepers. In both cases, there is precedent from similar projects that have managed to pull off their own missions.
Paint It Black
The secrecy of the UFO reality has been matched only by the money that has gone into it. The decades-worth of moves and countermoves with an otherworldly intelligence have cost a great deal of money just to build the infrastructure and coordinate manpower.
Asking Congress to fund such a program is not an option. By its nature, the UFO/ET issue created an “end run” around the traditional American constitutional governance, for even elected representatives could not be trusted to maintain secrecy over such an awesome reality. As the secret-keepers saw it, funding needed to be covert, and even included such illegal non-governmental sources as drugs and guns. Think of such publicly known scandals as the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, then multiply.
Still, public tax dollars also pay for such activities. The funds come from the black budget—that is, classified federal spending, much of which is hidden from Congress. The black budget has evolved throughout the years into a system of Special Access Programs (SAP). From these have grown “unacknowledged” and “waived” SAPs. Publicly, these “do not exist”—except that they do. Better known as deep black programs, a 1997 U.S. Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress.” Persons involved in them were ordered to deny that their program existed, even to superior officers. Saying “no comment” was not good enough. Physical security for the program normally included “elaborate and expensive cover, concealment, deception, and operational security plans.”18 Such is a glimpse of the complex, compartmented, Byzantine system of Pentagon spending and secrecy.
We are talking about huge amounts of unaccounted-for money. During the last two decades, several Congressional inquiries have noted that many billions of dollars have gone missing from the federal system; some have even put the figure into the trillions of dollars. In 1994, a law was passed requiring the federal government to account for its money in a business-like way. As a result, several reports described the loss of gargantuan sums of money. The most perplexing of these claims came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on July 16, 2001, when he spoke to the House Appropriations Committee regarding the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2002 budget and stated, “The financial systems of the department are so snarled up that we can’t account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that’s believable.”19
The amount of $2.6 trillion seems incomprehensible, especially when the Pentagon had an annual budget of about one-eighth that amount. Lest one believe this was a simple mistake, members of Congress discussed the amount, and the Pentagon’s accounting office later amended it to $2.3 trillion. The number was clearly offered as legitimate. Secretary Rumsfeld could make such a statement because it was part of the fiscal mess he inherited from the Clinton administration. It should be noted, incidentally, that the amount of $2.3 trillion reflected accounting discrepancies, not necessarily “missing money.” In later months, a good portion of the discrepancy is said to have been resolved. Even after that, however, many hundreds of billions of dollars were apparently gone.20
How is it possible to lose track of so much money? How long had this problem been developing? Although answers are not forthcoming, others have occasionally asked.
One person was aviation journalist Bill Sweetman. In one of the few public investigations of Special Access Programs, Sweetman estimated there were roughly 150 SAPs within the Pentagon at the close of 1999, many of them unacknowledged. They often had independent systems of classification, with total control exercised by the program manager. Most interesting, he concluded that most SAPs were dominated not by Defense personnel, but private contractors. He had no idea how these programs were funded.21
The sprawling secrecy apparatus was discussed again in 2010 by Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin. After a two-year investigation, they concluded that America’s classified world “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist w
ithin it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”22
This structure applies to UFO secrecy. Considering the obvious importance of the UFO phenomenon and the need for a secret infrastructure to deal with it, a detached analyst can assume that there are several UFO-related black budget programs, and that some of the lost money has gone into funding them.
Follow the Wreckage
The U.S. has a history of government agencies existing in secret for long periods. The National Security Agency was founded in 1952, its existence hidden from all but a handful of Congressmen and Senators until the mid-1960s. Even today, little is known about the actual activities of the NSA. More secretive still is the National Reconnaissance Office, ostensibly charged with monitoring America’s network of spy satellites. Founded in 1960, the NRO remained completely secret from the American public for 30 years.
Secrecy develops its own raison d’etre. For it breeds not only power, but private gain, and it appears that much of the UFO secret went private. Consider the scenario of a crashed disc recovery, like the Roswell incident. An exotic object goes down, the U.S. military arrives on the scene, keeps the civilians away, collects all material and bodies, sanitizes the area, and transports everything to relevant facilities, whether these be at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Los Alamos National Laboratories, or Nevada’s Area 51.
Once the bodies and materials have been transported, then what? Clearly, they would need to be studied. While the branches of the U.S. military employ many brilliant minds, the fact remains: if the military wanted unfamiliar or extraterrestrial technology studied and replicated, then private contractors would be the answer. That is where most of the talent works and cutting-edge knowledge exists. When something needs to be built, one turns to General Electric, Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, SAIC, E-Systems, Hughes, Raytheon, Bell Laboratories, Bechtel, and other companies that could incorporate exotic technologies into new weapons and applications.
Through time, this would require giving up some amount of “ownership” of the technologies to the corporations. This is not such a bad option for the military. In the first place, generals and admirals know that once they retire, their best financial outlook will come from employment with some defense contractor. Privatizing the UFO secret also helps with secrecy. It means that all the secrets concerning UFOs and related technologies become not merely classified but proprietary. As such, they become even more impervious to public scrutiny. Responsible military and government officials could now say in all honesty that there are no known U.S. agencies charged with managing the UFO situation. Plausible deniability is critical.
Several sources from the covert world support the argument that control over the UFO secret has gravitated to the private world. One well-placed individual, with upper level connections to the CIA, told the authors that early in the 1980s, if not before, “the [UFO] program was transmogrified and became private, just as many, many other projects become private.” Another source, equally well placed, said that enormous sums had been spent on a deep black program to study extraterrestrial technology, providing the interesting fact that security for the program was seven to eight times more expensive than the science. The source held a strong opinion that private contractors had taken the lead role in the secrecy structure. Two other insiders with high-quality credentials also arrived at this judgment.23
In this vein, the story of Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson is revealing. During the late 1990s, Wilson was Chief of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position known as J-2. In 1997, UFO researcher Dr. Steven Greer and Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell obtained an audience with Wilson. The two expressed their concern about the “rogue” nature of certain Special Access Programs connected to the study of alien technology; that is, their concern regarding these programs were dominated not by government personnel, but by private contractors, possibly as runaway programs beyond formal government control.
According to statements later made by Greer and Mitchell, as well as another corroborated source, Wilson did look into the matter.24 After two months, Wilson found that the claims were true. When he was finally able to meet with a representative of the SAP (not the program manager but its attorney), the Admiral was told that he lacked a need to know about it. Indeed, the only reason he was even granted a meeting was to determine how he learned about the program.
But saying that the UFO secret has been privatized is not completely right, either. We are talking about a quasi-public, quasi-private matter, like parents with joint custody of a child. Indeed, the U.S. military and intelligence community serves as the ideal shield behind which this private-public entity operates. The team-up makes the entire organization more impervious to public requests for information. And the continuing connection to the black budget feeds it with intelligence and resources that exist because of America’s global military footprint.
Through time, however, the U.S. government lost a great deal of control over the secret, and even lost track of what it knew. A cloak of confusion descended over this important and life-altering matter.
When outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961 of the growing influence of “the military-industrial complex,” he might well have had the UFO situation in mind. He certainly saw the future.
Presidents and UFOs
There is much evidence that past U.S. presidents have been interested in UFOs, and there is some that they failed to learn all they wanted to know.
Given that Truman did know and probably formed Majestic, and that Eisenhower probably received a briefing upon entering office, it appears that these two presidents had some level of knowledge and control over the issue.
There are rumors about President John F. Kennedy, of how he told Marilyn Monroe, and of how his own intentions toward Disclosure ultimately may have gotten him killed. President Lyndon Johnson is thought to have been disinterested and to have passed the responsibility off to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. President Richard Nixon is widely perceived to have had knowledge, and there is a story that in February 1973, he took his close friend, the comedian Jackie Gleason, on a wild ride in Florida, showing him alien bodies at Homestead Air Force Base.25
Long before he was a U.S. president, Gerald Ford was a powerful U.S. Congressman. In 1966, when UFO sightings in his Michigan district had peaked, he called for a Congressional investigation. “In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that was thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomenon,” said the future president, adding, “I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on the subject.” The result was the Condon Report, that masterful manipulation initiated by the U.S. Air Force, which debunked the phenomenon. As president, Ford had nothing to say about UFOs, though in retirement he replied to an inquiry from a UFO researcher. “During my public career in Congress, as vice president, and president, I made various requests for any information on UFOs. The official authorities always denied the UFO allegations. As a result, I have no information that may be helpful to you.”26
Jimmy Carter saw a UFO when he was governor of Georgia and promised to open the files when he became president. “If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists,” said the candidate. “I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one.” He tried for a year to get NASA to accept UFO reports, but gave up. This much is part of the public record.
The actress Shirley MacLaine, who was close friends with several U.S. presidents, stated in a 1995 appearance on the Larry King Show that, “[President Jimmy Carter] told me many times…that it was true, that there were crafts, that he believed there were occupants.”27
There is also a story told to the authors by a high-level intelligence official about a UFO briefing President Carter received in June 1977. It was
unknown to the source what specifics were discussed, only that when the president was seen in his office, he was sobbing, with his head in his hands, deeply upset.28 If it is true, then Carter got the briefing he wanted, but did not like what he heard. Moreover, he was influenced never to mention the subject again.
Ronald Reagan not only saw a UFO while Governor of California, but had his pilot chase after it. He told several people, including members of the press, until he realized the story would undermine his credibility. At that point, he back peddled. Years later, as president, he mused more openly. On several occasions during his presidency, Reagan discussed the scenario of how an alien invasion would unite humanity. Addressing the United Nations on September 21, 1987, he stated, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.29
Reagan is also alleged to have told filmmaker Steven Spielberg at the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial White House screening, “You know, there aren’t six people in this room who know how true this really is.”30
George H.W. Bush, a man with longtime connections to the world of intelligence, and who had directed the CIA for a year under President Ford, is believed to have known much about UFOs. While campaigning for president in 1988, he was cornered by a UFO researcher named Charles Huffer, to whom he said, “I know some. I know a fair amount.” As president, Bush was tight-lipped about the subject, although there are sources who allege that there were high level discussions on a possible UFO Disclosure in 1990, which was canceled following the abortive coup in the Soviet Union that summer.31
Shortly after he became President, Bill Clinton instructed his friend Webster Hubbell, whom he had named Associate Attorney General, to investigate and report back to him on two things. “First,” asked Clinton, “who killed JFK? Second, are UFOs real?” According to Hubbell, he found no answers, although it must be said that Hubbell’s tenure in office was brief, and he did not seem to have searched very diligently.32
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact Page 7
