New York Times Says Air Force, CIA Covered Up Reality of UFOs
Major Media Shift in Stance on UFOs
"When Blue Book closed in late 1969, the Air Force flatly lied to the American people, issuing a fact sheet claiming that no U.F.O. had ever been a threat to national security."
~~ New York Times article exposing CIA, US Air Force debunking of UFOs, 1/15/2019
Dear friends,
On Feb. 28, 1960, The New York Times on page 30 of the Sunday edition published an article on UFOs by Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA.
In this remarkable article, the CIA chief stated, "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."
That was not the first, nor the last time the Times had an article suggesting that UFOs might be real. Yet the vast majority of articles on UFOs by the Times
and most other major media over the years have ridiculed those who
believe in them. As one example, in describing my whistleblowing
activities related to an internationally watched terrorism trial, the
lead sentence in a front page article on the Wall Street Journal in 2005 began with "Frederick Burks believes in UFOs," as a way of discrediting my court testimony.
Yet in just the last couple years, quite a number of media articles supporting claims of the reality of UFOs have been published. This is a sea shift that many have yet to notice. The below New York Times
article published just last week represents an even bigger shift in
support of the reality of UFOs with solid information on a major
cover-up which has gone on for many decades.
Why
is it that we are only now being led to believe that UFOs and ETs might
be more fact than fiction? For a possible answer to this important
question, see the suggestions immediately below the article. For those
who have the eyes to see, it may be time now to awaken to a much grander
reality as humanity prepares to take part in a universe filled with
intelligent beings.
With best wishes for a transformed world,
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower
‘Project Blue Book’ Is Based on a True U.F.O. Story.
By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
New York Times, Jan. 15, 2019
By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
New York Times, Jan. 15, 2019
Featuring a Russian spy murder, a self-immolation, gun-toting government thugs and other fanciful plot devices, “Project Blue Book,” History’s popular new series on the Air Force’s program to investigate and debunk U.F.O.s, is not your historian’s Project Blue Book.
We viewed the first six episodes from the standpoint of writers who have long worked on the serious side of U.F.O.s. We broke the December 2017 New York Times exclusive on a secret Pentagon program investigating the phenomenon, with our colleague Helene Cooper. Leslie Kean wrote the Times 2010 best-seller “U.F.O.s: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.” Ralph Blumenthal has written about U.F.O.s for Vanity Fair as well as The Times.
So,
despite the embellishments, we were interested to discover parallels
between the TV version and the historical and current reality.
The
History series predictably sensationalizes and overdramatizes case
investigations and the historical figures involved, adding many story
elements that simply never happened. It’s already hard enough for those
trying to understand the truth about government involvement with U.F.O.s
without mixing fact and fiction.
Nonetheless, melodrama aside, the real story is there:
Project
Blue Book was the code name for an Air Force program set up in 1952,
after numerous U.F.O. sightings during the Cold War era, to explain away
or debunk as many reports as possible in order to mitigate possible
panic and shield the public from a genuine national security problem: an
apparently technological phenomenon that was beyond human control and
was not Russian, yet represented an unfathomable potential threat.
The
central character of the TV series, the prominent astronomer J. Allen
Hynek, played by Aidan Gillen, was recruited as Blue Book’s scientific
consultant and was indeed initially committed to explaining away flying
saucers as natural phenomena or mistaken identifications. But he
gradually realized that the bizarre objects were real and needed further
scientific attention. (Though he never saw a supposed alien creature
floating in a tank or crashed in a plane while recreating a reported
U.F.O. dogfight, as depicted in the series.)
While
Hynek was involved, Blue Book compiled reports of 12,618 sightings of
unidentified flying objects, of which 701 remain unexplained to this
day.
But what’s most important to study during that era is what occurred outside Project Blue Book, to the extent that it has been revealed. When we reported
on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,
which began in 2007, we offered a glimpse into a similar scenario today:
military cases being investigated and filmed without the public
knowing. This time, however, there was no public agency to accommodate
reports of incidents, even when hundreds of witnesses were involved.
We
learned through documents from the Pentagon program, and from
interviews with participants, that the mystery of the elusive flying
objects is still far from solved, and that not enough was being done to address that problem almost 50 years since the close of Blue Book.
It all began in 1947. Lt. General Nathan Twining, the commander of Air Materiel Command, sent a secret memo
on “Flying Discs” to the commanding general of the Army Air Forces at
the Pentagon. Twining stated that “the phenomenon reported is something
real and not visionary or fictitious.” The silent, disc-like objects
demonstrated “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in
roll), and motion which must be considered evasive when sighted or
contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”
A
new project, code-named “Sign,” based at Wright Field (now
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, was given the
mandate to collect U.F.O. reports and assess whether the phenomenon was a
threat to national security. With Russia ruled out as the source, the
staff wrote a top secret “Estimate of the Situation,” concluding that,
based on the evidence, U.F.O.s most likely had an interplanetary origin.
According
to government officials at the time, the estimate was rejected by
General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff. From then on, the
proponents of the off-planet hypothesis lost ground, with Vandenberg
and others insisting that conventional explanations be found.
Project
Sign eventually evolved into Project Blue Book, with the aim of
convincing the public that flying saucers could be explained.
Yet
behind the scenes, authorities grappled with something sobering:
well-documented U.F.O. encounters involved multiple trained observers,
radar data, photographs, marks on the ground and physical effects on
airplanes.
In
1952, the office of Maj. Gen. John Samford, the Air Force director of
intelligence, briefed the F.B.I., saying it was “not entirely impossible
that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such
as Mars,” according to government documents. Air Intelligence had
largely ruled out an earthly source, the F.B.I. memo reported.
National
defense concerns were mounting as well. After Air Force planes
scrambled to intercept brilliant objects seen and picked up on radar
over Washington in 1952, Samford called a news conference to calm the country.
He
announced that between 1,000 and 2,000 reports had been analyzed and
that most had been explained. “However,” he conceded, a certain
percentage “have been made by credible observers of relatively
incredible things. It is this group of observations that we now are
attempting to resolve.”
He said no conclusions had been drawn, but played down any “conceivable threat” to the United States.
Later
that year, however, H. Marshall Chadwell, the assistant director of
scientific intelligence for the C.I.A., concluded in a memo to the
C.I.A. director, Walter Bedell Smith, that “sightings of unexplained
objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity
of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not
attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”
By
1953, authorities were concerned that communication channels were
becoming dangerously clogged by hundreds of U.F.O. reports. Even false
alarms could be perilous, defense agencies worried, since the Soviets
might take advantage of the situation by simulating or staging a U.F.O.
wave and then attack.
Documents
show the C.I.A. then devised a plan for a “national policy,” as to
“what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to
minimize risk of panic.”
After
a closed-door session with a scientific advisory panel chaired by H.P.
Robertson from the California Institute of Technology, the C.I.A. issued
a secret report recommending a broad educational program for all
intelligence agencies, with the aim of “training and debunking.”
Training
meant more public education on how to identify known objects in the
sky. “The use of true cases showing first the ‘mystery’ and then the
‘explanation’ would be forceful,” the report said. Debunking “would be
accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and
popular articles.”
That
plan involved using psychologists, advertising experts, amateur
astronomers and even Disney cartoons to create propaganda to reduce
public interest. And civilian U.F.O. groups should be “watched,” the
report stated, because of their “great influence on mass thinking if
widespread sightings should occur.”
The
Robertson Panel Report was classified until 1975, five years after Blue
Book was shut down. But its legacy endures in the aura of ridicule
surrounding U.F.O. reports, inhibiting scientific progress.
“The
implication in the Panel Report was that U.F.O.s were a nonsense
(nonscience) matter, to be debunked at all costs,” Hynek wrote. “It made
the subject of U.F.O.s scientifically unrespectable.”
Hynek,
the former U.F.O. skeptic, eventually concluded that they were a real
phenomenon in dire need of scientific attention, with hundreds of cases
in the Blue Book files still unexplained. Even many of the “closed”
cases were resolved with ridiculous, often infuriating explanations,
sometimes by Hynek himself.
“The
entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical
premise that the incredible things reported could not possibly have any
basis in fact,” he wrote in the 1970s, when he was finally free to speak
the truth.
When
Blue Book closed in late 1969, the Air Force flatly lied to the
American people, issuing a fact sheet claiming that no U.F.O. had ever
been a threat to national security; that U.F.O.s did not
represent “technological developments or principles beyond the range of
present day scientific knowledge”; and that there was no evidence that
they were “extraterrestrial vehicles.”
(Just
a few years earlier, in 1967, a glowing red oval-shaped object hovered
over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and all 10 of the facility’s
underground nuclear missiles became disabled almost simultaneously while
the U.F.O. was present, according to interviews with witnesses and official government reports. Technicians could find no conventional explanation.)
But whatever the Air Force told the public, it didn’t actually stop investigating U.F.O.s.
A once-classified memo, issued secretly in October 1969, a few months
before the termination of Blue Book, revealed that regulations were
already in place to investigate U.F.O. reports that were “not part of
the Blue Book system.” The memo, written by Carroll H. Bolender, an Air
Force brigadier general, went on to say that “reports of U.F.O.s which
could affect national security would continue to be handled through the
standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.”
Clearly,
government agencies continued to have some level of involvement in
U.F.O. investigations in the decades following — and to the present.
Despite government statements to the contrary, once-secret official
documents include detailed reports of dramatic U.F.O. events abroad.
Many cases at home were not investigated, including a 2006 event
in which a disc-shaped object hovered over O’Hare Airport for more than
five minutes and shot straight up through the clouds at an incredible
speed.
Our
reporting in 2017, which led to briefings for members of Congressional
committees, showed that not much has changed since the close of Project
Blue Book.
Scientists
may know more about the behavior and characteristics of U.F.O.s and are
closer to understanding the physics of how the technology operates,
according to A.A.T.I.P. documents and interviews. But the
government still makes every attempt to keep investigations and
conclusions secret, while denying any involvement to American citizens.
Note: The original article on the New York Times website is available here. And don't miss our excellent UFO Information Center.
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