How the US Influences other Countries Policies on UFOs

For years, decades actually, the skeptical community has wondered how the US has been able to suppress information about UFOs in foreign lands. Why would foreign governments submit to a US demand that UFO sightings and UFO reports remain hidden behind a curtain of secrecy? The answer is probably a little more complex than I can attack here, on this blog.

However…

First, let me point out that during the Ghost Rocket wave that began in Finland but swept into all of Scandinavia in 1946, the Finnish government response was to suppress the news reports about them while those in Sweden were free to report every sighting until it became nearly overwhelming. At that point the Swedish military and the government began to actively suppress the sighting reports as well. Their reasons were varied, but they enacted that policy with no guidance from the US. A policy, BTW, that seemed to have ended the reports though not necessarily the sightings.

Second, let’s take a longer look at the situation in Australia. On August 14, 1952, with the United States buried hip deep in UFO reports from a wide variety of sources from all over the country, William McMahon, the Minister for Air told the Australian Parliament that the flying saucers were nothing more than “flights of imagination.” Even with that, he believed that a thorough investigation was warranted, which, of course, didn’t set it off on the right foot. His conclusions might have been inspired by the information released by Major General Samford in his press conference about the Washington National UFO sightings in July of that year.

This idea was reinforced in the United States by the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel, which was a five-day investigation into UFOs, especially after the summer of 1952 sightings. The Panel concluded that there wasn’t much to the sightings, suggesting that stories about UFOs be debunked, which then became an unofficial policy of

Captain Ed Ruppelt

ridicule. Remember, Ed Ruppelt explained the difference between flying saucers and UFOs. Calling then “flying saucers” had a note of ridicule in it as in “You don’t believe in flying saucers, do you?”

On November 20, 1953, many months after the Robertson Panel met, McMahon suggested that the UFO question was one that belonged to the psychologists rather than the defense authorities. He wrote, “The Royal Australian Air Force has received many reports about flying saucers, as have the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force, but the phenomena have not yet been identified… The Royal Australian Air Force has informed me that, so far, the aerodynamic problems relating to the production of flying saucers have not been solved.”

The response was a “Note of Action,” that indicated that “…all reports are still being investigated closely and recorded as an aid to further research into future reports of this natures.” Or in other words, they thought the sightings should be investigated and the Royal Australian Air Force was the responsible agency. But, as was the case in the United States, they simply weren’t investigating all the reports and they were not looking at them for evidence of alien visitation but thought they belonged in a more psychological arena. Delusions, illusions and other psychological problems were the answer.

Australian Richard Casey, the Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who originally thought little of the “saucer” reports, changed his mind and this is the point where the USAF and Donald Keyhoe come into play, which is the real point of all this. And yes, it has taken a while to get here but some background was

Donald Keyhoe

necessary. I laid much of this out in The UFO Dossier (pp. 237 – 254) and Michael Swords and Robert Powell did the same thing UFOs and Government (pp. 373 – 422) for those of you who would like to learn more.

Casey sent Keyhoe’s book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, to his Chief of the Division of Radiophysics, Dr. E. G. Brown, along with a note that suggested he had also seen the USAF statements “… about ‘Unexplained Air Objects,’ which are always carefully worded and are at pains to explain that the greater part of the ‘sightings’ are explainable as natural phenomena or on some other grounds.”

Bowen wasn’t too impressed with the information. He wrote that he “found the book by Major Keyhoe intensely amusing and entertaining… I am far from convinced by any of the anecdotes or arguments.” He also claimed that he knew many scientists involved with defense matters in the United States, and that they rejected Keyhoe’s suggestions.

In keeping with a belief held at high levels, Bowen thought that Keyhoe’s book, while entertaining, would eventually lead to the conclusion that there was nothing to the tales of flying saucers. The public would eventually become disillusioned with the UFOs and that would be the end of it. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case.

It might be said that all of this caused a change in the way the Australians dealt with the UFO problem. Melbourne University’s O. H. (Harry) Turner was asked by the DAFI to undertake a classified study of the early investigations held in their files. It could be said that this was the Australian equivalent to the Robertson Panel, that is, a review of the evidence gathered earlier with respected scientists studying the data. The outcome was certainly different.

According to Swords, based on information recovered by Australian researcher Bill Chalker, Turner, in his detailed report, recommended greater official interest with a concentration on radar-visual reports. One of his conclusions was “The evidence presented by the reports held by the RAAF tend to support… the conclusion… that certain strange aircraft have been observed to behave in a manner suggestive of extra-terrestrial origin.”

In what can only be considered a case of irony, Turner cited Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space, using the reports he described as coming from the USAF. Turner did qualify his report, saying “if one assumes these Intelligence Reports are authentic, then the evidence presented is such that it is difficult to assume any interpretation other than that UFOs are being observed.”

Given that Turner had used Keyhoe’s interpretation of what official USAF reports and intelligence documents said, the DAFI did communicate with the USAF to confirm the accuracy of Keyhoe’s statements, which isn’t surprising. The response from Washington, D.C. was “I have discussed with the USAF the status of Major Keyhoe. I understand that his book is written in such a way as to convey the impression his statements are based on official documents, and there is some suggestion that he has made improper use of information to which he had access while he was serving in the Marine Corps. He has, however, no official status whatsoever and a dim view is taken officially of both him and his works.”

As a result of this, the report was weakened considerably. The Department of Air concluded, “Professor Turner accepted Keyhoe’s book as authentic and based on official releases. Because Turner places so much weight on Keyhoe’s work, he emphasized the need to check Keyhoe’s reliability. [The Australian Joint Service Staff] removes Keyhoe’s works as a prop for Turner’s work so that the value of the latter’s findings and recommendations is very much reduced.”

The problem here was the RAAF and the DAFI believed the information that was provided by the USAF. In the Levelland, Texas, sightings in November 1957, the Air Force and Keyhoe got into another such battle with the Air Force suggesting that Keyhoe was wrong about the number of witnesses. Keyhoe had claimed there were nine but the Air Force said there were only three who had seen an object. A study of the case, including an examination of the Project Blue Book files, shows that both were wrong. There is good evidence that witnesses at thirteen different locations saw something, and there is a very good possibility that the sheriff was one of those who saw a craft.

The relevance here is that the USAF was not a fan of Keyhoe so that when the Australians asked for an analysis of Keyhoe and his book, they got a biased report that was not based on the evidence but on what the USAF had claimed about Keyhoe’s reliability. It is now evident that the Air Force had engaged, as Swords wrote, “an act of either conscious or unconscious misrepresentation on the part of the U.S. Air Force. They were engaged in a campaign to undermine the popularity of Donald Keyhoe’s books. While Keyhoe may have slightly overstated his USAF data, the intelligence reports quoted by Keyhoe and used by Turner to support his conclusions to DAFI were authentic. Eventually the Air Force admitted that the material Keyhoe used was indeed from official Air Force reports.”

Or, in other words, the USAF was able to manipulate the investigation being conducted in Australia to match their conclusions. If nothing else, it should be obvious based on this that after the negative conclusions of the Robertson Panel in 1953, the Air Force was actively attempting to implement the various debunking recommendations and were not interested in gathering UFO information. They were more interested in convincing everyone that there was nothing to UFO reports.

But in the world of 2018, we now know that Keyhoe was right more often than not, and that his work was based, at least in part, on official investigations and classified information. According to Frank J. Reid, in the International UFO Reporter for Fall, 2000, “For a little over five months – from August 1952 through February 1953 – a narrow window opened into Project Blue Book… According to Dewey J. Fournet Jr., an Air Force major assigned as Pentagon liaison to Blue Book, ‘The entire press had the privilege of requesting this [UFO] info: Don Keyhoe happened to be one who found out quickly about this [new] policy and took maximum advantage of it.’… Especially good cases were volunteered to him…”

What this means, of course, is that Keyhoe’s information was solid and had been rejected by the RAAF because their counterparts in the USAF told them Keyhoe was unreliable. I don’t know if the USAF officers were lying or simply didn’t know the truth. They were reporting to the RAAF what their superiors had told them. Keyhoe couldn’t be trusted.

Which brings us back to the original point. The USAF was able to influence the RAAF, leading them to a conclusion that was ill advised. What would have happened had they known that Keyhoe did have the inside sources, some of them official, who were providing him with quality information about the UFO situation. Instead, there was a watered-down version of their official report because they believed it was based on tainted information when, in fact, the information was good.

In other words, the prominence of the USAF in the world of UFO investigation suggested to the RAAF, that there wasn’t much to UFOs, and the RAAF responded in kind. They thought the USAF had the “goods” but it turned out to be more fool’s gold. It looked good, it looked right but it just wasn’t what everyone thought it was. And today we have to live with that misguided interpretation so that we continue to have these discussions rather than moving forward… but we see how, at least in part, the US can suppress UFO information in other countries.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Derek Bartolomaus (Billy Meier)

Derek Bartholomaus

This week I spoke with Derek Bartholomaus about the Billy Meier UFO contact case. I had asked him how he had gotten drawn into this and it came about through his day job. He became interested in the photographic evidence and tried to obtain the negatives for examination. Yeah, that does sound like an imposition on Meier. Why would he turn over the original negatives for examination? You can listen to the reasons for that and the rest of the interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/13223595

We focused the discussion on the photographic evidence that had been offered to prove that Meier had been contacted by an alien species. One of the photographs, of two of these aliens, have been identified as dancers from the old Dean Martin Show. Although it was originally claimed that picture had been taken by Meier, it is now suggested that the MIB or the CIA somehow intercepted or replaced that picture, as well as many others, with fakes, to discredit Meier. You can read more about this at Bartholomaus’ website here:

http:billymeierufocase.com

and on this blog here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-pteranodano-and-billy-meier.html

This interview, was, of course, from the perspective of a skeptic of the Meier claims. He hasn’t been involved for a while. He gives, what seems to be, solid reasons for his skepticism and frankly, the arguments do make sense. But, of course, there is another side to all this and we’ll explore that in the weeks to come.

Next guest: Michael Horn

Topic: Billy Meier (and this is from one of the leader supporters of the Meier contact claims.

Psychic Warriors

Back in the olden days, as I was working on my doctoral degree, I spent a lot of time in the University of Iowa’s psychology library doing research. While there I noticed that, at one time, there were a number of peer reviewed journals devoted to parapsychology and there were many universities, some of them quite prestigious, that had majors in parapsychology and related fields. I also noticed that many of those journals were no longer published and that now very few universities and colleges offered courses of study in parapsychology. Most of them were not top flight schools.

I note all this as preamble to something I read in the newspaper in the last few days which is to say on February 13. It seems (and many of us already know about it) that various governmental agencies had, at one time, employed psychics as intelligence agents which is to say they were gathering information using their psychic abilities in an attempt to learn more about what our enemies and often our allies were doing.

Fort Meade, Maryland

Now the CIA has released many once classified documents that relate to this period in our history. According to a story in the Miami Herald, there was an operation known as Grill Flame based at Fort Meade, Maryland, in which they attempted to locate where the hostages taken in Iran after the embassy was seized were being held. A dozen psychics tried more than 200 hundred times to gather intelligence about the situation including how closely the hostages were guarded and what their general health was.

Although the psychics apparently worked for the Army, it was in the CIA documents that this was revealed. These documents made it clear that the psychics efforts were monitored by a number of intelligence agencies and the top officials, civilian and military, at the Pentagon. They also showed that before the attempted rescue of the hostages in April 1980, the psychics were consulted by an officer representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an effort to ascertain if a situation existed that might require the mission be aborted. All of this, including if the psychics had been of any useful information, became a heated debate.

Once the hostages had been released and debriefed about their experiences, that information was compared to what had been developed by the Grill Flame psychics. According to the story published by the Miami Herald, “‘Only seven reports’ were proved correct wrote an Air Force colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs.”

He also noted that more than half were entirely incorrect but that 59 contained information that was partially correct or that might have been correct, but they also contained information that was wrong.

Army officers who supervised Grill Flame responded by claiming that 45 percent of the reports by the psychics contained some accurate information. They added that such information was unavailable through normal intelligence channels… except, if you are saying that 45 percent of the reports contained some accurate information, how do you decide which information is accurate? I suppose the argument is that you couple this with information through other intelligence sources, which might also contain inaccurate information or might be wholly inaccurate to draw proper conclusions. It would be just one more tool in the arsenal of intelligence weapons.

According to the Miami Herald, one of the psychics from Grill Flame, Joseph McMoneagle said that the stuff declassified was garbage. He claimed that they hadn’t declassified the stuff that worked.

I will note, apropos of nothing, that any excuse using the cloak of classification as the reason for disbelief or failure seems to be just that, an excuse. We are unable to evaluate the success, or lack thereof of Grill Flame because the good stuff is allegedly still classified. That may or may not be true, but until or unless more information is released, we simply don’t know how successful this might have been… or maybe do because it seems that this program has been concluded.

Oskar Linke - Update

The thing about the Internet is that it allows you to communicate with people all over the country and all over the world which helps us get at the truth. For example, J. Allen Hynek said the Oskar Linke UFO landing story was in the Project Blue Book files, so I looked for it. Hynek dated the case as July 9, 1952, but other sources said the sighting was June 17, 1950. I searched the Blue Book index around those dates. July 1952 was a period of intense activity and while, at other times in other years, the index might feature all the sightings received during two or three months on a single page, in July 1952, single dates sometimes took up two pages. In other words, there were a lot of sightings in July 1952. I found nothing in June, July or August of that year that mentioned Linke and his UFO.

There was nothing for the sighting around its correct date in 1950 either. I checked for several months on either side of the date. Some of the sources, other than Hynek, also suggested a report in Project Blue Book, which others said wasn’t there.

As those of you who read comments know, Ralf Buelow, left a comment about this and a link about Linke (I just couldn’t avoid doing that) that showed it was in the Blue Book file. If you haven’t seen that link, here it is:

http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-1194

That, of course, took me to Fold3 and their Blue Book file which was a single page entry. I looked at the entries before it and after it, which allowed me to find the entry in the Blue Book index. It is on the page for 1 – 31 March 1952 in the section labeled “Additional Reported Sightings (Not Cases).” It is entry number 1087. It is grouped with a March 15 sighting in Iran and another from Greenfield, Massachusetts. Linke’s sighting (Hasselback, Saxsoni) is from a retyped news clipping and the one from Massachusetts is from the newspaper. The source of the Linke news clipping, which is to say the newspaper, is not identified in the Blue Book file. It is not the same clipping as the one quoted by Hynek in his book, The Hynek UFO Report. Hynek’s report was from a Greek newspaper and the source is listed as I. Kathimerini. No source is provided for the Iran case.

For those of you interested in such things, the report that directly precedes it is from California, and is from either March 31 or April 1, according to Blue Book and therefore has nothing to do with Linke.

The Iran case is a single page that describes a luminous object traveling at great speed that probably wasn’t a meteor, according to the file. The sighting was representative of a number of sightings over the Iranian/Soviet border at the time.

The Massachusetts sighting is an actual newspaper clipping as opposed to a retyped version and it covers some sightings in that state. There is nothing about Linke in that either.

Here’s where we are on this, which says nothing about the sighting itself, but on the reporting of it. Hynek claimed that it came from the CIA, but the Blue Book file does not bear that out. He said it was one of the “unidentifieds” in Blue Book, but the index and the case file do not bear that out. His quotes, apparently from the Greek newspaper, do not match the quotes from the Blue Book file, though the information does match, which of course it would since both reports comes from Oskar Linke. I see nothing on the Blue Book report that identifies a newspaper which is why I say it is not the one Hynek quoted.

I thank Ralf Buelow for the information and the link.

Oskar Linke, Blue Book and the CIA

As many of you know, I’m writing a book which is no surprise because I’m always writing a book of some kind. Sometimes they are even about UFOs. As I was wading through the material, I came across a sighting that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had reported in his The Hynek UFO Report. The details were a little confusing and a typo or two made it even more confusing but I think I have straightened that out, which isn’t important here.

J. Allen Hynek

According to Hynek, on July 9, 1952 (or rather the date of the report) Oscar Linke and his daughter saw a UFO in what would have been East Germany. Linke said that he saw two entities and when his daughter shouted at him, those two beings reacted with surprise. They climbed back into their craft and took off.

So what’s the problem?

First, according to Hynek, the report is in the Project Blue Book files. He wrote, “One of the more interesting but isolated Air Force ‘Unidentifieds’ came to Blue Book in the form of a (then) secret CIA document:”

That document is a newspaper report from a Greek newspaper and that’s where the July 9, date came from. Others quoted Blue Book as the source following Hynek’s lead and some had the 1952 date as the correct one. I checked the Blue Book Master Index and found nothing to support a sighting on that date in Germany that involved an occupant sighting. Later I learned that the case was actually from June 17, 1950, and the man’s name was Oskar Linke. That didn’t help because I still found nothing in the Blue Book files about this report. I believe others have also attempted to find it with the same negative results.

I’m not here to argue the merits of the sighting, but Hynek’s interesting revelation. He seemed to believe the case was in Blue Book, and as the scientific consultant, especially in the early 1950s; he was privy to a great deal of UFO data collected by the Air Force. I’m not sure how he came into possession of this report because it was classified, though it might have been routinely downgraded at three year intervals until it was ultimately declassified in 1958, and besides, it was from a newspaper which sort of argues against the classification being to protect collection methods. While this clipping came from a Greek newspaper, it was apparently widely reported around Europe about the same time which is two years after the event.

No, the important point here is that the CIA was collecting UFO material and providing it to the Air Force. This was some five years before the beginning of Moon Dust (that was 1957 and the document was published in 1952… I mention all this so everyone knows that I’m not talking about the actual date of the sighting).

Anyway, I found it interesting that there were secret UFO reports being transmitted and that the CIA was gathering the data from around the world. Since this report was fed into Blue Book, according to Hynek and I don’t know how he would have learned about it otherwise, it suggests that there was another level to Blue Book which we have yet to penetrate. It suggests a real concern for UFO information at some high level of the government. And remember, we have found UFO related documents in the FBI files as well, so there was an interest in UFOs by the intelligence services.

All we have is this single little bit of data and in and of itself, the fact the CIA reported it might not be overly important. I might be reading too much into this. I just found it interesting that Hynek mentioned the case was in the Blue Book files, but it’s not, that it was classified as secret and that it came from the CIA. It suggests a higher level of interest in UFOs but doesn’t tell us much about that level of interest.

Howard McCoy and Roswell

In the search for documentation about the Roswell UFO crash, some evidence has surfaced, though it is not the sort of thing that the proponents were looking for. Though the documentation is not definitive, meaning that it does not mention Roswell specifically (nor does it mention Aztec for that matter) it does affect the overall notion that something alien fell out of the sky back in the late 1940s.

Colonel Howard McCoy

This is a letter, originally classified as “Secret,” written by Colonel Howard McCoy, who, at that time in late 1940s, was an intelligence officer who operated at the highest levels in the Air Force. He was at Wright Field in 1947 and was probably the author of the Twining Letter of September 1947, which announced that the phenomenon was something real and not illusionary or fictitious. He conferred with General Nathan Twining on a regular basis, and as I have pointed out repeatedly, was involved in studying these unidentified aerial phenomena since the days of the Foo Fighters late in the Second World War and the Ghost Rockets of 1946.

In a letter dated October 7, 1948, and sent to the CIA, McCoy wondered if they had any information about the UFOs and if they might have some sort of “domestic origin,” meaning, quite clearly, he wondered if it was a highly classified research project inspired by the CIA. McCoy wrote, “Your cooperation in so doing might greatly assist in identifying our own domestic developments from possible inimical foreign achievements.”

Okay, it really doesn’t say much, but you would think that if there had been a crash of an alien craft near Roswell (or Aztec for that matter), McCoy would be one of those on the inside who knew about it. He wouldn’t need to consult with the CIA to learn if they might know of some project that would account for the UFO sightings. The last thing that he would want to do is create an interest in searching for information about the flying saucers.

Don’t get fooled by the red herring that Stan Friedman has launched. True, the letter was only “secret” and we all suppose that the Roswell crash information would be “top secret,” and therefore couldn’t be mentioned in a document with a lower classification. But McCoy is asking for information and his request is classified at the appropriate level. That McCoy made the request at all is the important point here, not the overall classification of the letter. He could request the information he needed at a lower level of classification without violating any regulations and if the CIA needed to respond with top secret information, they certainly could have done that.

That he asked at all suggests that he didn’t have an answer, which, if Roswell was alien in nature, wouldn’t be true. He would have known about it. Instead, he was worried about some domestic program that might be under the auspices of the CIA. Had Roswell happened, the CIA wouldn’t have been involved, and even if they became interested at a later date, the Army had already collected the debris and moved it up the chain of command. The destination would have been Wright Field and if that was true, then McCoy would have been one of those officers who would have been responsible for the reverse engineering and gathering other information of intelligence value.

This letter does not bode well for the Roswell crash proponents. I don’t believe that McCoy, or anyone else in 1948, would have been writing these letters as a diversion in case sometime in the future, flying saucer information found its way into the civilian world. They assumed then that anything highly classified would remain that way nearly forever because that is the way it had almost always been. Civilians had no need to know or right to information that was the property of the military. True, some was released, but these officers in 1948 knew that information from the First World War was still highly classified. McCoy wasn’t writing the letter to dupe us; he was asking the CIA for help in identifying the problem… which was the nature of the flying saucers. He just didn’t seem know and he should have if there had been the crash of an alien craft near Roswell.

The CIA and the Ramey Memo

Since it has come up in the discussions here a couple of times, I thought I would identify that high-power government lab that was supposedly involved in an effort to decrypt the Ramey Memo. According to Colonel Richard Weaver, who answered my question about it without reservation, it was the National Photographic Interpretation Center which was part of the CIA back in 1994. I filed a FOIA request with them and received a fairly rapid response.

I told them that I was requesting information, documentation or anything relating to an examination of a photograph taken of General Ramey in July 1947, and that had been submitted to them for analysis by the Air Force in 1994. They responded writing, “This is a final response to your 17 January 2015 Freedom of Information (FOIA) request, received in the office of the Information and Privacy Coordinator for ‘information on an examination of a photograph taken on July 8, 1947, submitted to the National Photographic Interpretation Center (now National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) by the Secretary of the Air Force Office (Colonel Richard Weaver) in 1994.’”

They let me know that the CIA is not the repository for records of other government agencies, which, of course, I already knew. The request had gone to them because the National Photographic Interpretation Center had been part of the CIA at the time. By the time I filed my request it had become the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and fell under the auspices of the Air Force. The CIA supplied the names of the FOIA program managers at both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and for the Air Force. Good information and helpful and I, of course, filed the requests on the day I received the letter from the CIA.

But then the CIA had to get snarky. They wrote, or rather John Giuffrida, who was the acting information and privacy coordinator wrote that “For your information, the CIA was not created until September 1947 [emphasis in original] and material prior to that date would be contained in the records of the Office of Strategic Services and other predecessor organizations of the CIA.”

All well and good, but I wasn’t asking about something that had taken place in 1947, but had occurred in 1994. The parent organization of the National Photographic Interpretation Center was the CIA. Had I wanted information that preceded the creation of the CIA, I would have communicated with the National Archives, but I would have also asked the CIA because September 1947 was a reorganization of the intelligence community and not the creation of a brand new organization.

Anyway, I did send a request to the Air Force and received a quick response from them, handing me off to another organization. The FOIA manager, who is not identified, wrote, “…we are not the correct office to submit your request.”

And I sent a request to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and received a quick response from them. They wrote, “Our extensive search of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency records failed to identify any documents in our files that are responsive to your request.”

What does all this mean?

Not much really. I suspect that the attempt to read the Ramey Memo was a just part of the exercise and that the Air Force had expected the results they received. I don’t believe much of an attempt was made to read the memo, that someone might have looked at it with a magnifying glass or under some form of magnification. But rather than guess at their mission, here is what they say that they do:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has a responsibility to provide the products and services that decision makers, warfighters, and first responders need, when they need it most. As a member of the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, NGA supports a unique mission set. We are committed to acquiring, developing and maintaining the proper technology, people and processes that will enable overall mission success.

Geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. GEOINT consists of imagery, imagery intelligence and geospatial information.

Department of Defense and government customers with CAC cards should go to https://www1.geoint.nga.mil.  First time users must first register their PKI/CAC credentials with NGA. 

 Go to: https://pki.geo.nga.mil/servlet/RegistrationForm.  You have to fill out who you are, command, supervisor (name/phone/email), and security officer (name/phone/email).  When submited, [sic] the registration request is sent to your supervisor and security officer for approval then to NGA to be registered.  Once registered, you'll be able to access our NIPR site and have access to NGA products and services.

Or, in other words, they aren’t in the business in attempting to read an obscure document from more than a half century ago. Their mission has a more timely and real world component and I suspect that the Air Force submitted the material to them so they could claim due diligence. The Air Force could say that “we used a high-powered lab and they were unable to read the memo.”

What does this mean?

Probably one of two things, neither of them important. First the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency didn’t spend a lot of time trying to read the memo. Someone may have looked at it, couldn’t make out much and quit. They told the Air Force they couldn’t read it which made the Air Force happy, and that was the end of it.

Second, I don’t view this as a cover up but as one governmental agency asking another if they can help and in the end the second agency said, “No.” It wasn’t their job to decipher cryptic notes on a piece of photographic film from a half century earlier. The Air Force could report the failure and move onto other things.

Of course, I made the rounds, going from the CIA which was originally the parent organization of the National Photographic Interpretation Center to the Air Force and then to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and never did get a good answer. They only told me that they had no records, and given the nature of the request from the Air Force, I don’t find that strange.

The point is that I was given the name of that high-power lab by the man who would have known, made the FOIA requests, got a typical run around, and have nowhere else to go. I could appeal, but what will they say? “Well, we looked again, even harder this time but we could find no documents responsive to your request.”

Now everyone knows the name of the lab and a little of the history that goes with it. There really is nothing of importance here, other than we did attempt to find any documentation but in the big bureaucracy that is the US government, you need a really big shovel to sift through all the crap.

Philip Corso and The Day After Roswell, Again

(Blogger’s Note: In the last few days I have been asked about Philip Corso and his tales of seeing the Roswell bodies and of seeding alien technology into American industry. I have updated the information to reflect what we now know. This is my take on the stories Corso told, and once again, I find myself attempting to explain why I don’t accept what he said as real.)

As everyone now knows, Philip Corso burst on the Roswell UFO scene in the summer of 1997 with the publication of his book, The Day After Roswell. It was Corso’s story of his involvement with the flying saucer crash at Roswell, first as an officer at Fort Riley, Kansas, and later as a staff officer in the Pentagon, the Eisenhower White House, and finally on the staff of Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau. Corso claimed that he had been responsible, under orders from Trudeau, for leaking bits and pieces of alien technology to American industry for reverse engineering, duplication and replication.

There is no doubt that Corso had served as a military officer and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in World War II and stayed on active duty until he retired and did work for Trudeau. Although he did say that he had retired as a full colonel, there is no evidence to back up this claim.

It was during his assignment at Fort Riley that Corso was introduced, according to him, to the alien crash at Roswell. Corso, again according to him, was an above average bowler and because of his skill was invited to participate on a Fort Riley team by then Master Sergeant Bill Brown (which is a name nearly as common as John Smith for those who wish to attempt to learn more about this guy). Corso was surprised because enlisted men weren’t supposed to fraternize with officers at that time, but apparently Corso’s skill was such that the master sergeant took a chance and breached military protocol.

The friendship that developed between Corso and the master sergeant, who he now called by the nickname Brownie, would play an important role in what would happen on the evening of July 6, 1947, after the arrival of a “secret” convoy. Corso was assigned as the post duty officer, in charge of security and as he described it, the “human firewall between emergency and disaster.” As he walked his post, checking the security, he failed to find Sergeant Brown where he was supposed to be. Instead, Brown was in the doorway of the veterinary clinic. There was something inside that Corso just had to see.

Forget for the moment that Brown would have had no reason to enter the building unless there was some sort of a disturbance inside, or that the secret convoy of five “deuce and half” (two and a half ton trucks) with its accompanying “Low boy” side by side trailers would have been guarded by the men who brought them to Fort Riley to ensure that the contents were not compromised. Forget also that the best evidence suggests that the material from the crash was shipped by air to its various destinations because it was the quickest and safest way to move it and the 509^th Bomb Group had access to a wide range of military aircraft. Corso, in his first-hand account, claimed that the convoy stopped at Fort Riley, and the Military Police assigned to it as guards were all armed, which, of course, they would be so that wasn’t unusual. These guards, once the material was secured in the veterinary clinic, apparently abandoned their posts to leave the guarding of the crates to the local soldiers. These guards would have been no reason to unload the cargo, so there is no reason that it would have been in the veterinary clinic but without this wrinkle Corso’s story collapses.

Those local soldiers, being curious men, began to search the material from the top-secret convoy. What they found so upset them that they risked the wrath of the post duty officer and court martial by telling him that there was something he had to see. Brown told Corso that he had to take a look at what the convoy was transporting. Corso warned Brown that he wasn’t supposed to be there and had better leave. Brown, apparently ignoring this advice, which would actually have the force of a lawful order, said that he would watch the door while Corso snooped.

Inside the building, Corso found the crates but hesitated at prying open any of them, which would have been closed with a seal to expose any tampering. He searched among them until he found one that had apparently already been opened by the Fort Riley soldiers so that the nails were loose. He opened that crate and then looked down inside. In a glass tube containing a blue fluid, floating, suspended, was what Corso thought, at first, was a small child. Then he knew it wasn’t a child, but a human-looking creature with “bizarre-looking four-fingered hands... thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent light bulb-shaped head...”

Rifling the crate, Corso found an Army Intelligence document detailing that the creature was from a craft that had crashed outside of Roswell, which also doesn’t make sense. The documents wouldn’t have been stashed in a crate carrying the body. The paperwork appeared to manifest the remains, first to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, and then to Walter Reed Hospital for what Corso believed would be autopsy (which is in conflict with data provided by the late and former Brigadier General Arthur Exon). Of course, such a manifest would have been in the hands of the convoy commander rather than stuck in a crate where he wouldn’t have easy access to it. Corso, realizing that he was not supposed to have read the document, seen the creature, opened the crate, or penetrated the security around the cargo, put everything back the way he found it, and hurried outside. He told Brown that he had seen nothing and that he Brown, was to tell no one.

That wasn’t, of course, Corso’s last brush with the Roswell case. It was however, more than a decade before he again saw anything dealing with Roswell. Instead he had a number of military assignments, moving him to Washington, D.C., and then to Fort Bliss, Texas. At Bliss he was trained in anti-aircraft artillery, then assigned as an inspector of training and finally assigned as battalion commander for several weeks before he was reassigned to Europe. While at Bliss, according to Corso, he was assigned as the commander of the White Sands Missile Range. At least that is what he told reporters in the summer of 1997 as he was describing his background for them.

In Germany, in 1957, he was a commander of a Nike battalion. In March, 1959, he became the Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Seventh Army Headquarters. In May 1959, he became an Inspector General at Seventh Army HQ, and continued in that assignment for about a year. In 1960 he returned to the United States. In 1961, he was assigned as a staff officer of the Plans Division in Washington, D.C. and then as a staff officer of the Army’s Foreign Technology Division until April 1961 when he became the Chief of Foreign Technology. Three months later he was reassigned as a staff officer at Plans and less than a year later he retired.

It was during the tour in 1961 that he became involved, once again, with the Roswell case. According to an affidavit prepared by Peter Gersten, and according to Corso, “...In 1961, I came into possession of what I refer to as the ‘Roswell File.’ This file contained field reports, medical autopsy reports and technological debris from the crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.”

Corso’s job, in 1961, was to parcel the debris into American industry hands for research and development which doesn’t explain why he was exposed to information that was irrelevant to his assignment and in violation of the “Need to Know” rule. The idea here was to suggest to various companies that the small artifact or metal had come from an unknown source, which of course shows that there was no need to provide Corso with the background of a UFO crash. The expertise of the scientists at the companies was supposed to unlock the secrets of the debris. This led, according to Corso, to the creation of the transistor, night vision equipment, fiber optics, lasers, microwave ovens and a host of other recent developments though the scientific papers and history of the times suggests that this is not accurate.

All of this was outlined in Corso’s book which became news in July 1997. He appeared on NBC’s Dateline for an exclusive interview. About a week later he appeared in Roswell for a press conference, a lecture, and a book signing. For three weeks in August, his book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.

Corso was, in 1997, the highest-ranking officer to write a book about Roswell and to make public claims about the case of what he had seen and done (Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr. now holds that distinction). According to him, he had been a member of NSC, had worked inside Eisenhower’s White House, and had served with the Army’s Foreign Technology Division. If he could be believed, then here was the truth about the Roswell crash. Finally a witness with impressive credentials had gone on the record.

The stories told by Corso to friends and family are even more impressive than those detailed in his book. In a proposed chapter that was edited out of his book, Corso claimed that in 1957 he had taken command of missiles at Red Canyon, where he trained specialists in the management of sophisticated radar and range finding equipment. It was here that Corso saw a series of radar contacts showing objects that could outperform the best Air Force interceptors.

Corso, according to the details of the missing chapter, had been told to report all unidentifiable sightings and then, finally, was told to forget them. He also claimed that at “times of intense UFO activity during his tenure as commander... he is ordered to turn his targeting radars completely off because, he believes, the craft themselves are in danger from our missiles as well as from our high-energy radars.”

Naturally the claims of Corso were subjected to intense scrutiny. Problems with his book began to arise almost immediately. For example, Corso had claimed to be a member of the NSC in the Eisenhower White House. Herbert L. Pankratz, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library, reported Corso was not a member of the National Security Council or its ancillary agency known as the Operations Coordinating Board. There was nothing to link Corso to the NSC.

Corso, in his book, told of how he had intimidated the CIA director of covert operations after Corso learned the CIA was following him. He told Frank “Wiesner” that he was going to start carrying a gun and if he ever spotted a CIA agent following him, they would find the agent’s body with bullet holes in the head. Corso then noted that Wiesner was found dead in his London hotel room in 1961. Wiesner had killed himself by hanging, which is not to say that Corso’s threat so unhinged Wiesner that he committed suicide.

The problem is that most of the facts used by Corso to support this story, from the claim that he had charged into the Langley Headquarters of the CIA, to the facts surrounding the death of Frank Wisner (note correct spelling) are wrong. Corso couldn’t have charged into the Langley headquarters because they weren’t opened when Corso supposedly entered the building. Corso couldn’t have driven to Wisner’s office as he claimed because, in April 1961, Wisner was, in fact, assigned to the CIA’s London office. Wisner did, eventually commit suicide, but it was with a shotgun, at the family farm, and on October 29, 1965.

In what may be the most telling of the events surrounding the publication of Corso’s book is the Foreword written by Senator Strom Thurmond. Here seems to be an endorsement for Corso’s book from a man who has served in the United States Senate longer than almost anyone. When the book was published, Thurmond, objected, claiming that the Foreword he had written had been for a different book. The publisher, Simon and Schuster issued an apology and pulled the Foreword from future printings of the book.

Corso tried to explain it away, saying that Thurmond’s staff had written the Foreword and that “the old man knew it” and that they hadn’t really known the nature of the book. The whole flap, according to Corso, was a misunderstanding about the nature of the book and who actually authored the Foreword. As a matter of courtesy, given the controversy, Simon and Schuster decided to pull the Foreword.

Karl Pflock, who had been around Washington, D.C. in various capacities, decided to look into the matter himself, believing that his friends and sources inside the Beltway would give him a unique perspective on the matter. Pflock, it turned out, knew the senator’s press secretary, and learned that “Yes, it’s true the foreword was drafted by one of the senator’s staff... It was done at the senator’s direction on the understanding he had from Corso that it was to be for Corso’s memoirs, for which he and his staff were supplied an outline, a document which made no mention of UFOs.” Pflock added, “I know of my own certain knowledge the senator was and is mad as hell about the cheap trick that Corso pulled on him...”

Pflock continued, pointing out that Deputy General Counsel Eric Raymond demanded, “Recall all copies of the first printing - failing that, remove all dust jackets with the senator’s name on them; stop using any reference to the foreword by the senator in promoting the book; do not use the foreword in any subsequent printings of the book; issue a statement acknowledging the truth, ‘to establish for the public record’ that the senator ‘had no intention or desire to write the foreword to The Day After Roswell,’ a ‘project I completely disavow.’”

The apology issued by Simon and Schuster was not as bland as Corso had characterized it but was, in fact, damning in its wording. It was clear that Thurmond did not know the nature of the book and that the outline he had read was for a completely different book. The publisher did remove the foreword from all subsequent editions of the book.

This might seem as if it is an argument over trivia, but it does speak to the general attitude of Corso in constructing his book. If he was willing to mislead a United States Senator, one who Corso considered a friend, why believe that he wouldn’t want to mislead the rest of the country? The evidence is that he played fast and loose with the truth.

For example, it was Corso who said that he had been the commander at the White Sands Missile Range but a check of the Range’s website revealed that, with two exceptions, the Range had been commanded by a general officer. The first exception was Colonel Turner who had been the first commander, and the second was when a full colonel took over temporarily when the commanding general died. Corso’s name did not surface as a commander.

However, as noted, his records indicated that he had been a battalion commander at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The two organizations, Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range, share some facilities. So, it might be said Corso was a commander at White Sands but not the commander. Clearly Corso was inflating his record when speaking to members of the press.

During those same press conferences, Corso made other statements that were quite revealing. He mentioned the Philadelphia Experiment, a hoax that began in 1956 when a man claimed he had witnessed, during the Second World War, Navy efforts to teleport a destroyer. The story is an admitted hoax, but Corso began telling reporters about the event, claiming that he had read the top-secret files about it.

Research into Corso’s claims showed that they were firmly grounded in the UFO community. Corso had read and reviewed everything that had been printed, published on the Internet, or shown in television documentaries over the last five or six years as it related to the Roswell case. There was nothing new in Corso’s book, except for his claim that he had seen one of the bodies at Fort Riley and then that he was the conduit for the alien technology to American industry. For evidence, he offered nothing more than his claim it happened and documentation offered as some sort of evidence had nothing to do with his claims.

In fact, when Corso came into conflict with other witnesses, or information that was contrary to his point of view, he retreated. He appeared on a radio program with Frank Kaufmann but at every point of disagreement, Corso deferred to Kaufman as if Kaufman was the real authority. Kaufmann’s tales have since been shown to be untrue, a fact which Corso should have known if he had the inside knowledge that he claimed he had.

He was quick to suggest that his information might not have been the best. In other cases, it seemed to have been the worst. The caption over a photograph in his book read, “Lt. Col. Corso was never able to confirm the veracity of the following purported UFO surveillance photos which were in Army Intelligence files as support for material for the R&D project to harvest the Roswell alien technology for military purposes.”

The first of the pictures is of a well-known hoax. The photographer, Guy B. Marquand, Jr. told various UFO researchers, as well as the editors of Look, that he was sorry, but it was a hoax. He had been young and foolish and thought it a great joke. It would seem that if Corso was on the inside as he claimed, he would have been aware that this particular UFO photograph was faked.

Given the information available, given the mistakes in Corso’s book, and given his inflation of his own importance during his military career, it seems that the logical conclusion is that Corso’s claims are of little value. They added nothing to what was already known, and certainly have detracted from the whole of the Roswell case. When his claims break apart, those who know little about Roswell become convinced that the whole case is built on structures similar to those built by Corso.

Roswell, the GAO and Hiding Documents

Back in the mid-1990s, New Mexico Representation Steven Schiff asked the Air Force, and by extension other government agencies, what they knew about the UFO crash outside of Roswell. The Government Accounting Office, as it was then known, approached many of those agencies, asking for a search of their files for any documents relating to the event. Predictably, no one found anything that wasn’t already known. The FBI, for example, provided a redacted copy of a message from their Dallas office about information derived from their telephonic investigation of the incident, citing Major Curtan (actually Kirton). I’ve had a complete copy of the document for years which is why I know they misspelled Kirton’s name.

So what? You might be asking yourself.

I read now, of secret documents that come from the raid that killed bin Laden and that had been the subject of FOIA requests by various news agencies including the Associated Press. On May 2, 2011 (or the day after the announcement of the raid by the president), the AP requested “all videos and photographs taken during the raid…”

In March, 2012, according to the DoD response, they could find none of the files… where have we heard that before?

What has been learned, thanks in part to the document dump by Edward Snowden, is that the special operations commander, Admiral William McRaven, ordered the military files purged from the DoD computers and sent on to the CIA. This way they could more easily be kept from the public.

This was done in a blatant attempt (yes, those are my words) to evade the rules of FOIA and the appropriate federal regulations governing the release of this sort of information. The CIA can prevent the release of operational files and this can’t be challenged in court… well, I suppose it can be challenged, but the law would prevent the release.

So now we fall back to the middle of the 1990s, when agencies were searching high and low for any documents that related to Roswell and all said they had nothing that was responsive to that claim. Could it be that those files were moved to other locations to avoid release to the public?

No, I seriously doubt that it was done in response to Schiff’s request, but was

Patrick Saunders

actually done long ago to hide the paper trail for which we have searched for so long. Remember, Patrick Saunders told family members, specifically, daughter Susan, “how well he had covered the ‘paper’ trail’ associated with the clean up!” (She wrote to me on February 20, 1997).

In other words the government was not completely candid in what they had said about the records… or rather, I suppose you could say they were candid; they just looked in all the wrong places.

All this really does, I guess, is show us that the GAO investigation wasn’t the end all because we now know that they, meaning the government agencies and not necessarily the GAO, do hide information. This doesn’t prove that something about Roswell is hidden. It merely opens that door, just a crack.

And I suppose we just add this to all the other information that demonstrates that the government doesn’t release everything it has as we have seen time and again, whether it is the Air Force telling Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico that there never was a Project Moon Dust, to the Condon Committee telling us that UFOs have no effect on National Security. It means, unfortunately, much of what they say is not based in any known reality.

Spy Balloons and Philip Klass

In the last few days I have been fielding some inquiries about the Staff Sergeant Charles L. Moody abduction in August 1965. Moody had mentioned to Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), that after his UFO encounter, he had gone to the news stand and bought a copy of Official UFO. I wondered what might have been in that issue and thought I could figure it out based on the date of the sighting, but the most likely candidate is Official UFO Volume 1, No. 2, which I don’t have and probably would have had a publication date of August 1975. It would have been on the news stand in late July, if the normal distribution procedure held true.

I mention all of this to explain how I happened to see Official UFO Volume 1, No. 4, dated November 1975. As I was putting the magazines away, I glanced at the cover which had a big headline in the middle of the cover that said, “Interview: Philip Klass Tells – “Why I Don’t Believe In UFOs.”

Okay, seeing an interview with Klass so early in his anti-UFO career seemed interesting. The interview was conducted by George Earley, who found himself at FORTFEST ’74 in Baltimore, and had an opportunity to sit down with Klass for several hours.

All that was fine, but not particularly helpful, and most of what Klass told Earley was the same thing that he would say time and again in articles, his SUN newsletter and his various books. One thing I did find interesting was his discussion of secret balloon projects.

Earley asked, “There have been numerous claims of CIA involvement in the ‘UFO coverup.’ Didn’t they suggest debunking UFO reports at one time?”

Philip Klass

Klass said, “Yes, and I go into the reason for that in my new book [which is now, what, 38 years old]. Just briefly – about the time flying saucers were discovered (perhaps “invented” is a better word) [and I point out in my new book to be published later, Secrets in the Government Files… hey, everyone else promotes their work, why shouldn’t I? that the sightings began before the Arnold sighting] in the summer of 1947, the CIA and the USAF and the Navy were involved in a top-secret program involving giant, camera-carrying balloons. [That’s right, Klass is blaming balloons for UFO sightings made in 1947 in this 1975 interview]. They would be released from Western Europe; the westerly winds would carry them over the Communist Bloc countries – Soviet Union, Red China, etc. – snapping photographs all the way. Then, if the balloons arrived over Japan, we would send up a radio signal which would bring the camera down by parachute. We would recover the film. We would get a lot of pictures of Russian farms, but, hopefully, we would also get some pictures of Russian military installations, pictures that might indicate the Russians might be preparing to start World War III. This was 1947 – 48, remember.”

Well, our favorite topic here, Project Mogul was certainly underway in 1947, but they were experimenting with using microphones to detect nuclear explosions as opposed to photographing the Russian landscape, but Klass is referring to projects that actually existed including Moby Dick, Skyhook and Genetrix, to name just a few. And while most of them were operating, in a limited and experimental fashion in 1947, they didn’t actually get going until later.

Klass said, “They were experimenting. It began to become operational about 1949 or 1950. Because it was an intelligence gathering operation, the CIA was in overall charge. The Navy supplied the balloons while the USAF supplied the cameras, radio gear and the parachutes. The CIA knew we were flying balloons over Russia to photograph their military facilities, and now here we are getting flying saucer reports. Did this mean the Russians were doing the same thing – releasing reconnaissance spy balloons from Russia and Siberia to fly over the U.S. and photograph our military installations? In those days, back in the 1950s, where we had our missile sites, our air defense installations, our bomber bases was a very hush—hush operation.”

All well and good but the basic premise here is flawed. Klass is suggesting that these high altitude balloons being flown around were the genesis of the flying saucer reports and speculates that the Soviet Union might have been doing the same thing to us. Except the balloon operations here, in the United States, didn’t begin until after the Arnold sighting in June 1947, with the exception of Mogul, but those balloons were in New Mexico or on the east coast and numbered about a dozen. So, whatever Arnold saw, it wasn’t one of these balloons, and the follow up sightings reported around the country were not these balloons.

 Oh, don’t get me wrong, balloons, weather and experimental, were responsible for some UFO sightings. Although I’m worried we’ll get into a big argument about it, I believe that Thomas Mantell was killed chasing a balloon, so it did happen. But the genesis of the UFO sightings, which actually began earlier than Arnold, was not caused by balloon research.

Earley asked about Skyhook, and cosmic ray balloons. Klass said, “Yes, the same type of balloons as used for that. And they flew at such very high altitudes – 100,000 feet or more – that they could not be shot down by ordinary fighter planes of that day. Of course this was a classified program, but what is [emphasis in original] a matter of record – and you can check on this – is that not all of those balloons made it to Japan. They developed leaks or came down for various reasons, and they came down in Russia and the Russians complained about ‘spy balloons’ in the United Nations. There are accounts in the New York Times about this. The U.S. delegate at the U.N. simply said that these were not spy balloons but scientific research balloons. So the CIA’s interest in flying saucers had nothing to do with the idea they were spaceships from another world; the possibility that they were Russian spy balloons similar to ours was what concerned them.”

Well, that might not be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but there is some truth in there. The Japanese, during the Second World War had succeeded in launching some 200 to 300 attacks on the United States using “balloon bombs.” Six people were killed in these attacks, and some forest fires were set, but given they had launched some 9000 of the balloon bombs, the results were small and the damage done was of little consequence. The tragedy was the deaths of the six people… which given the destruction rained down on England, Germany and Japan during the war pales in comparison.

Anyway, the timing seems to suggest that the balloon explanation offered here is a little more enthusiastic than the data warrant. But what is really interesting was that Klass was floating [pun intended] the idea of balloons before it was fashionable. Kind of like the old adage, “Let’s just send up a trial balloon ….”