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.

The Washington National UFO Sightings Press Conference Part 4

Now we get to the point of the press conference and that was to talk about the sightings from Washington National Airport.

Reporter: General, have you talked to your Air Force Intelligence Officer who is over at the National Airport when they were sighting all these bandits on the CAA screen?

Samford: Yes, sir; I have.

Reporter: And have you talked to the Andrews Field people who apparently saw the same thing?

Samford: I haven’t talked to them myself, but others have.

Reporter: Well, could you give us an account of what they did see and what explanations you might attach to it?

Samford: Well, I could discuss possibilities. The radar screen has been picking up things for many years that, well, birds, a flock of ducks. I know there’s been one instance in which a flock of ducks was picked up and was intercepted and flown through as being an unidentified phenomenon.

Reporter: Where was that, General?

Samford: I don’t recall where it was. I think it might have been in Japan but I don’t recall the location of that. That’s just a recollection of what that sort of thing could happen and I do know that at Wright Field there was one of these things on radar -- that was in 1950, I think -- maybe Captain James would reinforce that. Was that in 1950?

Captain James: That’s correct.

Samford: -- in which the local radar produced the effect of the encircling phenomenon that caused quite a lot of concern and it was gone out and intercepted and found to be a certain kind of ice formation that was in the air in various parts of the atmosphere around Wright Field on that
day.

Samford is on fairly safe ground here. There are any number of reports in which the capabilities of the radars were not fully understood. During the Second World War, radars in Great Britain produced a strange phenomenon every morning as a blip came off the ground and then seemed to expand until it disappeared. They found that birds, taking off in the morning were the cause.

Samford: Again, there are theories like the men whose theory of light refraction which says that temperature inversion in the atmosphere can cause an image from somewhere else to be reflected in positions where it is not. If that is a correct theory, related to it is another oddity with respect to the ground effect that you get in radar.

We have one instance in which a night fighter with radar is reported to have locked on, as they say, to an object in flight, which, after he’d followed it beyond this curve, found that he was locked on to the ground and he had only a very few minutes to recover because the ground target had gone up and then misplaced this phenomena, and he locked on to it in a position where he wasn’t, but, following it, he eventually found himself directed toward the
ground.

Now, the conditions that seem to produce these temperature inversions and possibly the same kind of thing for ground targets being misplaced in altitude -- I don’t know that it is worded that they’re misplaced in azimuth -- is somewhat typical of the kind of hot humid weather that we’ve been having here in the last three or four weeks. There’s no reason to relate those phenomena to those atmospheric conditions positively, but it is a possibility.

Please note here something that the reporters failed to understand. Samford suggested a possible explanation but also said that there was no reason to believe that the sightings were related to the weather conditions. The reporters apparently didn’t hear this part of Samford’s statement.

Samford: Yes, sir?

Reporter: Did interceptors go up on any of the three
occasions?

Samford: Here.

Reporter: Yes.

Samford: Yes, sir.

Reporter: What did they see on their radar scopes?

Samford: I don’t recall that they saw anything. Do you remember, Roger, whether anything was sighted on their radar scopes?

Major General Roger M. Ramey: There have been no radar sightings. One or two reported (inaudible) --

Reporter: There have been no airborne radar sightings, General Ramey? Is that --

Ramey: That’s correct.

Actually there were airborne radar locks. This is based on the testimony of Norman Sykes, one of the interceptor pilots who was involved in some of the attempted intercepts on July 26. He had no visual sighting, but his radar operator did, in fact, detect some of the UFOs that night.
It is possible that Ramey didn’t know this, but given the history of UFOs, I believe that Ramey would have been quite interested in these sightings and would have taken the time to learn something about them. To the reporters, however, he continued with th proper Air Force line... as his orders would have been to do.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference Part 2

Having told his first lie (well, maybe made his first distortion would be a better way to phrase it), that the Air Force had something called Project Saucer, which I point out because some skeptics, okay, CDA, seems to believe that these officers would breach security while standing in front of a bunch of reporters, the conference continued.

Samford: However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of sighting reports], in the order of twenty per cent [sic] of the reports, that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. And because of these things not being possible for us to move along and associate with the kind of things that we’ve found can be associated with the bulk of these reports, we keep on being concerned about them.

However, I’d like to say that the difficulty with disposing of these reports is largely based upon the lack of any standard measurement or any ability to measure these things which have been reported briefly by some, more elaborately by others, but with no measuring devices that can convert the manageable material for any kind of analysis that we know. We take some of these things and we try to bring to the good honest workmen of science a piece of material that has no utility because it doesn’t have the kind of measurements on it that he can use. And, as a consequence, he has to reject these things and say, "Until you can bring me something more substantial than that, I can’t make any progress."

So our need, really is to get the measurement value on these and, in the interim, lacking sufficient measure of these things to make them amenable to real analysis, we have to say that our real interest in this project is not one of intellectual curiosity but is in trying to establish and appraise the possibility of menace to the United States. And we can say, as of now, that there has been no pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like consistency that we can in any way associate with any menace to the United States.

To this point, Samford has said little of real value. He has admitted there is a problem and that they have studied it, but they found nothing for science to investigate. An examination of UFO sightings prior to this point reveals that such is not the case. There had been a number of photographic cases, including movie footage, which can be measured and studies in the lab. There have been a number of radar cases, including the Washington Nationals which spawned the press conference, in which measurements could be made and examined by science. Samford was being less than candid, assuming that he knew what was in the Project Blue Book files, and as the Director of Intelligence, he should have known, at least something about that. This might be construed as his second lie, though that is somewhat strong language. Once again, he is protecting the classified information. We can argue about the reason it was classified, but as classified information he would not be able to talk about it with those who were not cleared to hear it.

This statement also provides a clue as to the nature of the official investigation in the summer of 1952. The Air Force had attempted to learn if there was a threat and had convinced itself that flying saucers were not a threat to the security of the United States. Satisfied that alien invasion fleets were not about to land, the Air Force attitude was that flying saucers did not warrant any sort of investigation by them. Air Force officers had fulfilled their mission when they determined there was no threat to national security. Besides, there was nothing they could about them anyway.

Samford: Now, we do want to continue in the interests of intellectual curiosity or the contributions to be made to scientific measurements, but our main interest is going to have to continue in the problem of seeing whether the things have [the] possibility of harm to the United States, and our present dilemma of lack of measurement that can be turned to analysis and a complete lack of pattern in any of these things which gives us any clue to possible purpose or possible use, leaves us in some dilemma as to what we can do about this remaining twenty per cent of unidentified phenomena.

The volume of reporting is related to many things. We know that reports of this kind go back to Biblical times. There have been flurries of them in various centuries. 1846 seems to have had a time when there was quite a flurry of reporting of this kind. Our current series of reports goes back, generally, to 1946 in which things of this kind were reported in Sweden.

There are many reasons why this volume goes up and down, but we can’t help but believe that, currently, one of the reasons for volume is that man is doing a great deal more. There’s more man-made activity in the air now than there was, certainly, in Biblical times or in 1946. In addition to that, our opportunities to observe have been enhanced greatly.

The difficult part of it, as far as advancing the program is concerned, is that our ability to measure doesn’t seem to have advanced in any way as well as our opportunity to observe and greater recurrence of more disturbing things of this sort that are actually in existence from man-made air participation that we know about.

So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with the best of our ability, giving to it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants in terms of identifying adequately the growing or possible or disappearing, if it turns out to be that, menace to the United States to give it adequate attention.

While General Samford is giving lip service to the idea that Air Force officers treat the subject seriously, the truth is that they didn’t. In less than a year, the staff of Blue Book, as it had existed in July, had been reduced to the point where it could do nothing. At its lowest, it was "commanded" by an airman first class, one of the lowest ranking of the enlisted grades. No officer was assigned.

Ruppelt himself wrote that in December 1952 he asked for a transfer. He agreed to stay with Blue Book until February 1953 so that a replacement could be assigned and trained but no replacement arrived. Ruppelt left Blue Book in the hands of a single officer and one enlisted man. By July 1953, the enlisted man was the sole soldier manning the office. When Ruppelt returned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base he learned that the investigation had collapsed.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 1

I have been advised, by a friend, Tim Banse, who seems to understand these things, that some of my postings are waaaaaaaay too long. He suggested that I break them up into smaller bites. In keeping with what I believe to be sage advice, here is the first part of the entire transcript, with my editorial comments, of the Air Force press conference about the Washington National UFO sightings in 1952.

This came about after the second round of Saturday night radar and visual sightings, and after a number of failed intercept attempts. The Air Force believed it necessary to call a press conference to explain the situation, at least as they saw it. Ed Ruppelt called the conference the largest and longest that had been held by the Air Force since the conclusion of the Second World War. Ruppelt also suggested that the cards had been stacked again Major General John A. Samford, the Director of Intelligence, who was the senior officer at the conference. Because Samford had to "hedge" on many of the answers to questions because the investigations had not been concluded, it seemed, to many of the assembled reporters, that the Air Force was attempting to hide the truth.

The press conference was held at the Pentagon, in room 3E-869, to be precise. Also attending for the Air Force was Major General Roger M. Ramey, then the Director of Operations for the Air Force and the same Roger Ramey who had been at 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth during the Roswell UFO crash briefings in July, 1947, as our old friend CDA thought to advise me, as if I didn’t know. Others there for the Air Force included Colonel Donald L. Bower, of ATIC, Captain Roy L. James, an expert in radar operations and also from ATIC, Ed Ruppelt, the chief of Project Blue Book, and Mr. Buroyne L. Griffing, a civilian from ATIC.

Conspicuous by their absence were Major Dewey Fournet, the military liaison officer between the Pentagon and Project Blue Book, Al Chop, the official Pentagon spokesman on UFOs, and Lt. John Holcomb, the Naval officer who was an expert on radar and electronics. Since all three had been at Washington National during the second set of sightings, their inclusion would seem to be a natural event. Apparently the Air Force had other ideas because none were there to answer questions even though all were assigned to the Pentagon in Washington.

The press conference began with an introduction by a civilian Pentagon press relations official who said:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind the military that, while they are welcome here, this is a press conference and let’s be sure that the press is all seated before the conference begins.

This refers to the fact that many military officers who had no role in the press conference were in the room to listen to it. They were being told to sit down and shut up.

Let me introduce General Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, and General Ramey, Director of Operations. General Samford.

Major General Samford: I think the plan is to have very brief opening remarks and then ask for such questions as you may want to put to us for discussion and answer. In so far as opening remarks is [sic] concerned, I just want to state our reason for concern about this.

The Air Force feels a very definite obligation to identify and analyze things that happen in the air that may have in them menace to the United States and, because of that feeling of obligation and our pursuit of that interest, since 1947, we have an activity that was known one time as Project Saucer and now, as part of another more stable and integrated organization, have undertaken to analyze between a thousand and two thousand reports dealing with this area. And out of that mass of reports that we’ve received we’ve been able to take things which were originally unidentified and dispose of them to our satisfaction in terms of bulk where we came to the conclusion that these things were either friendly aircraft erroneously recognized or reported, hoaxes, quite a few of those, electronic and meteorological phenomena of one sort of another, light aberrations, and many other things.

It is important to note that there never was a Project Saucer in a real sense. When the Air Force created its first investigation, code named Sign, it publicly called the project by the name of Saucer. Later, after the code name Sign was compromised, the Air Force announced that it had ended its investigation, but, in reality, continued it as Project Grudge. Eventually Grudge evolved into Project Blue Book, but when speaking with civilian officials and members of the press, the unofficial name of Project Saucer was often used.

The actual press conference began then and will be noted in the next installment of this posting.