Coast-to-Coast AM: Secrecy and Updates

 

And I say, once again, welcome to 1947. I’ve mentioned in the past that in 1947, the military created a project to investigate the flying saucers. They treated the topic as something real and not imaginary. They were concerned about national security implications and Ed Ruppelt reported that high-ranking officers were in something of a panic. The project was classified and the official name was not releasable to the general public given the classified nature of the investigation. It was called Project Saucer in public but was code named Project Sign officially.

Just this last weekend, Christopher Mellon reported that the military, the government and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) had issued new guidelines that would classify as “Secret” the videos like those released publicly in 2017. These “Tic-Tac) videos were not classified at the time, but would now, under the new guidelines, be classified. These new guidelines state, “Except for its existence, and the mission/purpose, virtually everything else about the UAPTF is classified, per the signed Security Classification Guide.”

This seems to suggest that everything that will be gathered by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, which seems to be a much more complicated name than necessary, will be operating under the same guidelines. In other words, nearly everything will be classified, which keeps it out of our hands, but more importantly, would inhibit the sharing of the information among the various government agencies that would benefit from easy access to the information. The Navy, because the information is now classified might be inclined to deny access to the Air Force, and the Air Force might be inclined to deny access to the Army. It is a situation that has plagued the military and various government agencies for decades.

As I say, so much for transparency.

This doesn’t mean that we no longer have access to interesting UFO reports. On February 15 of this year, in Aurora, Illinois, the witness opened the living room blinds and saw what he believed was a plane flying very low, just under the clouds. Which provides us with a suggestion that the object, whatever it was, was not an astronomical phenomenon, eliminating these explanations.

Although the witness thought it might be landing at a nearby airport, the craft did not look like a conventional airplane. It was triangular shaped with a white light at each corner. The object was in sight for about two minutes and then it just vanished rather than landing.

Near Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the witness saw what was described as a formation of six lights on two separate craft on January 26 of this year. The witness was driving towards town and saw the lights that were stationary. The witness said that there were many aircraft and drones in the area, but the light configuration was nothing like those. The witness mentioned a good knowledge of the various aircraft and drone configurations that were often seen around Holloman. Although the witness stopped to take a picture with a cell phone, the UFOs simply disappeared before any photograph was taken. The witness said that these were UFOs and that weird things had been happening around Holloman.

Finally, on Christmas Eve last year, the witness reported a formation of steady red lights that were traveling north to south in Bettendorf, Iowa. As the UFOs approached, they suddenly disappeared. There was no noise and the witness said he originally thought they were drones until they disappeared. The witness took pictures of the formation.

Bettendorf, Iowa on Christmas Even, 2021.

I’ll note here that I selected these last cases because the witnesses’ first thoughts were about drones. This seems to be a growing problem because there are now so many drones around and by putting a few LEDs on them, a rather convincing sighting can be faked. It’s just one more thing that we must watch for as we investigate UFO sightings.

The Congressional UAP Report

 

As many of you know, I have been suggesting that the report due to Congress Friday will be less than startling. I believe, based on the past, and on some of the things being said, that the report will focus on about 140 cases in which there were limited, obstructed views of the UFOs/UAPs and there will be a suggestion that drones, which are unmanned so that the effects of excessive accelerations won’t have a human crew to crush, are responsible for many of those sightings.

We have also heard that the equipment being used and the tactics employed during these events are considered top secret. The fear inside the military and the Department of Defense is that the revelation of these classified tactics and equipment will negatively affect national security. Or, in other words, these national security concerns will conceal the real nature of the UFOs/UAPs and we’ll be left with the same sort of nonsense that has been going on for decades.

Jacques Vallee

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Jacques Vallee about a classified section of Project Blue Book. He suggested that the cases hadn’t been classified, but that was not accurate. Many of the early cases were classified as secret. You can see where the classification markings have been crossed out. And that didn’t address the issue of a secret, hidden part of Blue Book.

I had asked about this because of information I had received while writing UFOs and the Deep State. I had heard that there was a classified section to Project Blue Book and those files had never been released to the public. It could be said that national security was the reason but that is just an excuse to hide information that the DoD and the government, and by extension, the Deep State doesn’t want published. This hints at a less than comprehensive report.

The other thing that sometimes is overlooked is that before there was an official investigation, General Twining of the Air Materiel Command, had ordered an unofficial investigation beginning in December 1946.  This was the result of the incomplete study of the Foo Fighters of the Second World War, and a failure to find an explanation for the Ghost Rockets that had been reported in Scandinavia and later in northern Europe in 1946. Colonel Howard McCoy had been one of the intelligence officers involved in both these investigations. He was privately gathering information about UFOs through military channels.

Twining’s order came six or seven months before Kenneth Arnold made his sighting in June 1947. At that point, that unofficial investigation morphed into an official one. Orders were issued and Project Sign began in January 1948… but, the public was told the name was Project Saucer. In other words, evidence of the cover up began with the creation of Project Sign. Information flowing from that investigation to the public was not as complete as it could have been.

After an internal fight in the DoD about the reality of UFOs, and a hint that the Chief of Staff of the Air Force was less than enthusiastic about the existence of alien spacecraft, it was announced that Project Sign had been concluded and an official report was issued. There were no national security issues, and no evidence that alien spacecraft were flying around.

However, it was merely a name change. Project Grudge was born with the same people in the same offices at the same base. Following the script written before, in 1952, it was announced that Project Grudge had been concluded. The huge report claimed there were no national security issues and there was no evidence that alien spacecraft were flying around.

Ed Ruppelt

But it was another name change and Project Blue Book was born into this rather chaotic system. Ed Ruppelt, at the time a first lieutenant, was given the task of reorganizing the investigation. For several months, he upgraded the system and the investigations, gathering as much information as he could.

In January, 1953, the CIA sponsored a panel to review the evidence. The chairman, Dr. H. P. Robertson, did not believe that there were alien spacecraft visiting Earth. He chose the panel members based, not on their unbiased opinions, but on their holding the same beliefs about the flying saucers as he did. It wasn’t a panel to review the data but one designed to destroy interest in the topic and convince the civilian world that there were no UFOs visiting Earth. It was hoped that this blatant appeal to authority would end interest and speculation about UFOs. The Deep State was still not interested in sharing its information with the public.

Although the panel’s report was classified, and the recommendations were that UFOs be “debunked,” Project Blue Book remained in operation until 1969. It was ended as a result of the University of Colorado study paid for by the Air Force. Dr. Edward Condon concluded that there were no national security issues, there was nothing to be learned from further study, and the Air Force had done a good job just as he had been hired to do. You might say that this was Robertson 2.0.

There were, of course other issues. The official figures for Blue Book were that the Air Force had investigation 12,618 sightings and of those, 701 remained unidentified. This is not true.

There are more than 13,000 sightings in the files. Many are in a section labeled “Additional Reported Sightings (not cases).” These are everything from newspaper clippings to intelligence reports on some of the sightings but were not, apparently, submitted through an official channel and were not investigated further. They were merely filed and then, routinely, ignored.

Although there are only 701 sightings labeled as “unidentified,” there are many more which are not identified. I took a look at a representative sample of cases labeled as “insufficient data for a scientific analysis,” and found there are something like 4000 labeled that way. It means there is no solution for the sighting but it is outside the dreaded “unidentified” category. It is labeled but not solved.

And I haven’t even mentioned those cases that do have solutions that make no sense, given the facts. The Levelland, Texas, sightings of November 1957 are a good example. Witnesses at least thirteen separate locations reported the UFO close to the ground and that the operation of their motor vehicles was impaired. The Air Force explanation is “ball lightning.” This overlooks the fact that ball lightning is extremely rare, it lasts for seconds and is rarely over 18 inches in diameter. Witness testimony refutes ball lightning as a solution, but the Air Force has the case labeled and that was the whole point.

I will note here that Condon carried on that tradition. About a third of the cases investigated by the Condon Committee had no solution to them. One was labeled as a phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since.” Not much of a solution but then, they didn’t leave it as unidentified.

And that brings around to Friday’s projected release of the UFO/UAP study. If history is any guide, then we will see the same sort of misdirection, misinterpretation, and misinformation. Senator Marco Rubio has suggested just that. He said that he believes the report “will provide more questions than answers,” and that it “will hold back a lot, partly because the technology we use to capture and analyze the images are top secret.” He did suggest that “If they classified something spicy in it, ain’t no way that doesn’t leak.”

The problem here is that an unnamed source leaking highly classified material about UFOs/UAPs might not be believed. It will look just like so much other false information coming from the government. Without a source and without some sort of extra evidence, the leak will be ignored.

In other words, I think this is going to be Condon 2.0. An attempt to avoid answering the questions by hiding the information under the mantle of national security and answers that provide no information. It won’t move us toward Disclosure or revelation about what is happening and what is being seen and photographed, but then that’s what the Deep State wants. Keep it buried to keep them in power.

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.