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 United States Air Force vs. the UFO Witnesses

As I was completing my last UFO book, I ran into a number of things that were somewhat disturbing. Some of those were the ongoing Air Force attitude that these things weren’t alien in nature, those who saw them were somehow deluded, and it was the Air Force mission to convince people that UFOs were an illusion. It didn’t matter to them how honest the witnesses might be, how carefully they had made their observations, or what their level of education or expertise might be. The Air Force mission was to stop the UFO reports. If they had to lie about it, misrepresent the situation, hide evidence or smear witnesses, that was all for the greater good… though they don’t seem to have an idea what that greater good might be.

I have pointed out time and again, including the posting that preceded this, the clash between the Major Donald Keyhoe, he of the original NICAP and the Air Force in their discussions about what had happened in Levelland, Texas, in 1957. The short version is that Keyhoe, in the national press said there were nine witnesses to the UFO and the Air Force countered with there were only three who saw the object. The Air Force files carried the names of more than three witnesses and I now believe they were splitting a fine hair. They were saying only three had reported a craft and Keyhoe was talking about nine who had seen something in the sky including a craft. As I have said, repeatedly, both were wrong. More than three saw the craft (more than three names were available in the Blue Book files) and there were more than nine witnesses scattered throughout the Texas panhandle around the Levelland area who saw something strange that night.

This can be taken a step further, as I learned in working on the book. The Air Force sent a single NCO to Levelland to investigate. It seems he spent the lion’s share of a day there and returned to file a report that suggested a variety of answers that really explained nothing. By way of contrast, just days later when a fellow named Reinhold Schmidt told Nebraska authorities that he had been taken onboard a craft, the official response was officers from two separate command structures. They spent quite a bit of time with Schmidt and his clearly invented tale.

You have to ask yourself, “Why?”

The answer is simple. Schmidt was quite obviously making it up, the physical evidence he claimed was motor oil of a type found in his car’s trunk, and the public relations benefit for the Air Force was clear. “Look at the nonsense we have to investigate wasting time, money and personnel resources.”

At the other end, they do nothing to call attention to Levelland, dispute Keyhoe even though they knew that he was right based on what was in their own files, but that didn’t matter. Smear Keyhoe as someone just in it of the money and who had no worry about what the truth might be. That sort of outlines the Air Force position because, when Levelland is examined in a dispassionate light, Keyhoe’s report was much closer to the truth than that of the Air Force.

This isn’t the only time that the Air Force went after Keyhoe. A scientist in Australia, Harry Turner, produced a report that suggested there was something extremely strange going on Down Under and he believed it to be alien in nature. In his report, he quoted Major Donald Keyhoe, who, in his book Aliens from Space, had suggested that he, Keyhoe, was working from official and classified documents not to mention discussions with those in high places who had some of the inside information. Keyhoe was drawing his conclusions on what he had seen and what he had learned from various officials and Turner was basing his report on many of the claims made by Keyhoe.

The Royal Australian Air Force queried their counterparts in the USAF, asking about Keyhoe and his claim of access to important but classified documents and his access to important and high-ranking officials in the US government. The USAF response was that Keyhoe didn’t have the access to classified information he claimed, the documents from which he quoted did not exist, and his access to these important people was limited. He had exaggerated the information for the financial gain of a successful book. Keyhoe and his information were not to be trusted. The RAAF, believing they had received the straight information from the USAF, rejected Turner’s report because of the negative comments about it and ignored, as best they could, UFO sightings reported inside Australia.

The truth was that Keyhoe had not been overly exaggerating and the documents he claimed he had seen or used as reference did exist saying much of what he said they did. While Keyhoe might have engaged in some hyperbole, or slanted his take toward his bias, the USAF did the same thing in their attempts to discredit him. It turns out that Keyhoe was closer to the truth than the Air Force was which is sad state of affairs but also tells us something about the climate of the time.

And finally, though I don’t mean to keep harping on the November 1957 sightings, these cases offer some of the most compelling evidence of Air Force duplicity and showed that when they couldn’t find anything else, they attacked the witnesses themselves. The James Stokes sighting is a case on point. Everyone around him suggested he was an engineer. Even his bosses in the Air Force at Alamogordo referred to him as an engineer. But the Air Force couldn’t find a college degree and labeled him as a mere technician. That Stokes worked as an engineer and was called that by others in the Air Force made no difference. In the press, the Air Force investigators made it clear that Stokes couldn’t be trusted because he had been disingenuous in describing himself, or, at least that was the situation according to the Air Force.

The point here is that we just can’t take anything for granted when we look at the UFO files created by the Air Force. We can see that they were less than candid, and while it might be said, based on what I’ve presented here that this was limited to 1957, the truth is there are other examples scattered throughout the files, up to and including the letter that Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler to the Condon Committee explaining what the Air Force expected for their half a million bucks. I’ve explored that in earlier posts here.

Or, to put a point on it, everything the Air Force claimed should be verified because we have found the errors in their files. Some of those errors were simple mistakes, some of them born of incompetence, and more than a few were lies designed to hide the truth.