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.