Filename: Omni-1.Art Type : Article Author : Patrick Huyghe Date : 00/00/00 Desc. : The Goverment and UFOs ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This File is in a Series of an Unknown ammount of Text files from ] [ Omni Magazine re-typed up by Ronald Courtier of Sacramento, ] [ California. Ronald Courtier takes no Credit for these articles, ] [ rather just typed Them up for references to UFO Investigators. ] * Files in OMNI-??.ZIP - ?? Bieng the order written in * The following article was originally published in the science magazine OMNI. It is reproduced here exactly as it appeared in its original form, without so much as a misplaced comma, period, or question mark. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From "OMNI"--December 1990 WHAT THE GOVERNMENT ISN'T SAYING ABOUT UFO'S by Patrick Huyghe Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon a secret meeting is in progress. Seated at the conference table are three Air Force generals, an Army colonel, several scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and personnel from both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. The colonel, Harold E. Phillips, is running the show. The idea for this cozy gathering known as the UFO Working Group was all his. Phillips has convened this session to discuss the "perfect" UFO incident. The case, he says, involved a whole town full of witnesses. He wants the CIA to send an investigative team. But a CIA representative at the table balks. The agency cannot legally conduct domestic activities, he says. A discussion ensues. Eventually an exception to the rule is found, and two CIA agents, posing as NASA engineers, are sent to investigate the UFO sightings over Elmwood, Wisconsin. The existence of the 17-member UFO Working Group was revealed for the first time this fall by investigative reporter Howard Blum in his new book OUT THERE. According to the former NEW YORK TIMES journalist, the group was established in February 1987 to coordinate a review of the evidence for UFOs and the search for extraterrestrial life. The DIA, of course, denies that the UFO Working Group exists at all. To UFO researches, the government team is less than impressive. "They seem like a loose-knit, unofficial discussion group called together on the authority of Phillips, a self- appointed UFO guru within the agency," says Larry W. Bryant, who directs the Washington DC, office of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS). Others wonder how the group could have been impressed by the sightings over Elmwood, the proposed home of a welcome center for E.T.'s. David Jacobs, a history professor at Temple University and the author of THE UFO CONTROVERSY IN AMERICA, thinks it can mean only one thing. "They're amateurs, " he says. Blum maintains that the group is official DIA business. But he doesn't think the government is harboring any secrets. "They're covering up not what they know, but what they don't know," he says. "They're embarrassed, and even a little frightened, by their inability to explain certain phenomena." Blum's view that the government knows little more than we do about UFOs is a decidedly "lite" version of the cover-up. The more sinister, traditional view holds that the government has evidence of alien visitations and has for decades kept this knowledge from the public. This "high- calorie" version of the cover-up as government conspiracy has been around for decades. The first to raise a stink about it was Donald Keyhoe, a retired major in the Marine Corps and a former aide to Charles Lindbergh. With the 1950 publication of FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL, Keyhoe became the first prominent individual to champion the notion that the government was hiding the existence of UFOs. Keyhoe had such troubles prying UFO information from the Air Force that he quickly became convinced a massive cover-up was taking place. The Air Force was aware that flying saucers were from another planet, said Keyhoe, but they were covering up the fact to prevent a public panic. Today many of the arguments for or against a government cover-up hinge on a single case. On the evening of July 6, 1947, a large glowing disc was seen over the New Mexico desert. A sheep rancher, who heard an explosion at the time, went out the next morning to find an area of the ranch covered with strange wreckage. Days later the public information officer at the nearby Roswell Army Air Field created a sensation by announcing that they were inpossession of a crashed flying disc. Shortly afterward, however, a retraction appeared: The wreckage, officials declared, was actually a "weather balloon." This much is history. Less well-known are reports that a thorough search of the area in the days that followed led to the discovery, miles away from the sheep ranch, of the main portion of the crashed disc. Inside, supposedly, were several small beings who died in the crash. The military is said to have whisked away the wreckage and its occupants. During the past decade more and more people have come forward claiming to have seen the craft and the aliens themselves. If there is a cover-up, then Roswell is where it all began. "Once Roswell came along, the government had real justification for keeping something under wraps," says Bruce Maccabee, a physicist who directs the Fund for UFO Studies in Mount Rainier, Maryland. "Assuming the Roswell case is true, there must be some groups keeping track of that stuff, keeping it under gaurd." Witnesses of the Roswell incident were intimidated, contends Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, who has interviewed many of the eyewitnesses and other participants. "People were told not to talk," he says, "no question about it. One officer was told by the acting head of the Strategic Air Command, 'I don't want you to talk about this ever again.' I even have a man who handled the bodies on official assignment down there, and not only was he personally threatened, but he was told that if he talked about this, they'd get his family, too." More convincing is the lack of official documentation on the case. "We know something crashed," says Barry Greenwood, research director of CAUS. "We know material was gathered. We know that it was shipped out somewhere. So where is the paperback? Where is the analysis? We just don't see it." But Greenwood, unlike Friedman, is not convinced that Roswell represents the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its occupants. He takes the "lite" view and thinks the government is just as baffled by the UFO phenomenon as the rest of us. Thousands of pages of UFO documents generated by the CIA, the FBI, the Air Force, the State Department, and other agencies have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. But these, syas Maccabee, offer only indirect evidence of a cover-up: They point to an accumulation of information that wouldn't be there if no one were interested. "It's hard to believe that all those reports would pour into government agencies and no one payed any attention," he says. "It's hard to believe the government would be so stupid." Maccabee believes the government is covering up the existence of UFOs, covering up that it really doesn't know what's going on, and covering up that it doesn't know what to do about it, namely what would happen if it went public with all this. Government agencies still have hundreds of UFO documents that they refuse to release to UFO researchers. The National Security Agency (NSA) admits to withholding more than 100 UFO-related documents, the CIA refuses to release about 50, and the DIA says it's withholding six. This is black-and-white proof of a cover-up, says Greenwood. "In a literal sense, information is being covered up in being withheld." The most tantalizing of all the withheld UFO documents are those belonging to the NSA, the supersecret agency whose primary job is eavesdropping on military communications. No one really knows what UFO information its documents contain, but Friedman has an idea what one may be about. Someone working for the agency told Friedman that in March 1967 a listening post picking up communications between Cuban radar installations and two MiG-21 jets sent to intercept a mysterious, bright metallic sphere in Cuban airspace. When the MiG pilots failed to make contact with the object, they were instructed to shoot it down. "Suddenly there was this shrieking from the pilot in the second plane," says Friedman. "The first plane had disintegrated." Friedman's contact says that NSA headquarters was sent a report on the incident. UFO researches took the NSA to court for its UFO documents to court in 1980, but federal district court judge Gerhard Gesell, the same judge who presided over the Oliver North case, ruled in the NSA's favor. The agency refuses to release any of its UFO-related documents because to do so would reveal sources and methods, and that would be a violation of national security. But Friedman believes that there is something about the phenomenon itself that the agency regards as a threat to national security. These objects are violating our airspace, he points out, and they show the powerless response of our military systems to such intrusions. He calls it the cosmic Watergate. Philip J. Klass, an aerospace journalist and the field's foremost skeptic, says there is no such thing. He points out that many of the communications intercepted by the NSA come from potentially hostile nations and many of them are coded. So the agency's rationale for not making these documents public is actually quite simple. "They might reveal the location of certain listening posts," he explains, "and even more important, they would reveal that we have cracked and were able to decipher certain codes." So if the question is whether the withheld documents contain any answers to the UFO mystery, the answer is Probably not. "Long ago a lot of us used to think that the government was covering up a knowledge of extraterrestrials and their craft," says Greenwood, who six years ago coauthored CLEAR INTENT: THE GOVERNMENT COVERUP OF THE UFO EXPERIENCE. "But we've had a change of attitude. We just don't see the government as having any answers. If they knew what UFOs were all about, I think history would have been a little different than what we now see." This argument gains power, oddly enough, from the Roswell incident itself. "If it was a UFO that crashed in Roswell," says Jacobs, " a whole series of events would have been set in motion in the government. There would be major studies of it. Hundereds of scientists would have been involved with it over the past forty years. The government would be acting very differently about UFOs than they do now. All of UFO history makes sense if there was not a crash, and none of UFO history makes sense if there was a crash." Jacobs adds, "It's still possible that one could have crashed and there's an entirely different scenario at work." If the craft at Roswell had been an E.T. craft, insists Klass, then the United States would have wanted to know just how many of these craft were passing overhead. At the very least, he says, we would have established a space-surveillance system similar to the one that was set up three years after the launch of Sputnik. Klass cannot imagine the government doing nothing and simply hoping the aliens are friendly. Never in his 24 years of UFO investigation has Klass encountered a government cover-up of significant information. If you think there's a cover-up, he says, call your local air base and report that a saucer has just landed in your backyard and that strange-looking creatures are getting out of it. If the government really were trying to keep things under wraps, he says, the voice on the other end would ask for your address and a SWAT team would be there within minutes. Instead, what will happen, says Klass, is that the voice on the other end will simply thank you for calling and suggest that you report you sighting to the local police department or to one of the national UFO groups. That's too simplistic, says Bryant. If they really have hard evidence about aliens and flying saucers, what would they care about what's in your backyard? For the past several years Bryant, who happens to be a pentagon employee, has been placing ads in military newspapers encouraging anyone with UFO information to come forth and blow the whistle on the government cover-up. So far no one has come forward to reveal what he calls the "ultimate secret" that will motivate the general public, the press, and Congress to resolve the issue. He's not surprised. "So few people in the government really know about UFOs," he says. "And those who don't know are covering up because it's the way of doing things. It's the bureaucratic way. When in doubt, don't let it out. Don't even let out that you don't know.