The Psychology of Dreamland - part 2 of 3
Further evidence for the captured-alien-spaceship story comes from a controversial document leaked anonymously, in the form of an undeveloped roll of 35mm film, to movie director Jamie Shandera in December 1984. When developed and printed, the film was found to contain images of a briefing document seemingly prepared for then-incoming President Dwight D. Eisenhower on behalf of President Truman. This document, bearing the date of 18 November 1952, is known among UFO researchers as the "MJ-12," or
"Majestic 12," document. It describes the recovery of a crashed UFO and alien bodies in New Mexico and says that a "covert analytical effort" organized by General Nathan Twining and Dr. Vannevar Bush had been set up to investigate the matter.
Among the twelve members of the Majestic-12 group was noneother than the late Harvard University astronomer, Dr. Donald Menzel. This was surprising to UFO researchers because, in the 1950s and '60s, Menzel had been one of the most outspoken critics of UFO research. He even wrote three anti-UFO books in an attempt to debunk the subject. The idea that Menzel had maintained a covert relationship with the U.S. intelligence community, and had even participated in a top-level UFO research effort, was a piece of the puzzle many UFO investigators concluded simply could not fit. Or could it?
A CIA panel convened in early 1953 had concluded that the continued reporting of UFOs by the American media posed a threat to national security for various reasons. The "Robertson Panel," as it is now known, recommended that the continued reporting of UFOs should be actively discouraged through a covertly exercised mass-media program of "training and debunking." One of the methods discussed at the time was the use of high-profile scientific authorities to explain away the phenomenon. (For an account of the Robertson Panel and its affect on public opinion see 'The UFO Controversy in America' by David M. Jacobs, now a history professor at Temple University. The book was based on his doctoral dissertation.)
Until the Majestic-12 document appeared, there was no solid evidence to support the view that Menzel was playing the role of CIA disinformation agent, even though his explanations for UFO sightings often seemed irrational and inconsistent with the reported facts. It was only in the course of trying to poke holes in the MJ-12 document that physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman discovered Menzel's hidden intelligence career,
a fact apparently unknown even to Menzel's wife. The story of this and other discoveries are related in Friedman's 'Final Report on Operation Majestic 12,' available from the Fund for UFO Research.
Even within the UFO-research community, the authenticity of the MJ-12 document is hotly debated. Friedman, who conducted a thorough investigation of the document with the help of a $16,000 grant from the Fund for UFO Research, concluded there was no evidence indicating it could not be genuine. Other investigators are more skeptical. As Friedman explained, though, whoever prepared the MJ-12 document could only have done so with an insider's knowledge of some very esoteric historical details--such as Menzel's clandestine intelligence career, for example, and other minutia about White House operations in the 1950s. In short, if the MJ-12 briefing document is disinformation, it is highly *sophisticated* disinformation,
almost certainly prepared by someone within the intelligence community.
If the MJ-12 document is a fraud, it presents still another paradox in a field already rich with them. Why would the U.S. intelligence community prepare a fake document designed to convince us that undeniable evidence for the existence of UFOs is in government hands when the Air Force had spent many years attempting to convince the public that UFOs are mythological? One suggested reason would be to suck civilian UFO investigators into accepting the authenticity of MJ-12 and then obliterate their credibility with the media and scientific world by exposing the
document as a hoax. After all, a similar thing seems to have occurred back in the 1950s following publication of a book about a crashed UFO and alien bodies called 'Behind the Flying Saucers' written by Frank Scully (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1950). Was history about to repeat itself?
Perhaps the boys in U.S. counter-intelligence had decided UFO researchers were getting a little too close for comfort and needed to be cut down a notch. If so, however, this only provides further evidence that something very important is being covered up by the intelligence community. Anyway you look at this issue, something doesn't add up--unless, of course, the
document is genuine.
Spy Versus Spy:
What is known about the CIA's involvement with the UFO controversy could by now fill a substantial book but, for the purposes of this article, a few choice examples will have to suffice. I've already mentioned the Robertson Panel's recommendation that media reporting of UFO sightings should be
covertly suppressed, as well as the fascinating case of Donald Menzel's secret life in the U.S. intelligence community. The Robertson Panel made other recommendations as well. One of them was that the two major UFO research groups existing at the time, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and Civilian Saucer Intelligence, should be "watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread
sightings should occur."
The CIA's conclusion that UFO groups needed to be watched apparently was taken to heart. One of the most influential private UFO research organizations in the 1960s, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), was literally crawling with CIA or former CIA personnel. In fact, it is hard to escape the impression that NICAP was being actively managed (or, more appropriately, mismanaged) by the CIA for its own inscrutable purposes. The history of the NICAP-CIA
connection was detailed by researcher Todd Zechel in the January 1979 issue of 'Just Cause,' the newsletter of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), one of the organizations that successfully sued the Agency under the Freedom of Information Act for release of classified UFO-related documents.
Shortly after NICAP was founded by space-propulsion researcher T. Townsend Brown in October 1956, at least two CIA covert agents worked their way into key positions in the organization. Nicholas de Rochefort, an employee of the CIA's Psychological Warfare Staff became vice-chairman of NICAP in late
1956. The second was Bernard J.O. Carvalho who became chairman of the group's membership subcommittee. According to Zechel, Carvalho, among other things, had been a cut-out (go between) man for CIA proprietary (privately owned) companies such as Fairway Corporation, a charter airline used by CIA executives.
In 1957, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA's original director (from 1947-50), joined NICAP's Board of Governors. As stated earlier, the authenticity of the MJ-12 briefing document is a subject of dispute, but it is nevertheless worth noting that Hillenkoetter was listed in that document as a member of the Majestic 12 UFO investigation team, along with Donald Menzel.
Another NICAP board member was Col. Joseph Bryan III who, from 1947-53 had been the founder and original chief of the CIA's Psychological Warfare Staff. In addition, former CIA briefing officer Karl Pflock was chairman of NICAP's Washington, D.C., subcommittee during the late 1960s and early 1970s, according to Zechel. Pflock, who has researched the Roswell case
under a grant from the non-profit Fund for UFO Research, was author of the theory that the alleged Roswell UFO crash was really a secret Project Mogul balloon, an idea the Air Force endorsed in its recent press release. Pflock vigorously ridicules any suggestion that he has a hidden, CIA-inspired agenda. (See "I was a Ufologist for the CIA..." 'UFO Magazine,' Vol. 8, No.
6, 1993) There are other CIA connections, as well, but I will not belabor the point.
NICAP began to run into financial problems following the release of the University of Colorado UFO "study" which portrayed the potential for UFO research in a very negative light. (More about this shortly.) Under the tenure of president John L. Acuff, NICAP's financial difficulties grew steadily worse, largely because most of the money the organization was
raising wound up in Acuff's pocket. Membership dropped off further after Acuff sold NICAP's membership list to the Nazi Party. Prior to his NICAP appointment, Acuff had been head of the Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers, whose membership included many Defense Department and CIA photo analysts.
When NICAP's money finally ran out, Acuff resigned and was replaced by Alan N. Hall, another retired CIA employee.
Todd Zechel summed it up best: "To come right out and say it was all a conspiracy would either be leaping to conclusions or stating the obvious--take your pick. But in the final analysis, the results speak for themselves. And the results are that if [the CIA] wanted to destroy the leading anti-secrecy organization of the 1960s, they couldn't have done a better job if they'd tried...."
Weird Science:
Readers who are old enough to remember the 1960s may dimly recall that, in 1966, when the Air Force had exhausted its credibility with the public over the persistent UFO issue, the Secretary of Defense turned the matter over to physicist Edward Condon at the University of Colorado. Like Donald Menzel, Condon was a respected scientist with impressive credentials and a history of secret military work. He had been director of the National Bureau of Standards and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At last, it seemed at the time, the UFO issue was to get its long-overdue day in the court of science.
Soon after this investigation got started, however, Condon began to behave in a most unscientific manner. Long before the results of his study were made public, Condon started giving speeches ridiculing UFO witnesses and the subject in general. Scientists both inside and outside the investigation team found this behavior very upsetting--as they should have. But what really upset insiders was the discovery of a memo from project
coordinator Robert Low indicating that the investigation planned to trick the public and scientific community by focusing on the psychology and sociology of UFO witnesses, rather than investigating the physical reality of the UFOs themselves.
This was the last straw for team psychologist David Saunders who leaked the Low memo to the press. This action ultimately resulted in his dismissal by Condon for "insubordination." Saunders, with reporter Roger Harkins, later
wrote a fascinating expos‚ of the whole twisted affair called 'UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong' (New York: Signet, 1968).
Many observers of the University of Colorado episode concluded the CIA was orchestrating the entire peculiar affair to derail any serious scientific attempt to study UFOs. As Saunders put it in a concluding chapter of 'UFOs? Yes!', "The Central Intelligence Agency is around, everywhere." Direct,
completely unambiguous connections between the CIA and the Condon
Commission are difficult to establish, however. The Agency was clearly wary of revealing its interest in UFOs. As Timothy Good pointed out in 'Above Top Secret' (New York: William Morrow, 1988), the CIA even took care that any work performed by its National Photographic Interpretation Center for the Condon Commission was not identified as being performed by the CIA.
(The latest controversy involving the CIA has to do with Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist with the Naval Surface Weapons Center. Maccabee is well known in the civilian UFO research community for his technical analyses of UFO photos and films. It recently came to light that Maccabee secretly had been lecturing about UFOs at the CIA, a fact that set off alarms of paranoia in certain quarters. This is probably a tempest in a
teapot but it demonstrates again an ongoing, clandestine interest in the UFO phenomenon by the intelligence community.)
News That's Unfit to Print:
Roger Harkins, then a reporter for the 'Boulder Daily Camera,' had a particular interest in documenting the CIA's suspected involvement with the Condon Commission. One day he was asked by the Denver Associated Press (AP) Bureau to file a story about an upcoming press conference by Jim and Coral Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), then an
influential private UFO-research group. Harkins decided to use the opportunity to smoke out any CIA operatives he thought might be lurking in or around the Denver AP Bureau by doing a story purposely linking the Agency with UFOs.
APRO's Jim Lorenzen provided Harkins with a seven-point rationale for the CIA's interest in UFOs. Harkins then wrote his story around this indictment of the CIA, assuming the Agency would want to suppress the story and that the AP might just do it. He then filed the story with the AP and returned
to the 'Daily Camera''s office to wait for it to come across on the teletype. He waited all night and the rest of the next day and, just as he expected, the story never appeared.
While this doesn't prove CIA involvement, it raises some interesting questions in light of the Robertson Panel's recommendations. Those who think the CIA couldn't, or wouldn't, suppress news about matters judged to have national security implications have something to learn from authors Victor Marchetti and John Marks. In their book 'The CIA and the Cult of
Intelligence' (itself the subject of a famous CIA censorship effort), the authors made it clear that planting CIA operatives in deep cover with major American media organizations has been a long-established tradition at the Agency. More common, perhaps, are the CIA's efforts to suppress news coverage through pressure or friendly persuasion.
For most Americans, all they know is what they read in the newspapers or see on TV, and if they don't read about or see UFO reports, then they effectively cease to exist. Like government maps, newspapers and television broadcasts are often mistaken for a faithful description of reality.
James McCampbell, an engineering physicist and author I interviewed in 1979 for a radio documentary broadcast on National Public Radio said he, too, had concluded UFO news stories were being suppressed. In response to a question about lack of American press coverage of sensational UFO-related
developments in France, McCampbell responded, "I think that the principle sources of information in the media are controlled, at least by pressure from the government, to keep information concerning UFOs out of general circulation. I reach that conclusion when I compare the hundreds and hundreds of [UFO] clippings I get from small-town newspapers throughout the
United States, none of which ever get covered in the wire services. The principle newspaper editors are relying quite heavily on the wire services for information."
Paranoia? Well, consider the fact that some of the most sensational UFO flaps in recent years were never mentioned by most of the nation's leading newspapers. According to the U.S. government's own documents, retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act, UFOs haunted major military bases across the United States in 1975. Unusual lighted objects were seen by Air
Force personnel over bases in Maine, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, New Mexico and elsewhere, only to escape again into the night. The Air Force explanation for some of these events was that the objects were unidentified helicopters. Even if you accept this explanation, one would think that a story about unidentified helicopters flying at will over some our nation's most sensitive nuclear-weapons facilities would be worth a few column inches in 'The New York Times' or the 'Washington Post.' Yet, the story never surfaced until the FOIA documents came out years later.
Press coverage hasn't improved much since 1975. An electronic search for articles about the triangle-shaped UFO seen nightly by thousands of people over Belgium in 1990 turned up only one tongue-in-cheek story in 'The Wall Street Journal.' Across the Atlantic, however, these sightings were being seriously reported in major European publications such as the July 5, 1990, 'Paris Match.' The sightings were even officially confirmed by the Belgian Defense Minister who released radar tapes from an F-16 fighter that had chased and tracked the mysterious object. The unidentified craft also was videotaped by several ground observers. Yet, unless you're a loyal devotee
of tabloid TV or spent that time in Europe, you probably don't know these events occurred.
A still more sensational series of UFO sightings took place over and around Mexico City during and after the total solar eclipse of 1991. This being the age of the video camcorder, many people recorded these UFOs on tape. Hundreds of such videotapes, including footage from broadcast TV cameramen in Mexico City, have been edited into two documentaries, 'Messengers of Destiny' and 'Masters of the Stars' (available from Genesis III, Box 25962, Munds Park, AZ 86017). This was big news for months in Mexico, but 'The New York Times,' along with other major U.S. newspapers, apparently decided it was just not news that was fit to print. An electronic search revealed not a single story about these events in any of the indexed major U.S.
newspapers.
The major TV networks haven't much to crow about, either. For example, on October 1982, the PBS network broadcast 'The Case of the UFOs' on its popular NOVA science series. By any standards, it was a masterful piece of anti-UFO propaganda, completely misrepresenting the most basic facts about the subject, albeit in a seemingly objective style. Although many UFO
researchers were filmed for the program, nearly all of this footage wound up on the cutting-room floor. Footage of the few researchers who were allowed to speak was carefully edited to completely misrepresent their views. Their original testimony in support of UFO research was presented to suggest that they thought there was little evidence for the phenomenon.
Even worse, the nation's most famous and experienced UFO researcher who founded the non-profit Center for UFO Studies, the late astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, was not allowed to speak on the program in defense of the subject to which he had devoted much of his life. The heavily slanted
program left viewers with the impression that few scientists believe UFOs exist or should be studied, an idea that is completely contradicted by polls and surveys of scientific and engineering opinion.
In 1977, for example, 53 percent of 1,365 members of the American Astronomical Society who responded to a survey from Stanford University physicist Peter A. Sturrock, said they thought UFOs "certainly" or "probably" should be investigated further. Surveys published by 'Industrial Research' magazine show similar support for UFO research among engineers and scientists. Dozens of professional scientists are currently involved in
UFO research and hundreds more would certainly join them if federal funds were available. Of course, you can't get federal money to study something the government insists does not exist.
It later came to light that content decisions for the NOVA program had been made on the advice of Kendrick Frazier, editor of 'The Skeptical Inquirer,' the mouthpiece for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The organization has waged a kind of holy war on UFO
researchers for years and could hardly be counted on for a balanced view of the controversy.
However you account for all of this, the evidence shows that the national media, for whatever reasons, have not been providing accurate coverage of either the UFO phenomenon itself or those who study it. Again, it may be jumping to conclusions to attribute this to government policies; perhaps
American journalists have simply decided that mass sightings of UFOs have less public appeal than, say, traffic accidents, robberies, and celebrities--to which they devote enormous time and resources. Even so, suppression of UFO coverage was precisely the goal the CIA set out to achieve in the early 1950s when media reports began to pose a national-security problem for the U.S. government. Whether by design or dumb luck, they seem to have gotten their wish.
Little Gray Men:
If the military-intelligence community really *has* been studying alien technology out there in the Nevada wasteland, it doesn't take much imagination to come up with reasons why authorities would want to keep this information out of circulation. Advanced technical knowledge has inescapable political consequences, as those attempting to stop nuclear
proliferation know so well. Simply admitting that alien contact has taken place could open up a virtual Pandora's box.