Scientists Challenge Air Force Regarding UFOs

By Stanton T. Friedman

Frankly I am sick and tired of the US Air Force lying to the public, the press, and members of Congress about UFOs,” said nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman at a public lecture “Flying Saucers ARE Real” in Albuquerque. “I have had a serious interest in UFOs for 39 years, lectured in a dozen countries, and visited seventeen document archives,” he continued. “For 50 years there has been massive misrepresentation about UFOs in general, and in recent years the Roswell Incident in particular. The Air Force has come up with four different answers for Roswell:

1. A flying saucer
2. A radar reflector and weather balloon
3. A Mogul balloon train over 500 feet long with 23 balloons, sonobuoys, etc.
4. And most recently, a Mogul balloon train plus crash test dummies dropped at least six years AFTER the 1947 crashes Southeast of Corona and West of Magdalena.”

Friedman, who spent fourteen years as an industrial nuclear physicist working on a wide variety of classified, highly advanced nuclear systems for major corporations, was the first civilian investigator of the Roswell Incident.

“I hereby challenge Colonel Richard Weaver, author of the outrageously misleading huge volume ‘The Roswell Report: Fact Vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert’, and USAF Captain James McAndrew, author of the 1997 ‘The Roswell Report: Case Closed’, to a formal debate.

“These two officers have made a mockery out of serious investigation. They have used all the tools of the propagandist with selective choice of data, false reasoning, false claims, positive and negative name calling. These reports should be listed under fiction in the library.

“The Mogul explanation doesn’t fit. There are gross differences among the testimony of their witnesses, and they ignore the testimony they don’t want to consider while claiming falsely that they have talked to all the original witnesses still alive who handled material totally different from the Mogul explanation.

“They left out vital aspects of quotes from the FBI. They falsely tried to claim the Roswell story came to light because of a story in a tabloid in 1978. That story didn’t appear until 1980 after a colleague and I had talked to 60 people connected with the case. I was falsely portrayed as somebody who gets his UFO stories from tabloids.

“The fact is in 1978 I was the first to talk to a key witness, Major Jesse Marcel the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the world in 1947. I was referred to him by an old ham radio buddy of his who had seen the press stories in 1947. Jesse never sought publicity. I discussed many of these false charges in my book TOP SECRET MAJIC.

“One of the silliest official USAF stories is the crash test dummy nonsense. I spoke in person with Colonel Madson, whose picture is in the Case Closed volume and was heavily involved in the research program. He is adamant that the explanation doesn’t fit. Remember that the dummies had to be the same height and weight as air force pilots. None were dropped anywhere near the two crash sites and none were dropped earlier than 6 years AFTER the 1947 events.

“They used a crazy explanation for the red-headed officer observed independently at the Roswell Base Hospital, and in the Plains of San Augustin. World class pilot, Joseph Kittinger, was a redhead and was at the Roswell base hospital after a ballooning accident. But it was twelve years later! If the explanation doesn’t fit, one must acquit. As it happens, I was the first to hear the two independent stories about the nasty red haired officer and the black sergeant, an unusual combination for 1947. The Air Force says nothing about the black sergeant, or the two independent stories.

“There are many other examples of massive misrepresentation by the Air Force about UFOs. The USAF Office of Special Investigations even told its own units to ignore their own regulations if they received an FOIA request from me about UFOs. The USAF apparently even lied to the CIA recently, falsely claiming that half the UFO sightings after 1955 were the results of observations of super secret reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2 and later the SR-71. But there was no increase in the number of sightings after 1955. Why would anybody report a very high flying aircraft moving in a straight line and never making right angle turns, as stopping on a dime, instantly reversing direction, or silently landing and taking off in the middle of nowhere, like UFOs so often are observed to do???

“The Pentagon based Air Force Liaison officer has written numerous one page letters in response to constituent requests for information about Roswell to congressman. It took me five pages to correct all the false claims he made.

“Colonel Weaver wrote a researcher that the Operation Majestic 12 Documents, which are the subject of TOP SECRET/MAJIC are known by everybody to be BOGUS. In response to my Freedom of Information Act request for any memos, letters, documents, etc. supporting this ridiculous and baseless claim, I was told, ‘There are no records available.’ This is a clear case of research by proclamation.

“Doesn’t the Air Force have a responsibility to those who pay the bills to be honest? Or are they above the law? I repeat my challenge:

“USAF officers McAndrew and Weaver, do you have the courage of your convictions? Name the date and place. Perhaps Larry King or Walter Cronkite or Ted Koppel would be willing to act as moderator.”

The post Scientists Challenge Air Force Regarding UFOs first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Scientists Challenge Air Force Regarding UFOs appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

The UFO Challenge

By Stanton T. Friedman

As a nuclear physicist who has had a serious interest in flying saucers since 1958, I have reached four major conclusions:

1. The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not.
2. The subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate, meaning that some few people in major governments have known since July, 1947, when two crashed saucers and several alien bodies were recovered in New Mexico, that indeed SOME UFOs are ET. As noted in 1950, it’s the most classified U.S. topic.
3. None of the arguments made against conclusions One and Two by a small group of debunkers such as Carl Sagan, my University of Chicago classmate for three years, can stand up to careful scrutiny.
4. The Flying Saucer story is the biggest story of the millennium: visits to Planet Earth by aliens and the U.S. government’s cover-up of the best data (the bodies and wreckage) for over fifty years.

Since 1967 I have lectured on the subject “Flying Saucers ARE Real” at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups in all fifty US states, nine Canadian Provinces, twelve cities in England and nine in other countries, with only eleven hecklers. I have also appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows. Overall, I have probably answered about 35,000 questions about UFOs and secrecy.

It’s clear that over 97% of the people have NOT read any of the five major scientific studies I discuss, and are unaware of the mountains of evidence that support my conclusions. They are also unaware of the scientific data, as opposed to tabloid nonsense. However, it is also clear from the Opinion Polls and from my own experience that indeed most people accept the notion that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. The greater the education, the MORE likely an individual is to accept this proposition. In an October 25, 1995, Oxford University Debate on the resolution “Planet Earth is being visited by intelligent extraterrestrial life,” the affirmative side, of which I was a part, garnered 60% of Debate Union Member votes on the question. Ninety-two percent of 100,000 people calling during a TV Debate in London on June 27, 1997, said Earth has been visited by aliens!

The problem is NOT that there is not enough evidence to justify my conclusions; but that most people, especially the noisy negativists, are unaware of the real, non-tabloid evidence.

Debunkers seem to employ four major rules:

1. What the public doesn’t know, we certainly won’t tell them. The largest official USAF UFO study isn’t even mentioned in twelve anti-UFO books, though every one of those books’ authors was aware of it.
2. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.
3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people. It is easier.
4. Do one’s research by proclamation rather than investigation. It is much easier, and nobody will know the difference anyway.

Many major media people will concede that if indeed aliens are visiting earth, that would be a major story. But because they take great pride in their KNOWLEDGE of major stories, if this were happening they would know about it. But they don’t. Therefore, anybody who says visits are real must be a crackpot.

I have noted four major reasons why the big names in science and journalism haven’t jumped on the pro-UFO bandwagon:

1. Ignorance of the data. Scratch a debunker and one usually finds somebody who is putting down what he is not up on.
2. Fear of ridicule in sponsoring a thesis (only about ten have been submitted relating to UFOs) if a professor, or sponsoring a detailed reportorial investigation if an editor. I check all my audiences and find that, while in agreement with polls, 10% have had a sighting but only 5-10% of these witnesses have been willing to report what they saw. Biggest reason? Fear of ridicule.
3. Ego. If aliens were visiting Earth, they would call a press conference or ask to talk to the National Academy of Sciences. They haven’t, so aliens must not be visiting. Flying saucers finish the job Copernicus started in taking man out of the middle of the universe. Priests fought Copernicus’s ideas. Today guys in lab coats, rather than priestly robes, fight alien visitations.
4. Failure to use our knowledge of technology to understand UFO behavior. They say “It is impossible,” rather than “I don’t know how.” Despite the absurd claims of certain ancient academics and fossilized physicists, it is clear on the basis of solid engineering studies that trips to nearby stars are feasible with round trip times shorter than the average person’s lifetime — using, for example, staged fission and fusion propulsion systems. I have worked on both. It’s clear that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. The history of science is littered with challenges, leveled by people who know nothing about the job at hand, against traditionally “impossible” claims.

The cult of S.E.T.I. (Silly Effort To Investigate) with its crazy notions that nobody would travel — but that aliens, stuck at the level of radio, are trying to attract our attention — mocks the notion of flying saucers, not by dealing with the evidence, but by proclamations about the ABSENCE of evidence. This ignores science.

I prove at every lecture that the NSA and CIA are withholding UFO data. Having worked under security for fourteen years, visited seventeen document archives, and having become aware of the huge black budgets of the NSA, NRO, CIA, DIA, etc., I know how easy it is to keep secrets. My nineteen years of study about crashed saucers, and thirteen years on the Majestic-12 documents have convinced me these are real. The challenge for us all, as we enter the new millennium, is to recognize that while our future is in space, we are not alone. I truly hope we qualify for admission to the Cosmic Kindergarten.

The post The UFO Challenge first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post The UFO Challenge appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Flatwoods Monster UFO Event

by Stanton T. Friedman

Frank Feschino’s telephone call came as a surprise this past summer. We had met at a conference in Florida a few years back when he had mentioned he was researching the Flatwoods Monster UFO event of Sept. 12, 1952. Our pictures were taken together and that was about the end of it. Now Frank, an artist who has done film school as well, was asking if I would help him out by attending the Flatwoods Monster 50th Anniversary event in Flatwoods, West Virginia, the weekend of September 12, 2002. There were more conversations and I agreed as long as they would cover expenses. I hadn’t been in West Virginia for years, though I had spoken at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

Frank wanted me to speak on two afternoons at the newly set up “museum” or event center and do some media interviews.

I did some homework reviewing what had been written about the case by Jerome Clark, Donald Keyhoe, Dr. Joe Nickell, and others. Some was impressive. The plan was to drive to Bangor, Maine, fly to Cincinnati and then to Charleston, West Virginia. Frank would pick me up with the mayor and drive the 60 miles on Interstate 79 to a motel in Sutton, next door to Flatwoods. That morning was jinxed. I got on the connecting flight in Cincinnati with a few other passengers. Then we were told to get off, just a small problem with the plane and they were bringing over another aircraft. While waiting there was a major Security Alert and we were all chased out of Terminal A. With all my travelling, this was my first such security adventure — and I hope my last.

I spent a few hours waiting in line then finally getting through security to find that the plane had left and I was booked on a much later flight and wait listed for a somewhat earlier flight. I tried calling Frank who was of course at the airport in Charleston. I was the last standby let on the flight. Frank was waiting with the Flatwoods Mayor. They hadn’t been able to get any useful info from the airline, but somebody who got off my supposed flight said things were a mess. Fortunately, we did arrive in time to take the tour leading a bunch of people who had come for the event to the actual site of the encounter with the monster. Frank led the tour as we walked past the big tree which the monster came from behind. We walked up the hill to the top where the UFO had landed and the gully to which the UFO had migrated. We were there exactly 50 years to the minute after the event.

Knowing the geography was very useful. Since that place at the top was the highest flat area in the region, it was a natural place for a plane in trouble to land. In the gully the UFO was not exposed. These areas were well above the school yard where the youngsters had been playing football when they first spotted. the object. I helped Frank on the tour even noting that a month or two before, while on a radio show out of NY, a former USAF man then based at Andrews  AFB, had called saying that not only were there jets scrambled over Washington, DC, during the famous July 1952 flap of sightings (even over the White House) but frequently for the following year, which would include the time of the Flatwoods case. The base was definitely but quietly concerned about UFOs. The airman noted that in one instance two jets had been sent up after a UFO and only one came back.

I spoke without slides both days in the small museum meeting room which had been decorated with Frank’s photos and drawings, did several interviews and met with several witnesses including Mrs. May, the key witness, and one of her sons who was there and had also been a witness. It turned out that the Mayor had also seen the object fly over.

Only about a 15′ section of the big tree that had been there in 1952 was left. The “Monster” had come from behind the tree. The branch under which the FM had passed was 12 feet above the ground. The monster was floating about a foot or so off the ground (thus being about 10′ high) giving off some kind of oily substance which stained clothes of some of the witnesses and whose smell made some of the boys quite ill. It was clear that the monster was not too much like the drawing which had been spread around after being made by an artist for the We the People TV show on which Mrs. May and a local reporter appeared within 2 weeks of the event. It was much more mechanical and had antennas instead of hands.

We heard for the first time a tape that had been made many years earlier of a show hosted by Long John Nebel, the old New York City talk show host who often dealt with UFOs. Nebel interviewed naturalist Ivan Sanderson in depth. Sanderson had gone to West Virginia and talked to many witnesses within a short time of the event. Gray Barker of Clarksburg WV had also interviewed witnesses soon after the event. The local reporter, Mr. Stewart, had interviewed many witnesses and was aware of other sightings in the area that same weekend.

I was truly amazed at how much effort Frank had put into his investigation. He found news clippings from all over the East Coast talking of UFOs and supposed meteors seen that weekend though more likely burning or plasma surrounded UFOs. There are no normal meteor showers Sept. 12-15. Frank dug out the Blue Book files which had been difficult to read. He managed to locate the head of the National Guard contingent who was at the site within hours of the event, having been instructed by the military to check it out. Colonel Leavitt was with a bunch of troops who spent over night at the site. He managed to get samples of the oily material which were sent off never to be heard from again. Frank,  because of his film school training, videotaped extended interviews with many of the key people including both Colonel Leavitt and journalist Stewart before they died.

Of course, there are some who say the whole story was baloney with the kids making up stories to get attention and the so called monster being nothing more than a large barn owl because of the way the top of the monster (seemingly a protective helmet) was shown as being backed by something in the shape of a playing card spade. Naturally in the tradition of noisy negativists, these debunkers did their research by proclamation rather than investigation.

The loudest of the debunkers is Dr. Joe Nickell the chief investigator for the self-anointed Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Dr. Nickell does have three degrees (all in English) and did visit Flatwoods, and writes well. However, he did not talk to the witnesses and did not visit the site hillside, the tree, or the flat area at the top. He has a long, very misleading article in Ron Story’s 2000 Encyclopedia. It was just scared youngsters seeing a barn owl and a meteor landing on the hill. A ten foot high owl would really have been something, especially one able to float without moving its wings and without a branch to set on. For a large glowing Meteor to land without making a loud explosive sound and not creating a crater and not leaving any meteorite residue would be truly remarkable and especially when it had to change direction and slowly move across town.

Frank Feschino has done most of his work very quietly and has been almost obsessive about secrecy. I feel particularly privileged to be able to read a copy of his manuscript about the case. I surely hope that a publisher will soon be found and that a motion picture production company is not far behind.

Based on his drawings and comments made by reporters within three days of the events and on testimony by other witnesses from a nearby town where a “monster” was also seen, I think that at least the exterior portion of the monster was mechanical. It made me think of a hazardous material protective device — perhaps with an Extraterrestrial Biological Entity inside. It seems clear the object was in trouble when it landed. There is far more evidence relating to the Flatwoods Monster event than was the case with regard to that other West Virginia monster, the Mothman.

Although Frank Feschino has already collected a huge number of clippings about the case I would be most happy to receive any that readers can dig up from any newspapers for September 12-16, 1952. They may refer to UFOs or meteors or missing jets seen East of the Mississippi and can be sent to me at POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730 USA. Please indicate the date of the clipping and the name of the newspaper. I will forward them to Frank. The best website to check out is Frank Feschino’s at www.flatwoodsmonster.com.

The post Flatwoods Monster UFO Event first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Flatwoods Monster UFO Event appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Petition, UFOs, White House and Lies

By Stanton T. Friedman

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when personnel of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President at the New Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., discussed how to respond to a petition about disclosing data on UFOs. I suspect that nobody brought up the enormous amount of information available indicating that not only are aliens visiting, but the US and other government have been withholding information for many decades. The response certainly indicates intentional lying and misrepresentation or total ignorance.

The petition, prepared and submitted by Steve Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group, went like this:

I, for one, was not one of more than 5000 persons signing the petition. My reason was straightforward. Having worked under security for 14 years and having researched the flying saucer phenomenon (certainly most UFOs are NOT alien flying saucers) for 53 years, I believe there is a very strong national security side to the question. I cannot see releasing technical data that could be of use to other countries also researching the phenomena and wanting to duplicate the extraordinary flying capabilities of the flying saucers… for military purposes.

The response was issued by research assistant Phil Larson. He stated “The US government has no evidence that (1) any life exists outside our planet or (2) that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition (3) there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.” No indication is provided as to just what sources, if any, were evaluated. Furthermore, a real red herring was provided: “There are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth.” He then discusses SETI, The Kepler Spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity), soon to be launched to Mars. None of these have anything to do with the extraterrestrial presence here, the petition’s topic!! Why mention them?

Larson generously concedes that “The odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.” Odds cannot be determined when there is no data. He also foolishly states that “The odds of making contact with any of them — especially any intelligent ones — are extremely small given the distances involved.” To which distances is he referring, billions of light years to very distant galaxies?? Or 39.3 light years to Zeta Reticuli? Where is any data to support these totally baseless claims? Does he have travel schedules for civilizations outside Earth? Surely the astronomical community knows nothing about interstellar travel. More about evidence below, but let us first look at (3).

No credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public? Is he really unaware of the many TOP SECRET UMBRA CIA UFO documents that have been released so heavily redacted that many pages say “Deny in Toto” or that many others are blacked out except for fewer than eight words. Is he really unaware that because of a FOIA court case, the NSA has admitted finding 156 TOP SECRET UMBRA UFO documents. When finally released, one could read about one sentence per page with the rest being whited out. The excuse for redaction was that it is illegal to release sources and methods information. It is absurd to suggest that more than 95% of these UFO documents consisted of sources and methods information. Federal Court Judge Gerhard Gesell agreed the documents should not be released. “The Public interest in disclosure is far outweighed by the potential danger to the security of the United States should this information be released,” he wrote.

Is Larson really unaware of the following 1969 statement by USAF General Carroll Bolender asked to decide Project Blue Book’s future: “Reports of UFOs which could affect national security are made in accord with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not part of the Blue Book system….Termination of Blue Book would leave no official federal office to receive reports of UFOs . However, as already stated, reports which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.” When BB was closed as a result of Bolender’s memo and for more than 40 years since, the public has been falsely told there was no government concern with UFOs. This was a flat-out lie. As late as 2011 there were official regulations in place instructing military pilots how to reports UFOs. Where is all this data? No evidence being hidden???

Since 1969 the public has been told (1) “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.” (2) “There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge” and (3) “There has been no evidence that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles.” Skillfully constructed lies and deception!! What if any other agency such as the navy, CIA, NSA, DIA, NRO, ONI, Majestic 12, etc had done the reporting, investigating, or evaluating? I worked on programs such as nuclear fusion propulsion for star travel (at great cost) way back in 1961. If there was no threat to national security, why were military pilots officially ordered in 1952 to shoot down UFOs if they did not land when instructed to do so? Why did an AF general state that more than 300 jets had been scrambled?

No evidence being hidden? Then why did Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles make the following statement in a very widely distributed press release, on October 25, 1955, about a large study concerning UFOs. “On the basis of this study, we believe that no objects such as those popularly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States. I feel certain that even the Unknown 3% could have been explained as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been obtained.” That the two supposedly factual statements (“3% Unknowns,” “incomplete observational data”) are bald-faced LIES is easily demonstrated. The data are compiled from “the study” whose title was NOT given in the press release (“Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14”) and which was not distributed, though the press release got very wide coverage.

Nothing Hidden?? The Unknowns comprised 21.5% of the 3201 cases investigated by Battelle Memorial Institute (NOT 3%!!) whose identity was not given in the press release. Of great importance is that there was a separate category listed as Insufficient Information comprising 9.3% of the cases. By definition no case could be listed as an Unknown if there was insufficient information despite Quarles’s lie. A statistical cross comparison between Unknowns and Knowns showed that the probability that the Unknowns were just missed Knowns was less than 1%. It was also found that the better the quality of a sighting the MORE likely to be listed as an Unknown. Nothing Hidden? Surely you are joking, Mr. Larson.

There were also many lies in the two huge reports about Roswell. One ridiculous one was even blindly accepted by the New York Times and appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition above the fold. Reports of bodies associated with the Roswell case were supposedly the results of observations of crash test dummies dropped all over New Mexico. Two very serious problems with this lie are that no dummies were dropped until 1953 (six years after Roswell) and that all were 6’ tall, weighed 175 pounds (just like pilots) and were in uniforms influencing drag and heating on the way down. There is no possible way even including time travel that they could have morphed into skinny creatures under 5’ tall with big heads and big eyes. Nothing Hidden???

Mr. Larson could have benefitted by consulting two other official US government reports besides “Blue Book Special Report 14: Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects: Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, House of Representatives July 29, 1968.” This includes testimony from 12 scientists — all but one, myself, with PhDs. One finds multiple witness radar visual cases, sightings by astronomers and other scientists. There was also the half-million-dollar University of Colorado study (usually called “The Condon Report”) done for the USAF. A special UFO subcommittee of the world’s largest group of Space scientists, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reported that 30% of the 117 cases studied in detail could not be identified. There was also the Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 case of Nov. 16, 1986, which involved ground and air radar and airborne witnesses. The FAA radar installation’s data was confiscated by the government. The object was twice the size of an aircraft carrier. Nothing Hidden, Mr. Larson?

Benefit might also be obtained by reviewing the extensive files of NARCAP (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena) which include loads of sightings by pilots. These are men entrusted to fly civilian and military aircraft carrying loads of people. Many outstanding cases are in Leslie Kean’s “UFOs: General, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record.” These cannot be ignored.

Larson talks about evidence. One would think he would mention the literally thousands of physical trace cases from all over the world collected by researchers such as Ted Phillips. He says “no contact with any member of the human race.” Perhaps he should read Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. A great deal of the testimony was obtained by psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. He had been a colonel in the army entrusted with directing a 3000 bed hospital treating shell shock war veterans. He was chosen by the army to star in their movie Let There be Light about his successful treatment of these early sufferers from PTSD. He had stated that the emotional intensity of the Hills as they relived portions of their abduction experience was every bit as emotional as that of his many military patients.

What we have here is a travesty against the public, the press, and those many witnesses who have come forth. There is a classic example of bait and switch. Try to redirect attention from aliens visiting (the subject of the petition along with concerns about cover-up) to hypothetical meaningless talk of what might be way out there for which there is no basis at all. If the discussion were in a court of law, Larson would have to be convicted of perjury.

The post Petition, UFOs, White House and Lies first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Petition, UFOs, White House and Lies appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Peter Jennings Program

By Stanton T. Friedman

By the time you read this you will have read a ton of verbiage about the February 24 Peter Jennings’s ABC “UFOs: Seeing is Believing.” I think it is appropriate for me to comment since so many people sent me emails about it. Almost all were sympathetic about what they considered the unfair treatment that I and the Roswell incident received.

The producers in Roswell interviewed me for over an hour in July, 2004. Don Schmitt who has been active in Roswell research for many years was also interviewed. He and a film crew actually went out to the site, which was marked out for more archeological digging. I believe about 20 seconds of my interview was shown with none of Don’s nor of the scientific work site. I had been cautiously optimistic after hearing a few weeks before the showing that I had made the cut, but that 100 people had not. My optimism decreased when I heard that Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Jill Tartar, (SETI Specialists) and Michael Shermer, skeptic, were going to be on. Despite all their writing about SETI, it was clear that none knew anything about UFOs. Proclamation is not the same as investigation. I had jokingly told people that, after all, Peter Jennings and I were both dual citizens of the USA and Canada and, surprisingly, both had been born on July 29. How could I not trust him? I didn’t place enough emphasis on the fact that Benito Mussolini was also born on July 29.

I was favorably impressed with the first portion with interviews with aircraft crew members, comments about Blue Book’s focus on explaining away sightings and the interview with Major Friend whom I had met at Blue Book in the early 1960s. The second half of the show was like a horror film. The SETI people waxed poetic about their wonderful search for ET Signals. There was no indication of any knowledge of UFOs other than one of the sillier moments of the show when Jill Tartar described having a sighting of the moon partially obscured by clouds. This was worth recreating?? One can see why the SETI people don’t want to deal with eyewitness testimony. I think one could also see why I say that SETI stands for Silly Effort to Investigate and why I talk of the cult of SETI: Charismatic hand waving, very strong dogma (they must be out there, they can’t be coming here, we will make the most important discovery in Man’s history a signal from a distant civilization, and nobody could possibly come here — if they did, we would be out of a job) and strong irrational claims about the absence of evidence. Meaning “we don’t dare review it.” Dr. Tyson joined the crowd and proclaimed that eyewitness testimony may be OK in court, but not in science. Tell Jane Goodall that.

Several times PJ used the term “mainstream science” along with a proclamation about its non-acceptance of UFO reality. No evidence was presented. It appears that the only mainstream science he was talking about was astronomy. Think of chemists, biologists, geologists, us physicists, etc. Much of science today was based on eyewitness testimony of something unusual. Think Roentgen and X-rays. I believe that most mainstream scientists like me believe that the methodology has to suit the problem. Unpredictable, brief appearances of strange craft (not under the control of the observer or of Mother Nature) behaving in strange ways require eyewitness testimony as, of course, do airplane crashes, crimes, etc. Shostak proclaims when he finds a signal they will tell everybody else who will then verify it and anybody can use his own antenna. What happens if the transmission stops? How many can afford their own Hat Creek Telescope System? Does he think the signal will be “Testing 1, 2” repeated over and over again? That we can order the saucer to stop while we do measurements?

PJ claimed that mainstream science doesn’t accept the UFO evidence. This was yet another misrepresentation. Polls have consistently shown that the greater the education the more likely to accept UFO reality. Two polls of R and D people showed that about 2/3 of them who expressed an opinion said flying saucers were real. But then they live in the real world unlike the SETI cultists.

The program contained, as might be expected, based on past experience, a major putdown on star travel from people who know absolutely nothing about space travel. We were told that the Voyageur spacecraft, our fastest space craft launched 30 years ago, will take 73,000 years to reach the nearest star and that the fastest man made object goes only 11 miles per second compared to the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second. Wow! Sounds like we sure can’t get there from here. These are both totally misleading. The Voyager hasn’t been attached to a propulsion system since it left the vicinity of the earth!! It is coasting. This is like tossing a bottle into the ocean or a feather in the air as a basis for estimating crossing time for the Queen Mary 2 or the SST or the space station.

We physicists have accelerated particles in the vacuum chambers of expensive accelerators to speeds of 99.99% of the speed of light. Eleven miles per second is absurd. Space is a very large vacuum chamber. These totally misleading comments rank on a par with Dr. Simon Newcombe’s claim in October, 1903 (2 months before the Wright Brothers’ first flight) that the only way man would fly would be with the help of a balloon. Dr. Bickerton in the 1920s proved “scientifically” that it would be impossible to provide enough energy to put anything into orbit. Dr. Campbell in 1941 “scientifically” calculated that the required initial launch weight of a rocket able to get a man to the moon and back would be a million million tons. He was, because of his total ignorance about space flight, off by a factor of 300,000,000. All three were, like the SETI cultists, astronomers. With this track record, why believe any of their proclamations? I was involved more than 40 years ago in work on a fusion propulsion system able to eject particles having 10 million times as much energy per particle as in a chemical rocket. This, of course, was not presented. After all, I was just a promoter.

A real hatchet job was done on Budd Hopkins in the show’s segment on UFO abductions. The witnesses were OK, but then we have the off-the-wall proclamations about sleep paralysis being the explanation coupled with hypnosis to generate false testimony from the witnesses. All the data provided by Budd about the fact that many abductions don’t take place in bed (think Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton, etc), that there are many cases when more than one person is abducted (is sleep paralysis contagious?), that at least 30% of abduction investigations do not involve hypnosis, and there are physical markings, was left on the cutting room floor. Budd has worked with over 600 abductees. Had the 2 Harvard psychologists worked with more than a dozen? Why wasn’t any of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack’s interview run? The pronouncement that there is no benefit of hypnosis in memory enhancement is false. Phil Klass made the same claim to me, but stopped when I provided an article about a stonemason being able, under hypnosis, to describe tiny details on a particular stone that he had placed years earlier.

Finally we have the Roswell segment. I was introduced as a Roswell promoter. The term was used twice. There was no mention of the fact that I was a nuclear physicist who had worked for the likes of GE, GM, Westinghouse, etc. The totally unjustifiable term “myth” was used at least twice. PJ should be ashamed. Jesse Marcel junior was filmed. There was no mention of the fact that he is a medical doctor, a Flight surgeon Colonel in the reserve, and serving in Iraq despite being 67. His father was called an intelligence officer, but without adding that the group was the most elite military group in the world, the 509th, which had dropped the A-bombs on Japan. Don’t these facts go to credibility? Of course I am a Roswell promoter, based on 27 years of research and investigation and the outlay of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours and finding loads of supporting testimony, visits to 20 Document Archives, all ignored by the noisy negativists and none presented in the program.

At the request of the producers I had provided a total of 57 videos from which they used a few clips. One video was the 105-minute “Recollections of Roswell” which included testimony from 27 witness including Retired General Thomas Jefferson DuBose. He told me of taking the call from General Clements McMullen, head of SAC, who was the boss of 8th Air Force Commander Roger Ramey (who was DuBose’s boss) ordering him to get the press off their back, send some wreckage up here today, and never talk about it again.

For reasons unknown they had historian Robert Goldberg tell the Roswell tale although he was seriously in error in his description of Roswell in his book about conspiracies and on the show. They gave Karl Pflock quite a bit of time with his Roswell debunking. They blindly accepted the Mogul Balloon explanation even though there is no evidence to support it, the materials characteristics don’t match witness testimony, and the dates and locations are wrong. They stressed the high security for Mogul — vastly overstated since several launches were allowed to just drop in the desert, no chase planes or ground teams. At least the crash test dummies weren’t paraded. I have dealt with all the objections in my MUFON 2003 paper “Critiquing the Roswell Critics.”

The real promoters on the show were the SETI cultists with their myths. They have no evidence of any kind that there is anybody out there, that there are signals being sent, that they can receive and interpret such signals if there are any, using our primitive technology. An AM radio can’t pick up FM signals. They can’t admit that there is overwhelming evidence of alien visitation.

It appears that the producers were perfectly willing to present some interesting testimony though they left out things like Project Blue Book Special Report 14, or other large scale scientific studies, and the statement by AF General Carroll Bolender that reports of UFOs which could effect national security were not part of the Blue Book system. But the three areas of investigation that clearly together establish both the cover-up and that the planet is being visited (Roswell and the abductions and the fact that interstellar travel is feasible with reasonable trip times) were trashed. Sounds like when push came to shove they lacked any courage at all. It was nice to give a neat segment at the end of the program to Dr. Michio Kaku saying that maybe visitors are well ahead of us and can warp space and time. Fusion propulsion systems are much closer in time. Blacked out and whited out government UFO documents force one to the conclusion that the government is not just incompetent with Blue Book, but lying through its teeth.

Perhaps I should mention that only 11.6 million people watched the show. The Unsolved Mysteries program on NBC in 1989 about Roswell was seen by over 28 million people the first time around and 30 million the second time.

Particularly irritating was the frequent mention of lights in the sky, billions of stars, and absence of physical evidence. There was not even the slightest mention of Ted Phillips’s 3000+ excellent physical trace cases from 90 countries. Why show Chris McKay digging in desert dirt and not the traces left by a UFO?

Frankly, I was also bothered by the proclamations by nasty noisy negativist retired USAF officer James McGaha. We had a full-scale debate in Tennessee. The video is noted at my website www.stantonfriedman.com. It is easy to say we need both sides. But is that true when one does his research by investigation and the other does it by proclamation?
Over the years I have been involved in the making of a number of documentaries about UFOs. These include “UFOs ARE Real,” “Flying Saucers ARE Real (2 Vols.),” “Stanton T. Friedman IS Real!,” “Do you Believe in MAJIC?” and in numerous interviews for a wide variety of producers of shows that have aired on the History Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, etc. Therefore, I am really puzzled about certain aspects of the Peter Jennings’s Productions UFO special seen on ABC on February 24, 2005. The word is that 150 people were interviewed and only 50 made the cut. That is far more than would be required for a 2-hour special. I had heard just before the broadcast that an interview was done with Harvard psychaitrist Dr. John Mack that would not be used. It surely would have made a good counterweight to the two Harvard psychologists falsely explaining away abductions as sleep paralysis enhanced with hypnosis. It was only after the broadcast that I found out how many extended interviews with very sharp people hadn’t been used. Richard Hall, Dr. Richard Haines, Dr. David Jacobs, Dr. Bernard Haisch, John Schuessler, John Greenewald, Ted Roe of NARCAP, etc. I saw the people who interviewed Don Schmitt (no air time) and myself (20 seconds, and referring to me as a promoter twice, and calling Roswell a myth at least twice) in Roswell with Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. None of this is in the PJP show. Crews for PJP travelled a lot including, for example, to the MUFON Conference in Denver. There was no mention of MUFON in the program though CUFOS was given a lot of time with old footage of Dr. J. Allan Hynek as well. Strangely he was portrayed as a courageous loner, the only one standing up to the debunkers — a totally misleading portrayal. The question thus arises as to why spend at least many hundreds of thousand dollars to collect far more footage than could possibly be used? Perhaps they will do another special using “the good stuff?” I doubt it.

But if one wanted a real state-of-the-art survey of ufology on who knows what, is there a better cover story than that a company linked to Peter Jennings, the last remaining Big Time Network news anchor, is making a hard-hitting 2-hour special? People are flattered to be asked to contribute. Many of us were questioned for more than an hour. It might also be possible when reviewing the tapes to get clues as to who might be speaking out of turn. The crews were very tight about who all they talked to. Is it really surprising that the harshest attacks came down on Roswell, the reality of abductions and the reality of interstellar flight? Glorifying the Silly Effort To Investigate cultists provides a great deal of misdirection away from the reality of UFOs and the government cover-up. The footage would be a feast for the minions of whatever group is taking Majestic 12’s place to help plan their strategy for debunking and also for possible future release of data. I suspect they are also collecting reactions to the program. I would really like to collect the names of those who were interviewed but didn’t make the cut besides those given above.

The post Peter Jennings Program first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Peter Jennings Program appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

The UFO “WHY?” Questions

ABSTRACT

I have been fortunate enough to lecture (usually “Flying Saucers ARE Real”) over 700 times in 18 countries. My audiences, mostly college and professional groups, seem to have no problem accepting the detailed factual data that I present leading to my conclusions that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft and that the subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate. But what seems to be of most concern, judging by the Question and Answer sessions, are the “WHY?” questions. Why would saucers crash? Why would aliens visit Earth? Why doesn’t the government tell us what it knows? Why would aliens not land on the White House lawn or at the United Nations? Why would people fake MJ-12 documents? Why do you say SETI stands for Silly Effort To Investigate? Why have you kept at it for 39 years? Why hasn’t the government taken you out? Perhaps my answers will help the reader answer his “WHY?” questions, or lead to more such questions.

THE UFO “WHY?” QUESTIONS

1. WHY have you concluded that the evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled Extraterrestrial Spacecraft?

The simplest answer is that it is the only conclusion merited by the enormous amount of evidence. In my lectures I review 5 large scale scientific studies and ask after each one how many have read it. Typically fewer than 2% have read any. I note the 5000-plus physical trace cases that Ted Phillips has collected from over 70 countries. In these people see a craft land and then take off leaving behind various markings on the soil such as burn circles, landing gear marks, small footprints, dried out rings of soil, etc. These are not crop circles where normally no saucer is seen. About 1/6 of these cases involve reports of small beings. I refer to the more than 1000 abduction cases that have been investigated by Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack, and Raymond Fowler and the Betty and Barney Hill case as recorded by John G. Fuller. I review the outstanding work by Marjorie Fish clearly indicating that Betty’s star map makes sense and provides information not previously known to us. Furthermore, I have spent time at 20 archives, had a security clearance for 14 years, and find it perfectly obvious that crucial data has been withheld and many government people have lied with regard to UFOs. Saying some UFOs are of ET origin, of course, doesn’t answer other questions such as WHY are aliens coming here, WHY haven’t I seen one, where are they from, etc., etc.

2. WHY don’t the aliens, if they are real, just land on the White House lawn and say “Take me to your leader.”?

Obviously I don’t speak for any aliens. However, let us note three facts:

A. The White House is in a forbidden flying zone. Our response to intruders in such zones is to take immediate action to escort the intruders away or shoot them down. As far back as the summer of 1952 when, in July, UFOs did fly over the White House, orders were given to military interceptors to shoot down UFOs if they don’t land when instructed to do so. This is described in detail in Frank Feschino Jr.’s new book Shoot Them Down. Major General Roger Ramey proclaimed that interceptors had been scrambled hundreds of times without any luck. As an indication of the zeal of pilots, I have heard of at least 7 specific cases in which the UFOs zapped attacking earthling aircraft. Tim Good in his new book Need to Know recounts similar cases. I am working on a claim by a pilot that UFOs took out 20 of our planes in Europe in the early 1950s.

B. It may come as a surprise to many Americans, but the President of the USA doesn’t speak for Planet Earth. After all who elected him World President? Certainly not the billion people from India or the 1.3 billion people in China. Obviously the UN also does not speak for Planet Earth, either.

C. Normally, negotiations only take place between roughly equal parties. Surely it is not difficult to see that aliens have technology far in advance of earthling technology. Their vehicles are clearly faster, more maneuverable, and have access to huge space carriers (mother ships) with lord-knows-what capability. They have no reason to negotiate when they can already do what they please.

3. WHY in the world would aliens want to come here if, as you have claimed, we are a primitive society whose major activity is clearly tribal warfare?

Answers to this question depend very much on one’s picture of the local galactic neighborhood and of the situation on our planet. The SETI cultists seem to think we are the Crown of Creation and that there may be “as many” as 50,000 civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy, which has a few hundred billion stars. It is almost 100,000 light years across which, according to Frank Drake, means there may be another civilization “only” 1000 light years away. This would, of course, make us very special as one of the elite civilizations. I think that there are probably many advanced civilizations within our local neighborhood on planets around some of the 2300 stars within 54 light years, especially the 46 that are very similar to the sun. The driving fact here is that we have only had fancy technology for perhaps 100 years. But the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and has been suitable for life for well over a billion years.

Just down the street, 39.4 light years away, we find a pair of sun-like stars, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. These are only an 1/8 of a light year apart from each other, but are a billion years older than the sun. In other words, there has been a great deal of time for other civilizations to establish themselves. Having an easily observable neighbor nearby would provide far more incentive for the development of interstellar travel than we have out here in the boondocks. My view is, per a fine analogy from physicist Beatriz Gabo Rivera, that we are like the gorillas in a nature preserve in Africa who know nothing about what is going on outside the preserve. I think aliens have been traipsing around the neighborhood for a very long time indeed. I think it is hilarious that Dr. Seth Shostak, one of the noisier SETI guys, says there is nobody at ZR 1 or ZR 2, because they were listened to by a Southern Radio Observatory 10 years ago. One would think he knows what equipment and frequency alien communicators way ahead of us would use, and that they are trying to attract our attention, which is totally absurd.

Answers also depend greatly on how difficult it is to travel within the neighborhood. If one is a SETI cultist noting (as on the terrible Peter Jennings, Feb. 24, 2005, TV mockumentary) that our fastest spacecraft is the Voyager probe and that it would take 70,000 years to get to the nearest star, trips would be very uncommon indeed. A much more realistic approach is to note that Voyager hasn’t had a propulsion system on it since it left Earth. It is coasting, helped by some cosmic freeloading. Can we estimate the time it takes to cross the ocean by throwing a bottle in? Can we tell how long it would take to fly from New York to Los Angeles by putting a feather in the air? It took Charles Lindberg 33 hours to cross the Atlantic. The Concorde did it in just a few hours. The space station goes around the entire earth in 90 minutes. Electromagnetic signals take 1/7 of a second to circumscribe the earth.

Remember, we have just started on our technological kick. Think back to 1900. Note no TV or radio or microwaves or nuclear power plants or satellites or DNA testing or lasers or computers or airplanes or rockets or nuclear weapons or transplanted organs. I am convinced that, unless we stupidly destroy ourselves, there will be a time when star travel is not considered any more far out than crossing the Atlantic on a 747 is today. I recently flew nonstop from Newark, New Jersey, to Hong Kong, China, in less than 17 hours. Nuclear submarines circumnavigate the globe without surfacing. Obviously there are those who think star travel is impossible. If that were true, which it isn’t, obviously nobody could be coming here from the stars.

Think of all the people going through O’Hare Airport in a year and the huge variety of reasons for travel. To get the ball rolling, here are some reasons for coming here. I am sure the reader can think of more:

A. Graduate students doing their thesis work on the development of a primitive society, on a planet where, amazingly, there is no planetary government, and where there are many different languages; on various strange biological specimens, or on genetic variations of the intelligent beings.

B. Broadcasters with weekly shows such as “Idiocy in the Boondocks.”

C. Mining engineers similar to those who went to California and the Klondike and Australia for gold, or to Texas and the Middle East for oil. As it happens, the earth is the densest planet in the solar system, so would be expected to have more of the rare but very important very heavy metals such as gold, uranium, rhenium, platinum, tungsten, osmium, etc. These are all much denser than lead. We know from studying star spectra that they are rare. They also have very special properties.

D. Mining engineers extracting more common metals from the nodules on the bottom of the ocean and from the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. We have been talking about doing this. Obviously war is much more important than ocean mining to us, so we build nuclear submarines to stay in the depths of the ocean carrying their multitude of nuclear tipped missiles. There are also abundant supplies of so-called rare earths, many used in the electronics and nuclear industries. It should not be forgotten that a century ago the primary use for uranium was to prepare yellow glazes for pottery. Zirconium and titanium were essentially worthless. Now nuclear navies use zirconium based alloys because of their splendid nuclear and anticorrosion properties. Titanium is used in aircraft like the SR-71 because of its high strength and low density.

E. Operators of refueling and rest and relaxation centers on the back side of the moon or in the depths of the ocean or in the asteroid belt.

F. Visitors checking on old colonies established by their ancestors. Perhaps there were many different ones which might explain why we have black, brown, red, yellow and white races.

G. Jailers. This may be a penal colony on which aliens dropped off their bad boys and girls and that is why we are so nasty to each other. Georgia and Australia were first settled by convicts. Letting the convicts go bother other civilizations who, unlike us, have learned to live peacefully, may be a no-no in the galactic rule book.

H. Vacationers. This may be a recreation center. Notice how many people visit Hawaii and Las Vegas and Orlando. If the travel wasn’t easy, how many would venture forth to see Mickey Mouse or gaming tables or surfing beaches?

I. Specimen gathererers for ET zoos and aquariums. We are still finding new specimens.

J. Local galactic horticultural societies collecting specimens for their displays and genetic cross breeding.

K. Medical researchers. They may have to evaluate the genetic material of loads of specimens to find genetic defects or super-special genes. There are a number of conditions whose frequency in the population is quite small (for example, only one person in 14,000 has hemophilia) so many specimens must be checked.

L. Honymooners. Perhaps this is the honeymoon capital for this corner of the neighborhood. Special rates for a week on Earth… side trips to the moon and Mars…

M. Cartographers. Local neighborhood maps may describe, for example, the equivalent of English coaling stations in the 19th century.

N. Sports enthusiasts. There may be special excursions to observe various such events. Don’t forget that a World Championship Chess match was held in Iceland.

O. Scouts seeking the best site for a new amusement park in the solar system.

P. Weapons inspectors. If we make the eminently reasonable assumption that every advanced civilization is concerned about its own survival and security, than we would expect that our development of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the means for delivering them in the local neighborhood would be of great concern. Clearly after World War II it should take less than a century for us to master fission and fusion and other new technologies to allow us to take our brand of friendship/hostility… out there. Thus, a logical reason to visit is to quarantine us until we develop a technique for learning to live at peace with each other. No galactic federation new-member committee would allow us to join. Too primitive.I suspect that the SETI cultists think they would be welcome guests. Not very likely.

Q. Producers. Having worked on a lot of motion picture documentaries at many locations, I would suggest perhaps some visitors are planning epic fiction and factual movies for film companies at home… shooting on location hither and yon.

4. WHY is the government not telling what it knows?

Are they afraid of War of the Worlds panic? I hardly think so. After all, New Jersey was being destroyed by Martians. What could we do against them? Panic was not inappropriate. First we have to recognize there is a Cosmic Watergate and a long history of government lies about UFOs such as I described in Ref. 1, which lists lies from the FBI, CIA, USAF, NSA, etc. Some want to insist that (A) governments can’t keep secrets, and (B) the real secret is that they don’t know what is going on and can’t admit that either.

I disagree with both. A few examples of secret-keeping that have leaked out: The Manhattan Engineering District employed 130,000 people to develop the atomic bomb at a cost of several billion dollars in total secrecy during World War II. The Allies broke the German code during World War II and had 12,000 people working at Bletchley Park in the UK intercepting, decoding and translating German military communications. If the secret had come out, the Germans would have changed their codes. There was really nothing in public until 25 years later despite the obviously great improvements in technology. We also had broken the Japanese military codes — again in secret. With regard to B, note that the military agencies have monitoring systems that provide far more information than we civilians can obtain — and in secret.

The Naval Research Laboratory finally admitted in 1995 that it had launched a bunch of Corona electromagnetic intelligence satellites to monitor Soviet radar and communications systems starting in 1960, after 12 secret failures. The first one that worked provided more data than all the previous secret U-2 flights that preceded it. The Soviets knew about the U-2, but dared not admit that they couldn’t do anything about it. The American people had not been informed. Similarly the Soviets had shot down a number of military reconnaissance aircraft probing Russia, North Korea, and China causing the loss of 166 crew members. Their families were lied to: unfortunate accident, crashed at sea, etc. It was not until 2001 that the USA had a meeting with families of the crew members that they were told what happened, even though most of the losses occurred in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Medals were distributed. William Burrows tells the story in his book By Any Means Necessary (Ref. 2).

The National Reconnaissance Office first admitted in 2005 that it had launched 7 Poppy satellites between 1962 and 1971. Their function was to conduct very sophisticated monitoring of electronic and radar installations on Soviet ships. Thousands of people were involved.

So yes, indeed, secrets can be kept. The annual US Black Budget is estimated at 30-40 billion dollars. That is a lot of secrecy.

So WHY keep UFOs secret?

A. All major countries and many terrorist groups would very much like to duplicate the flight technology of the saucers. They can literally fly circles around our vehicles, move at very high speed, make right angle turns, move straight up and down — typically with little noise, no visible engines, no exhaust. They would make wonderful weapons delivery and defensive systems. Since we have recovered wreckage at least as early as 1947 (see Crash at Corona, Ref. 3) we would have set up a highly classified project (call it Operation Majestic 12 as described in my book TOP SECRET/MAJIC (Ref. 4)) to try both to evaluate the wreckage and to obtain measurements of flight characteristics using airborne and spaceborne and earth-based radar sets, cameras, electromagnetic sensors, and other instrumentation. Surely governments have very much more sophisticated instruments and observation platforms than do private individuals. The key rule here is that one can’t tell one’s friends without telling one’s enemies. It appears that there have been many UFO crashes including ones overseas (Varginha, Brazil, for example). There is a long history of countries gathering and evaluating crashed vehicles of their enemies. This does not require a conspiracy; everybody has the same self interest concerns.

B. Each country worries about its enemies determining the secrets of saucer technology before they do and must be concerned about how to defend against new vehicles and also how to learn what the other guy has already learned. Soviet spies at Los Alamos apparently shortened the time it took the Soviets to test their first A-bomb (1949) by at least a year.

C. What if an announcement were made, by highly trusted individuals around the world, such as the Queen and the Pope, saying that indeed SOME UFOs are ET spacecraft? Here are some things I believe would happen:

(1) Church attendance would increase.

(2) Mental hospital admissions would increase.

(3) The stock market would go down; uncertainty is always the enemy.

(4) Based on my more than 600 college lectures, the younger generation, which, unlike me, was never alive when there wasn’t a space program, would push for a new view of ourselves as EARTHLINGS instead of as Americans, Canadians, Greeks, Peruvians, etc. Many would think that would be great. But I know of no government on Earth that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet (where it belongs) instead of to individual national governments. Nationalism is the only game in town. I believe that alien visitors — they may be our landlords, for all we know — think of us as earthlings even though, because of our military traffic, they would be well aware of different ruling groups in different places.

D. A small group of religious fundamentalists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson come to mind) have already loudly proclaimed that UFOs are the work of the devil and there is no other intelligent life outside Earth. What an insult to the notion of an all powerful GOD! They would be up the creek without a religious paddle if an announcement were to be made. They have had a great deal of political clout.

E. Making an announcement would require that governments admit they have been lying through their teeth for decades. I don’t know of any government that wants to do that.

F. If an announcement were carefully made without the scare mongering of “War of the Worlds”, a lot of people would think that surely, aliens, who can come here, must be far more advanced technologically than are we, since we can’t go out there. This would strongly suggest that soon there would be new methods of energy production, air and ground transport, computers and communication systems, i.e. economic chaos. We are not very good at large scale economic changes in a hurry. Think of the Soviet Union which, at our strong demands, had democracy, elections, freedom, capitalism. On the average, except for the high price of oil, are Russians better off today than they were 17 years ago??

G. Because I am convinced that military pilots in many countries have been disintegrated or “disappeared” by UFOs, I think governments would all be very resistant to telling their citizens that we tried to attack UFOs and they returned the favor — only they succeeded. The head of the American Rocket Society in 1952 took President Truman to task for the attack orders. Frank Feschino Jr. (Shoot Them Down) has gathered hundreds of reports of supposed airplane crashes in the USA and overseas in the early 1950s. Three military pilots, each of whom flew over 100 missions in Korea where they had to deal with marauding MIGs, crashed when they came back home. That seems very suspicious to me.

5. WHY would saucers crash?

Usually this is accompanied by a comment that it makes no sense that a sophisticated vehicle coming from many light years away could possibly crash. Please note that the vehicle could have come from a base on the back side of the moon, in the asteroid belt, on Mars or some alien “coaling station” in the local neighborhood. I once did 25 college lectures in 35 days in 15 states. I was gone all the time from when I left home until I returned rather than going back and forth to home after each lecture.

A. In the first place, there are many indications that what crashed at Roswell and in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico in early July, 1947, were small Earth excursion modules rather than the interstellar, very large vehicles (space carriers? mother ships?) which would have brought them to Earth just as our large aircraft carriers carry 75 or so small airplanes whose mode of propulsion is distinctly different from that of the carrier.

B. Secondly, when we examine major efforts by the Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of aircraft crashes, we often find, after much effort, that it was simple unexpected things ranging from loose bolts, to ingested birds, to faulty wiring, to pilot error, to ice in the wrong place. It could have been very high atmospheric electricity levels because of storms or the great dryness of the desert air. Or unexpected high altitude hail. We know a radar set was on over at White Sands because of an impending rocket launch and the fact that it used vacuum tubes. This was a tracking radar pointed North. Crossing the beam might have led to a small hiccup in the control system for a magnetoaerodynamic propulsion system leading to a collision and subsequent collision of the lead saucer and its wingman’s saucer. Perhaps a US military rocket launched in the neighborhood might have inadvertently homed in on a saucer. Perhaps there was a momentary loss of attention when the Trinity highly radioactive site, at which the first atomic bomb was tested, was noted. We certainly have no reason to believe that aliens never make mistakes, or never run into the unexpected. Some day perhaps the government will release the report that was undoubtedly written as to the causes of the crashes. Just because we don’t have that report, it doesn’t mean the event didn’t take place.

6. WHY haven’t you seen a flying saucer?

I have no idea, though I have mostly lived in cities and am watching for traffic rather than looking to the skies. I check my audiences after my lectures and find that typically 10% have seen one, which covers many decades. Only 10% of those were reported. I have never seen Tokyo either or had polio or HIV. I know people who have seen Tokyo, had polio, or HIV. I spent many years chasing neutrons and gamma rays. Never saw one of them either. They are also real.

7. WHY do you say SETI stands for Silly Effort to Investigate?

Frankly I find that there is very little science behind the SETI effort. It is assumed that there are civilizations using communication technologies similar to ones we have developed to try to attract our attention. It assumes there is no colonization and no migration and that nobody is coming here. They assume that because it takes less energy to send signals than to travel, that nobody is traveling. Of course nobody flies from Newark to Hong Kong because the Internet and telephone is cheaper! Hah. It is all fancily dressed hogwash. They could easily be thousands or millions of years ahead of us. An AM radio doesn’t pick up FM signals. A German General just before the start of World War II in Europe noted (see Ref. 2) that the Brits were building a whole array of tall (more than 200′) towers with cross pieces which he figured had to be part of a radar net. The Graf Zeppelin slowly moved parallel to the array and listened and found no signals. The frequency being used was 10 times higher than what the Germans were using and they fortunately were never aware of how well their planes were being tracked.

If civilizations, with a great deal of common heritage and similar background and access to similar science, can’t correctly predict the technique to be used by similar people a few hundred miles away, why assume we can second-guess aliens? They persistently say there is no evidence for UFOs, but always avoid dealing with the large scale scientific studies. Check their references. Look carefully at the Drake Equation, their Holy Grail. We have no way to determine the lifetime of a civilization, or the fraction of planets that have intelligent life or that develop technology. We have data on one “civilization” on one planet in one solar system. Real scientists don’t extrapolate or interpolate from one data point. The SETI people omit colonization and migration which could greatly lengthen the life span of a civilization. That is pseudoscience, no matter how many degreed professionals are involved. Admittedly, their job security is dependent on nobody coming here…

8. WHY hasn’t the government taken out Stan Friedman, if what he is saying about a Cosmic Watergate and overwhelming evidence that we have visitors is true?

Obviously I don’t speak for the government. I am careful in what I say, and I don’t break the law in seeking classified data from people with clearances. I may be doing exactly what they want, that is, preparing the public for the date when the great secret is released. I have never had an unlisted telephone number. It is in my books and on my website. All those lonely drives to Roswell would provide plenty of opportunity. My answering service is instructed to give out my travel information to callers. Frankly, I can’t live my life looking over my shoulder. Some have suggested I was too well known and that a sudden death would be suspicious…

9. WHY would people fake a bunch of MJ-12 documents?

I am not a psychiatrist, but I would suggest to enhance status; to think “Gotcha”; or to disinform the public so that the fake documents would be an excuse for labeling such genuine documents as the Eisenhower Briefing Document, the Truman-Forrestal Memo, and the Cutler-Twining Memo as frauds. Or, perhaps, might it be to be able to claim that the proponents are stupid or are disinformation specialists? The same old tired false anti-MJ-12 arguments keep being put forth despite the fact that I have demonstrated that they are nonsense. The Majestic 12 article in Wikipedia is loaded with false and misleading claims. For example, in the 5000-word afterword in TOP SECRET/MAJIC 2nd Edition (2005), in “Update on Operation Majestic 12” (see www.stantonfriedman.com), in “Roswell and the MJ-12 Documents in the New Millennium” (Ref.5), and in my “Review of Case MJ-12” also on my website I demolish the anti’s and show that other MJ-12 documents are fraudulent. Remember, one of the key rules for debunkers is “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.” Another is “Do your research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble and the public won’t know the difference.” I distinctly showed that at least seven of the supposed MJ-12 documents provided to Timothy Cooper are emulations of real documents published in books and generally available. They were retyped, much handwritten material was Xeroxed or scanned, and the two were combined. And there were often factual misstatements. Deuterium is not light hydrogen. Sandia is in New Mexico, while General Spaatz was not in New Mexico on July 7, 1947 (I found his flight log and a newspaper article and desk calendar indicating he was in Port Aransas, Texas, fishing).

Some of the statements from the phony emulations were repeated in other documents which means the latter ones were also phony. I have been told that when good information is leaked, bad is put out so as to confuse things and imply the real ones are phony: guilt by association. It is interesting that Colonel Richard Weaver, author of the grossly misleading USAF Book The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (see Ref. 5) had as his military specialty “Disinformation.” He provided the fiction.

10. WHY have you kept at it since reading Ruppelt’s book in 1958 and giving your first lecture in 1967?

I enjoy being on the stage and the very enthusiastic response I get from my audiences, especially from the technical societies. I am pleased when people tell me that they decided to teach a course about UFOs, after hearing me talk. I can think of no subject more important to the future for my children and grandson than the notion of an earthling orientation in the hope of helping stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. What is more exciting than alien visitations and government cover-ups? I believe I bring a unique background to my presentations:

A. So far as I know I have worked on more cancelled high technology classified programs than anybody and so can deal with those silly “It would violate the laws of Physics” arguments. Not many have worked on nuclear airplanes, or in general on fission and fusion propulsion systems.

B. Because I worked on many classified programs and have visited 20 archives, I am in a better position than most to deal with the silly “Secrets can’t be kept” notions.

C. Because I have probably had to answer about 40,000 questions at lectures and on talk shows and in classes, I have been forced to think about the questions such as the “WHY?” questions, more than most.

D. I was very fortunate to be able to find that my memory was good and reliable (at least until recently) and I could give acceptable answers in a hurry. Being on debate teams in high school probably helped a lot. I have been very lucky, first to have worked on so many leading edge classified programs, and second to be able to provide so many presentations to attentive audiences.

REFERENCES

5. Weaver, Colonel Richard L. “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” US Government Printing Office, 1995 (about 1000 pp.). 

The post The UFO “WHY?” Questions first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post The UFO “WHY?” Questions appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Stanton Friedman Slams Author of Roswell Initiative

by Stanton T. Friedman

Kent Jeffrey, using perfect timing just before the Roswell 50th anniversary celebration, dropped a bomb on the very people who trusted and supported him, and his intentions with the Roswell Initiative, which he authored. Incredibly, he wrote a long dissertation on how he now believes the government’s lame versions of what took place in Roswell. It was a shock to the UFO community to say the least. (The Roswell Initiative is contained at the end of this general segment.)

In the following article Stan Friedman exposes Jeffrey’s paper for what it is… WORTHLESS!

Dave Vetterick

Kent Jeffrey’s anti-Roswell conclusions (MUFON Journal, June 1997) are based on the same kind of false reasoning that led to his pro-Roswell views: don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up; be enthusiastic and ready to put ones money where ones mouth is, but don’t have the facts in hand first; don’t bother finding out how security works; believe what one wants to believe; do one’s research by proclamation rather than investigation. Select from the data available to back up your conclusions and ignore the facts that don’t.

Kent stated on a recent radio show with me that he has never had a security clearance and his article certainly shows over and over again that he doesn’t understand that higher classification info cannot be presented in lower classification documents, that having a particular level clearance is not enough to gain access to classified information, that one must have a need-to-know for that information, that people with high-level security clearances do not pass classified information on to people not having a clearance and need-to-know for the information.

Kent decided the Santilli footage was fraudulent because of the curled phone cord. I asked if he had checked with the phone company. He said he didn’t need to. He knew there were no curled cords in 1947. He was wrong. The patent was granted in 1937 and production began in 1938. I tried to keep him from wasting his money on attorneys because no evidence had been presented that Frank Kaufman had played any role in intelligence in 1947 (he was a civilian clerk on the base) or needed legal counsel. Kent didn’t need any evidence because he and his father had a good visit with Frank. So he wasted thousands of dollars.

I tried to get him to understand that it was ridiculous to jump from talking about events in New Mexico in July 1947, to demanding the President declassify everything learned about ETs since 1947 which might, of course, include technology of great importance from a military standpoint. I didn’t sign the Roswell Initiative because I do not believe technical data (defensive or offensive) should be put on the table for the Saddam Husseins of the world. Remember that one can’t tell one’s friends without telling one’s enemies.

Kent can’t seem to understand the utter foolishness of his comment that information about ETs is “knowledge of profound importance to which we are all entitled.” Important? Certainly. But why does he think we are all entitled? There is an annual black budget of $30 billion. Our elected representatives obviously believe there is a great deal of information to which we are not entitled. Other foolish nonsense includes “The existence of a crashed alien spacecraft would have been much more of a social and scientific issue than a national security issue.” Is there no understanding that the government was confronted with a vehicle having exotic flight capability (clearly potentially useful for weapons delivery, for defense, for reconnaissance) whose origin wasn’t known, whose purpose wasn’t known, and whose technology would be useful, not only to the US, but to our enemies? What weapons did the aliens have? Would aliens work with our enemies? Would they be attacking Earth? These are major security issues.

Kent hardly mentions the security level of the many documents to which he refers and which he proclaims would have certainly told about a crashed saucer. He acts as if he has seen all the relevant documents and as though all members of the advisory board would have had a need-to-know for compartmentalized information. Only one document, as it happens, was TOP SECRET and it dealt with “Analysis of Incidents,” not analysis of wreckage; two very different areas of technological investigation. I have been to seventeen Archives now. At none of them did I have access to Special Compartmented Information rated, for example, TOP SECRET/UMBRA or ULTRA, or MAJIC. W.B. Smith, in a 1950 TOP SECRET memo, said the matter of flying saucers was the most classified subject in the USA, even more than the H-bomb. Arid Kent thinks we are all entitled to know all about them!!!

Kent talked to three former officers of the FTD — none of whom were at Wright in 1947. He insults them by saying that if they had known anything highly classified about crashed saucers, they would have told him (no clearance and no need-to-know) what they knew. The very reason they might have been so kind to him is that they wanted to be sure to dissuade someone so naïve that there WAS anything. Furthermore, I have several times been inside a vault at FTD when I was a project engineer on a contract with them for Aerojet General Nucleonics. It was a very compartmentalized place. The primary focus at FTD was paper work from foreign scientists, from spies, from intelligence analysts. I have trouble believing it was ever FTD’s job to go from analyzing wreckage to developing new technology. U-2, Stealth, the SR-71, and a myriad of other technologies were devised by industry under contract to major CIA or USAF or NAVY or Army groups; NOT at FTD.

General Arthur Exon told me in person that even HE did not have a need-to-know for all the activities at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, even when he was base commander in the mid 60s. We cannot even be certain that the three officers would have been told about events and wreckage brought there more than a decade earlier. Their concern was the here-and-the-now and the near future and enemy (not alien) technology. It would have been much more likely to ship wreckage to a highly classified facility such as Area 51 (supposedly established in the late 1940s) or a part of Los Alamos or Sandia. With the very successful Manhattan Project as a shining example, it seems most likely that a Special Project would have been established outside the US Air Force, Navy or Army; let’s call it Operation Majestic 12.

Kent talks about conversations with B-29 pilots. Why would they have had a need-to-know for info re crashed saucers? That wouldn’t help them be better bomber pilots. Again he insults them by saying that if they knew or had known anything beyond that which was in the papers, they would have told him. I should mention I attended the 50th anniversary reunion of the 509th in Wendover, Utah, and another reunion in Roswell and talked with loads of people from the 509th. I was also very impressed with the men of the 509th. Kent proclaims “The most significant and dramatic event in recorded history would surely have been discussed by these men.” Security doesn’t work this way. In the first place: no need-to-know. In the second place: if they did know, they would have known better than to talk to anybody. Remember that Jesse Marcel was in Intelligence; Cavitt and Rickett were in the Counterintelligence Corps. None were pilots.

Kent denigrates Pappy Henderson. I spoke with his wife, with his daughter, with his son, with his WW II Bombardier. He told none of these people before seeing a newspaper article about the crash, after 1980. He did tell his good friend, Dentist John Kromschroeder, before the article appeared; but with his promise on his honor as a former naval officer not to talk about it. John didn’t — until after the Unsolved mysteries program broadcast including Sappho Henderson. Pappy, after all, was entrusted with flying VIPs over the harbor in the Pacific after nuclear weapons were detonated there during operation Crossroads in 1946.

Kent rattles on about the high reliability of today’s aircraft engines implying that alien spacecraft would be much more reliable. One would think that the only reason an airplane could crash was engine failure. Yet Kent himself tells of an MD-88 that crashed because the flaps weren’t set properly. The Valujet and TWA 800 crashes didn’t occur because there was engine failure, but apparently because of unexpected events having nothing to do with engine reliability. Landing gear have collapsed on airplanes. I hate to remind Kent, a professional pilot, that occasionally pilots make errors, too. Sometimes birds are ingested into engines, no fault of the engine. Kent states the craft must be capable of interstellar flight. Why? There are many reports of huge mother ships carrying smaller saucers. Fighters attacking North Vietnam didn’t fly there directly from the USA on each mission. Many flew from aircraft carriers located near the front.

Kent acts as though the debris found by Mac Brazel must have been all there was. There have been aircraft accidents where an engine was found many miles from the fuselage. I am convinced, partly from the Eisenhower briefing, as delineated in TOP SECRET/MAJIC, that alien bodies (NOT time-shifted crash test dummies) and other wreckage from inside the craft, were found just a few miles from the debris field. Kent complains about nothing exotic being found because he apparently thinks he knows all about alien spacecraft construction. One of the things that Jesse Marcel Sr. impressed upon me in 1978 was the lack of anything conventional.

Kent doesn’t know, for example, what the outer hull (skin?) of an alien vehicle would look like. How could indestructible material be spread out? By an incredible explosion induced by a lightning bolt dumping a huge amount of energy into a magnetoaerodynamic propulsion system. The steel left after the Oklahoma City bombing was still very strong even though broken. A radar beam, known to have been on, could have disrupted a propulsion or guidance system causing a collision. After all, 40% of the UFO sightings in the summer of 1947 according to Bloecher involved more than one vehicle. There is ample evidence, ignored totally by Kent and others who, for whatever reason, do not want it to be true, that another vehicle went down in the Plains of San Augustin as described in Crash at Corona, and having a gash in the outer hull like two parentheses face to face.

Jesse Marcel spoke to Walter Haut of a piece of the very strong lightweight metal being rested on a rock with the other end on the ground when the sledgehammer was applied with no dent; hardly paper backed foil radar reflector easily torn by a four-year-old but pounded while flat on the ground.

One of the worst things about Kent’s article is that it employs tunnel vision. What about the testimony of Bill Brazel, who found strange wreckage himself? Of Judd Roberts the radio station man? Of Elizabeth Tulk and Phyllis McGuire, the sheriff’s daughters? Of Loretta Procter, of other ranchers? I spoke with all of these in April. What about all the testimony relating to the Plains of San Augustine crash and the easy proof that the NSA and CIA are withholding UFO-related information. Why does Kent act as though as though flying disc and UFO mean the same thing? My lecture is Flying Saucers are Real, NOT UFOs are real because only some UFOs are flying saucers, though all flying saucers are UFOs.

He acts as though the US government would never lie. When the Trinity Site nuclear explosion occurred in July 1945, a cover story was issued saying an ammunition dump had blown up — but, fortunately, no one was injured. During WW II elaborate disinformation schemes were used to misdirect enemy activity. Yes, Virginia, governments do lie, and yes, the US government did recover two crashed alien saucers in New Mexico in July 1947 complete with bodies as described in Crash at Corona. Despite the attacks of noisy negativists.

Kent blindly accepts the current stories from Cavitt and Newton although they completely contradict earlier stories told by them long before Roswell became a big deal. The stories even contradict each other as well as the testimony of Jesse Marcel and Lou Rickett as told to me first hand long ago. The only basis for even considering a Mogul balloon explanation is the disinformation newly told by Mac Brazel after being reprogrammed (according to Judd Roberts, Bill Brazel, Loretta Proctor, the Stricklands, Frank Joyce) and reported in the Daily Record on July 9, 1947 with the supposed June 14 recovery date and the sticks-and-foil nonsense. July 8 articles say the stuff was recovered “last week.” Even the RDR says the stuff covered an area 200 yards in diameter — neat trick for a few sticks and foil from a radar reflector. Brazel would never have made the difficult trip to Roswell for a tiny radar reflector. If Cavitt was being truthful, Brazel would have tossed the wreckage (Cavitt said it would fit in one vehicle) into the back of his pickup and there would have been nothing to take Marcel back to see.

But wait: Cavitt now says he immediately recognized it as a balloon… covering an area 20 feet square. Captain McAndrew says it was a huge Mogul train of balloons over 500 feet long with 23 balloons and sonobuoys and radar reflectors. How could that come down in an area 20 feet on a side? Why didn’t Cavitt describe any foil and sticks? Could he have thought that he was supposed to say a balloon — rather than a Mogul Balloon? Why had Cavitt tried to convince Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle he wasn’t even based in Roswell in early July 1947, when he now, many years later, has clear recall of a simple balloon? Why did Cavitt lie when he said he went out with Jesse and Rickett and saw nobody else. There was no way he could ever have gone to the debris field without following Brazel.

Marcel and Rickett each said they had gone out separately with Cavitt. Why doesn’t Kent tell us the last line of the July 9 article: “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.” Remember that Brazel had previously recovered balloons. Why doesn’t Kent mention that Colonel Richard Weaver, in his huge Air Force report, intentionally eliminated a most important phrase from a July 8, 1947, FBI memo about the supposed balloon: “The object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector [but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief]… disc and balloon being transported.” The intent is clearly to deceive.

Newton’s testimony is very different now from what it was in 1979 to Bill Moore after I had located him. Could it possibly be relevant that both are loyal career officers on nice pensions who need no hassles in retirement? Remember that almost 20 years ago Jesse told me that the wreckage covered a huge area hundreds of yards long and that he and Cavitt each took away only a small portion of it. Remember, too, that Mrs. Cavitt told Bill Moore, “He’s not going to tell you anything. They told him not to.” Bill had unfortunately mentioned at the Toronto MUFON conference that we had located Cavitt — before he had been visited.

Kent says the symbols drawn based upon Jesse Jr.’s testimony are the same as those recalled by Newton. They look about as much alike to me as Greek and Russian letters. Did it not occur to Kent that Newton might have seen Jesse’s symbols at the Roswell museum or on an extruded replica? Funny, he hadn’t mentioned the symbols years ago. Funny that the CIA’s most sophisticated photo analysis couldn’t find any of that wonderful toy factory tape in the photos.

In short, Kent Jeffrey’s enthusiastic “definitive” article is a splendid example of propaganda — NOT of investigation.

The post Stanton Friedman Slams Author of Roswell Initiative first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Stanton Friedman Slams Author of Roswell Initiative appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Update on Operation Majestic 12 Documents

By Stanton T. Friedman

It should be no surprise that the various highly classified Operation Majestic 12 or Majic-12 or MJ-12 documents have been attacked since their existence was first made public. Equally unsurprising is the fact that a number of phony or hoax or fraudulent MJ-12 documents have been released as well. Clearly if the original documents: The Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) of November 18, 1952; the Truman-Forrestal Memo (TFM) of Sept. 24, 1947 (page 8 of the EBD); and the Cutler-Twining Memo (CTM) of July 14, 1954 (found in July, 1985, in Box 189 of Entry 267 of Record Group 341 at the National Archives by Jaime Shandera and William Moore) are genuine, then the consequences are enormous. Aliens are visiting earth; the government has recovered at least one crashed saucer and several alien bodies; and a very significant group of outstanding American scientists and military leaders has collected, reviewed, evaluated, and kept secret all kinds of information about the visitors. Man is NOT alone and the government has covered up the biggest story of the millennium at least since 1947.

Ten years after the 1984 receipt of a roll of exposed 35mm film by Jaime Shandera at his Burbank, California home and his efforts with William Moore and myself to evaluate them, a new roll of film showed up in the mailbox of aviation and science writer (and longtime ufologist) Don Berliner. This contained many pages of SOM 1-01: Majestic 12 Group SPECIAL OPERATIONS MANUAL: “Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal.” Meanwhile Tim Cooper, a researcher in Big Bear Lake, California, began receiving loads of supposedly related MJ-12 documents. There would appear to be no connection between the original three documents and the SOM 1.01 (Mailed from Wisconsin rather than Albuquerque, NM) or the mass of Tim Cooper documents which were usually in the form of Xerox copies, often only legible with difficulty and received by him by mail or dropped off at his PO Box.

THE DEBUNKERS

There seem to be several distinct groups attacking the documents:

A. There are those who believe (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that no alien spacecraft have ever visited Earth. Therefore, any documents saying that they have must be false. No need to do a detailed investigation, to spend time in Archives, research the people involved, etc. THEY MUST BE FRAUDULENT!!

B. There are those who are convinced that some UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft, but that no saucer crashed near Roswell because they haven’t found any other classified documents indicating any have. Karl Pflock in his book (Ref.1) epitomizes this approach. If no saucer crashed at Roswell, then the documents must be fake.

C. There are several former military people who are convinced that the documents must be false because the style, format, details, etc. do not match what they would have expected them to be based on their military service from the 1960s onward. This ignores the many changes in office procedures (copy machines, word processors, etc.) and the fact that the White House is a civilian organization not a military one.

D. There are a lot of armchair theorists who think they can make judgements without doing any homework at all.

In much of the discussion one finds the use of the four basic rules for debunking of any controversial idea:

1. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them.

2. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.

3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people; it is easier.

4. Do one’s research by proclamation; investigation is too much trouble.

Another important rule for some of the attackers is that “Absence of Evidence is Evidence for Absence.” Karl Pflock and others cite numerous documents, mostly only classified Secret, that say nothing about Roswell or MAJESTIC 12. This, of course, neglects the fact that there are still numerous documents from the Truman and Eisenhower eras 1945-1961 that are still classified, that we rarely see documents that have classification stamps of TOP SECRET Code Word (TSCW). I was told in November, 2003, by an archivist at the Ike Library that they still have about 300,000 pages of classified documents. We know that the NSA classified 156 UFO documents (found in response to a Judge’s directive) as TOP SECRET UMBRA when they finally released a highly expurgated version (about two lines per page are not covered with Wite-Out), supposedly because that information is about sources and methods. Why would it be listed under UFOs if only 5% is about UFOs?

In addition, as a result of my spending a lot of time at twenty different Document Archives from coast to coast, I can say that almost never does one find TSCW documents about anything. The best documents for comparison with the EBD would be the four National Security Briefings for President-Elect Eisenhower presented by DCI Walter B. Smith in the time period between Ike’s election on November 4, 1952, and January 9, 1953, when Smith informed President Truman of his security briefings for Ike before and after the election. Unfortunately, despite my FOIA request to the CIA and a subsequent appeal to their response (“We have nothing in response to your request” even though I gave the dates and times of two of the briefings), we have no such documents for comparison.

I won’t try to cover all the existent literature on the documents. There is my 1990 108-page “Final Report On Operation Majestic 12” (Ref. 2) and my 272-page 1996 book “TOP SECRET/MAJIC” (Ref. 3). There are several lengthy papers (Ref. 4-8) and Kevin Randle’s new book “Case MJ-12” (Ref. 9). There are also numerous statements on the Internet.

Academics have found it necessary to jump into the fray as well, often without benefit of any research. For example, Carl Sagan (Ref.10) said “The Air Force says the documents are bogus. And UFO expert Philip J. Klass and others find lexicographic inconsistencies that suggest the whole thing is a hoax.” He seemed to be unaware of the fact that Klass had paid me $1000.00 for providing more than fourteen documents done in exactly the same Pica typeface as the Cutler-Twining Memo though Klass, on the basis of nine Elite Typeface documents (obtained by him by mail, he had never been to the Ike Library) of the 250,000 pages of NSC material at the Ike Library, had insisted the CTM should have been done in Elite! Some lexicographic research! Our correspondence and a copy of his check to me are in Ref. 2.

Dr. Robert Alan Goldberg in the Roswell Chapter of his book “Enemies Within” (Ref. 11) stated

Evidence of malfeasance was plentiful. Critics noted that the date format did not conform to governmental style, the papers carried no top secret registration number, military titles were improperly noted and signatures appeared to be grafted on to the document. Anachronistic usages like “media” and “impacted” further betrayed the find.

Goldberg is a Professor of History at the University of Utah. Anybody spending much time at the Truman and Eisenhower Archives would find many different date formats in classified, limited distribution, old documents. In Ref. 2 I published three brief cover memos from CIA Director Allen Dulles to White House Staff Secretary Colonel Andrew Goodpaster, done within a ten-day period, using these three date formats: 12 November l956… November 20, 1956… And NOV 22 1956 (Rubber stamp) and even noted one file folder that had seven date formats and found examples of both Roscoe Hillenkoetter and W.B. Smith (DCIs and MJ-12 members) using the day, month, comma, year format of the EBD. Goldberg didn’t bother to check the Oxford Dictionary. Both “media” and “impacted” were in use at the time. I will discuss military titles below.

TOP SECRET CONTROL NUMBERS

The old military guys have persistently attacked the fact that the EBD, the TFM, and the CTM items all lacked a TOP SECRET CONTROL number. They vociferously insisted that all TS documents must have a TS control number.

Ed Stewart made a truly strong claim on UFO UPDATES:

For those who might not be aware, here is something that you will not hear from Stanton T. Friedman, even though he is well aware of the fact having visited the archives on many times in his own words. RG 341 is a record group with nothing but declassified Top Secret documents. All documents in the group are filed by control numbers. If a document did not have a Top Secret control number, it would not have been able to be filed in RG 341. Repeat, every document in RG 341 is a Top Secret document that has been declassified and has a control number, the entire record group.

This was a truly incredible proclamation and is totally false. One might be forgiven for thinking Ed was claiming to have reviewed all of RG 341. Record Group 341 has 9787 cubic feet of material (about 1000 4-drawer filling cabinets). I have, since 1985, had a 56-page Preliminary Inventory of the Records for RG 341 which lists various entries and how many feet of files are in each and how much of the total is TS: typically only a few percent. For example “Unclassified through Secret, Incoming and Outgoing messages 1946-Dec. 1957,” 1743 ft. Entry 21 of RG 341. “Top Secret Incoming and Outgoing Messages, Oct. 1947-Jan, 1958,” 51ft. Entry 23 of RG 341. In other words there were only 3% (51 of 1743) as many TS messages as those through SECRET. Furthermore many of the documents are still classified. I pointed this out on the UFO Updates Internet interest group. Ed’s response after a few days of silence was

My apologies to Stanton Friedman. On attempting to verify the statements I made with the source of the information, it became apparent that much that I had posted related to RG 341 was misleading to false. I asked for clarification, which was promised, but after four days was undelivered. I felt a reply to Friedman’s last message needed to be time-sensitive to be of any value. Thus my apology to Stanton Friedman and readers of this mailing list for having posted the first paragraph of my last message which is not supported by facts. Unfortunately, I will not be available for further discussion on the UFO subject. I have decided there isn’t anyone in this field that I really care to associate with any longer regardless of what their opinions are.

Like the kid who takes his marbles and goes home.

Jan Aldrich who, like Ed, is quite knowledgeable about army classification procedures, later picked up the same argument even after I pointed out that I had been told by the Archivist Larry Bland at the General George Marshall holdings in Virginia, that if they had to use TS control numbers in Marshall’s day, on all TS documents, we would still be fighting WW 2. I noted that an archivist at the Ike Library said that often the White House didn’t use TS Control numbers. I had published two TS documents without control numbers in Ref. 2 in 1990. One would think they were relevant since they came from Robert Cutler and wound up in General Nathan Twining’s papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Jan said it would only count if the originals at the Ike Library had no TS Control numbers. Dr. Herbert Pankratz at the Ike Library graciously supplied me with a Xerox copy of the one memo he found (It indeed had no TS control number) and noted in writing on January 9, 2003, “We have numerous documents classified as ‘TOP SECRET’ which do not have control numbers on them.” I should stress that, of course, many TS documents do have TS control numbers — especially when there are multiple copies of a many-page document. The EBD says “Copy One of One.”

TOP SECRET RESTRICTED

Many including the US government have made a big thing about the typed security marking on the brief CTM: TOP SECRET RESTRICTED over a line saying SECURITY INFORMATION. The point is that supposedly this was never used and doesn’t make sense because TOP SECRET is the highest category and RESTRICTED is the lowest. The Archives in their first version (May 9, 1988) of a commentary about the CTM stated “The Acting Director of the FOI office of the NSC informed us that TSR is a marking which did not come into use at the NSC until the Nixon Administration [1969]. The Eisenhower Presidential Library also confirms that this particular marking was not used during the Eisenhower Administration.” They later corrected several false claims in response to data provided by me. I must admit that although I had found Confidential Restricted and Secret Restricted, I had not found TOP SECRET RESTRICTED. Does that mean it wasn’t used? NO, since we have seen only a small amount of TS material. It should be noted that often highly classified information from one administration was carried over to the next at the White House rather than being sent to the appropriate presidential Library. The Ike Library had a number of documents from the Truman era that were not at the Truman Library.

The uncertainty was removed when the General Accounting Office in its pursuit in many archives for Roswell-related material made the following statement on page 80 of their 400-plus-page report on their Roswell Investigation:

Dec. 7, 1994, Ms. LJ and I reviewed records pertaining to the Air Force’s atomic energy and certain mission and weapons requirements. These files were classified up to and including Top Secret. The period covered by these records was from 1948-1956. There was no mention of the Roswell Incident. No information pertaining to the assignment was obtained. In several instances we noticed the classification Top Secret Restricted used on several documents. This is mentioned because in past references to this classification (Majestic 12) we were told that it was not used during this period.” [Italics added]

I tried to obtain copies of the materials they had seen. I was told that the materials were still classified. Clearly absence of evidence was NOT evidence for absence. An obvious question is why would a clever forger use a security marking that was so uncommon rather than just a plain vanilla TOP SECRET? How did he know to place a slant red pencil mark through the marking? I was informed that this was standard practice prior to declassification. An obscure detail indeed.

MILITARY RANK CONFUSION

Kevin Randle’s major complaint about the MJ-12 papers is that the military ranks are blatantly wrong. On page 2 of the EBD, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (DCI 1947-1950) is noted thusly: “BRIEFING OFFICER: ADM. ROSCOE H. HILLENKOETTER (MJ-1)” and is listed lower on the page with a beginning line of “Members of the Majestic 12 Group were designated [referring to establishment of the group on 24 September, 1947 — note the same date format as on the cover page listing of 18 November, 1952]as follows: “Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Gen. Nathan F. Twining, Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Gen. Robert Montague.”

The kicker here is that Hillenkoetter was not a Full Admiral but only a Rear Admiral.

However, in September, 1947, Montague was only a Brigadier General and Twining and Vandenberg were only Lieutenant Generals. (Vandenberg got his 4th star in October 1947). In short, the writer of the briefing was consistent in using generic ranks. This makes perfect sense in view of three factors:

1. In mixed groups of civilians and military people, what rank can one give the civilians?

2. The navy has only three flag ranks: Vice, Rear and Full Admirals, but the army has four: Brigadier, Major, Lieutenant, and Full (4-star) Generals.

3. The names were listed as they had been designated in 1947, but some ranks had changed prior to November 1952. Generic ranks get around that problem.

Early on Randle had asked me for other examples of Hillenkoetter signing memos as Admiral. I had to point out that there is no Hillenkoetter signature on the EBD, so the question is irrelevant.

This argument may sound weak, but General Arthur Exon, Colonel Jesse Marcel Jr. and Commander Thomas Deuley had no trouble with generic ranks. Ike himself in his books used them. Fortunately, because of the work of California researcher Brian Parks, I was able to locate a relevant example of just this same approach. Andrew Goodpaster (by this time a Brigadier General) had written a classified memo dated June 30, 1958, in which he listed the attendees at a meeting on June 27, 1958. Several were civilians and five were military. All of the latter, including himself, were listed as General or Admiral even though only one was a 4-star. However, his signature is Brigadier General. Goodpaster had been with Ike from the start of his presidency in 1953, so surely knew the right protocol for the White House. During a visit in November, 2003, I found a number of these “memcons” from General Goodpaster using generic ranks for meeting attendees including himself but signing Brigadier General.

MEMBERS OF MJ-12

Many people in ufology had serious difficulty with Dr. Donald H. Menzel being listed as a member of MJ-12. After all he was, at the time in 1952, the best known UFO sceptic. By the time of his death in 1976, he had written three very negative books and given a number of papers — all attacking UFO reality. Often his UFO science, as has been noted by Dr. Bruce Maccabee and Brad Sparks and Dr. James E. McDonald (Ref. 12) was almost ludicrous. As I have noted elsewhere, his presence on the committee had bothered Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera and myself right from the start suggesting that the memo was a hoax. There was obviously the problem of all the others, based on readily available information, having had very high level security clearances. But surely one didn’t need a clearance to teach astronomy at Harvard?

I hadn’t liked Menzel, but did a lot of checking. I had viewed his UFO correspondence at the American Philosophical Library in Philadelphia, found out that his papers were at the Harvard Archives with some also at the University of Denver. After getting approval from three different people to view the Harvard holdings, I paid a visit to Harvard at the expense of the Fund for UFO research. There I made a shocking discovery that Menzel was up to his ears in very highly classified work for the CIA, NSA, and more than thirty companies. He had taught cryptography before WW 2, learned a different symbolic language (Japanese) and worked on all kinds of classified problems for many years after WW 2. He told Jack Kennedy he could tell him more about the NSA when they were properly cleared to each other. Menzel had been associated with the NSA and its navy predecessor for thirty years as of 1960! None of this was noted in an eight-page appreciation in Sky and Telescope after his death (Ref. 13). I published an article in IUR (Ref. 14) and gave more details in Ref. 2 and Ref. 3. I had early on noted correspondence between Menzel’s attorney and MJ-12 member Bush thanking Bush for his support of Menzel at a terrible USAF Loyalty Hearing. The file is at the Harvard Archives. Fascinating reading.

Many in ufology claimed that Menzel couldn’t have led a double life as a public debunker and a private advocate of the notion that the aliens recovered at Roswell were “beings from another solar system entirely.” All admitted that they knew nothing of his clandestine postwar activities. Some, many years later, were able to obtain some government files on Menzel. None have shown that these were known prior to my discoveries in 1986. I should point out that many very bright spies led double lives for years such as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who were Soviet spies working for many years in British intelligence. Claus Fuchs who spied at Los Alamos certainly led a double life.

Randle says little about the other MJ-12 members, but, after misrepresenting my reasons for saying that Menzel belonged on the group, had the following comment:

Nowhere did he [Friedman] find any mention of MJ-12 [in his papers and records]. There are no marginal notes, no oblique references, no highly placed correspondence that suggests, mentions, identifies or confirms the existence of MJ-12 or Menzel’s connection to it.

This is another one of those “absence of evidence” claims. Certainly I had never claimed to have found any direct evidence. But none of Menzel’s files at the Harvard Archives were classified despite all his classified activities. He had already spent thirty years (as of 1960) working for the NSA and its Navy predecessors. No rational person would expect him to have left classified materials about a TOP SECRET Code Word black budget activity, whose very existence was classified, in the open.

Kal Korff claimed (Ref.15) that he had classified access to Menzel’s government records. He mentions the CIA but never mentions the NSA connection which was the focus of my articles.

LINGUISTICS

None of the vocal critics including Randle even discuss the findings of world-class linguistics expert Dr. Roger Wescott. At the suggestion of attorney Bob Bletchman, I had obtained 27 examples of Hillenkoetter’s various writings from the Truman Library. Dr. Wescott reviewed these and the EBD and stated in an April 7, 1988, letter to Bob

In my opinion there is no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter himself. This statement holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum of November 18, 1952, as well as for the letters, both official and personal.

(Letter is page E-2 of Ref. 2. Randle has a copy.)

TRUMAN FORRESTAL MEMO

Right from the start the TFM has been the target of the debunkers. Phil Klass in a fast press release after Bill Moore publicized the EBD, TFM, and CTM, had claimed it was an obvious fraud since it made all kinds of mistakes compared to real Truman letters. He used the word “letter” nine times even though it is clearly headed “Memorandum.” Many have claimed that the typewriter was obviously from 1960 proving it was a fraud (no forensic document analysis was provided). Most claimed that the signature was identical to that on another memo from Truman to MJ-12 member Vannevar Bush. First measurements clearly indicated it was not an exact copy since the lengths of various segments seemed not to match. Randle provided the off-the-cuff opinion of Peter Tytell, a world-class Questioned Documents examiner. Moore, Shandera and I had sent a copy of the documents to PT who didn’t want his name used anywhere, and prepared no report, but apparently claimed the typewriter typeface was not in use until the 1960s. Randle quotes him thusly “It was just perfect because the whole thing of the twelve pages or however many pages it was. Most of the pages were just blank pages with just five words written on them like Top Secret or Appendix A or something like that.” In reality there were eight pages and only one, page 7, (not included by Randle) had “Appendix A.” Fortunately Dr. Robert M. Wood hired an expert, James A. Black, to perform a professional examination. On November 13, 1998, Black stated

My knowledge of typewriter fonts permits me to conclude that the letter was likely to have been typed by an Underwood Standard typewriter. The portions of the type font of the letter that can be clearly visualized match those of a typewriter exemplar of an Underwood Standard typed in May 1940.

Black also added that that the disputed signature is most likely a reproduction. “I reached this opinion because the ink line is homogenous and feathering is absent at the ends of the lines.” Does this prove the document is a fraud? The real question is where would there have been an original of the memo with a signature?? Forrestal’s ORIGINAL would have been signed, but who else would have received a signed copy? One expects that Dr. Bush and the DCI (Hillenkoetter) noted in the memo would have had copies. Most likely unsigned. Forrestal died in May, 1949, three years earlier. Since we know that W.B. Smith was briefing Ike at this time (1952) on National Security matters, presumably Hillenkoetter, then at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, may well have had the EBD typed at the CIA. Smith (who worked very closely with Ike during WW 2) might well have said that Ike likes documents with signatures. Surely the CIA had the capability of lifting a signature from the memo from Truman to Bush (ironically I had found that in the Bush papers at the LCMD).

Of course, none of the critics of the memo note that the numerical portion of the date “24,1947.” is offset from the September and done with a different typewriter. Bush’s office always put a period after the date. Rarely did Truman’s. George Elsey, who worked for Roosevelt at the White House and then for Truman during his entire term in office, told me that most of what a President signs is prepared by other people and sometimes the documents have to have the date typed later when it is clear which date is appropriate. He could find no reason to say the EBD, TFM, or CTM were fraudulent. Truman was very busy at that time as the New National Security apparatus was being installed, the USAF was separated from the Army, the CIA was created from the Central Intelligence Group, etc. etc. Why would a hoaxer use two different typewriters and put a period after the date? Forgers normally do as little as possible to call attention to idiosyncrasies in the forgeries — whether paintings or documents.

Other critics of the signature claim, based on Albert S. Osborne’s book “Questioned Documents,” that no two signatures are alike. Actually, Osborne said that one could have identical signatures, just not consecutively. After the 1948 election Truman commented to a family member that he was signing 500 thank-you notes an hour.

Some were surely identical to others. Klass had even claimed the Osborne book was published in 1978, when it would have covered Xeroxing, when it fact it was published in 1910 and the chapter involved is entitled “Traced Forgeries.”

HOW DID A HOAXER KNOW SO MUCH?

In Ref. 2 I provided a list of more than 37 facts not known to be true until after the EBD, TFM, and CTM had been received or found. A lot were trivial such as the date given, August 1, 1950, for Smith having permanently replaced the deceased Forrestal as an MJ-12 member. I obtained from the Truman Library the fact that that was the only date when Truman and Smith met during a many-month period of time before Smith succeeded Hillenkoetter as DCI. They had not provided that information to anyone else.

The CTM has neither a signature nor /s/ as do the other two memos we had from Cutler to Twining. Cutler was out of the country on that date, so could not have signed any letter. However, he left detailed instructions with James Lay, Exec. Sec. of the NSC, to keep things moving out of his basket while he was gone. I published that letter and the one from Lay to Cutler while Cutler was overseas saying he was taking care of things, in Ref. 2. It took me two years to get the latter via mandatory classification review through the Ike Library as it was still classified when I found a withdrawal sheet noting it. I had also discovered that earlier that day (July 14, 1954) Lay had met with Ike and they had a phone conversation at around 4:30 PM. George Elsey told me that Lay and Cutler worked very closely together and Lay would certainly have sent a brief note for Cutler to Twining making a trivial change in schedule. How did the forger know NOT to sign the memo nor use /s/ since it was some time after the discovery of the CTM that Robert Todd found the memo from Cutler to Lay saying he would be gone??? Todd is strongly opposed to Roswell, MJ-12, Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera, Jesse Marcel, etc. It is also interesting that the Cutler-Lay memo underlines a few words as does the CTM. This is uncommon in documents of that era, but apparently was used by Lay and Cutler about NSC matters.

The EBD says that the detailed investigation of Roswell began on July 7, 1947. Several years AFTER its receipt, in a newly declassified box of General Twining’s papers, I found his flight log which shows that he indeed flew to New Mexico from Dayton on July 7, 1947. This was confirmed by his pilot’s flight log as well, also found much later. How did anybody know that date fit?

Some people have complained that anybody could have found out what I did about Menzel prior to receipt of the EBD. Yes, of course, the documents were sitting at the Harvard Archives. But it took three signatures, including his wife’s, for me to gain access. No evidence has been claimed or put forth that anybody else had looked at the papers before I had. Some have even falsely suggested that I noted the letters to Kennedy, etc., at the readily accessible APL Menzel UFO Correspondence file. They weren’t there. No permission signatures were required for that access. I am reminded of people who claim “I could have bought that land for a song 25 years ago.” — but they hadn’t.

PHONY DOCUMENTS

Note from The Black Vault: This section had very small thumbnail size versions of the document. Although  readable, it is difficult. Stanton did not publish higher resolution copies when this this article was first written.

Tim Cooper of Big Bear Lake, California, had received a load of supposed MJ-12 documents over a period of time. With the exception of a lengthy piece on the history of UFOs (Bowen Document) which is on original paper but only has a magenta TOP SECRET MAJIC stamped on it, they are Xerox copies. In a number of instances the originals were very hard to read which meant much time was spent trying to decipher the words. To some this means authenticity. One had bothered me because it was supposedly a memo from Admiral Hillenkoetter to President Truman (Feb. 17, 1948) noting that President Truman wasn’t getting much of the MAJIC material being received in large quantities every 24 hours. Marshall would prepare special black books for Truman (see Figure 1). This made no sense. Truman wasn’t an engineer or scientist. What was the purpose of so much material going to him? It sounded to me like it would have been from Marshall to Roosevelt about the MAGIC material being processed by the ton after we broke the Japanese codes during WW 2. I was also concerned by the recently discovered “machines” and so much “product” being received every day. Sounded very much like what would have been a letter from General Marshall to President Roosevelt during WW 2 talking about the “intelligence product” of code breaking using a cipher machine.

My suspicions were confirmed when I discovered the original (see Figure 2), from Marshall to Roosevelt, about MAGIC, in the readily available book “The American MAGIC” in the University of New Brunswick Library not far from the very important book “Wedemeyer Reports” by General Albert C. Wedemeyer.

On the other hand there was one which I thought was genuine because some regulations which were noted in an item to C. Humelsine matched info turned up by Larry Bryant at the Pentagon. The signature was Humelsine’s according to his wife (see Figure 3). Marshall was in New York according to the archives, hence the need for using the

referenced secret telephone. (But then look carefully at Figure 4, clearly an emulation.) There were a number that were questionable. A real breakthrough came when I asked for an opinion from Archivist Larry Bland at the Marshall Archives about a letter supposedly from Marshall to Humelsine (see Figure 5).

He immediately recognized it as a takeoff on a famous letter (see Figure 6, also from Lewin’s book) from Marshall to Governor Thomas Dewey (the Republican Candidate for President in the election of 1944) trying to get Dewey not to make any charges that we had broken the Japanese codes since that would lead to their being changed and would cost many lives. Marshall noted that he couldn’t be seen with Dewey. The emulation said he couldn’t be seen with Humelsine!! But Humelsine had been his executive secretary during WW 2 and was again

playing that role to Marshall as Secretary of State. They saw each other almost every day. Also it was addressed “Dear Carl:” but Marshall essentially never used first names except for contemporaries. Marshall was decades older than Humelsine.

This was a real break. I also asked Bland if he could see any reason why General Albert C. Wedemeyer (his signature is on one of the Cooper documents) should be connected with MJ-12. His field was China. He had served there during WW 2 and was sent in 1947 to make a study about what the effects would be if the US did or did not get heavily involved in fighting the communists. Bland agreed that he couldn’t see the connection either. He mentioned that there was an entire book “Wedemeyer Reports” (Ref. 16). I located it at the nearby University of New Brunswick Library. Almost immediately I found three documents that were the models for three phony emulations.

The technique was straightforward. Retype an existing document with an old typewriter, making a few changes (dates etc.) to conceal the chicanery, scan or Xerox the handwritten portions of documents, combine, and voila, a genuine-looking phony. I checked other books at the  library and sure enough the book “The American Magic” had both the original of the Dewey letter (Figure 6) and the original Marshall Magic letter (Figure 2). Bob Wood had located the original (Figure 4) of the letter supposedly from Marshall to Truman via Humelsine letter. It was from Marshall to Truman about Wedemeyer, not Twining. (Figure 4). I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that I knew from Twining’s pilot log that he flew to DC on Sept. 26, not Sept. 25.

Almost all of the phony documents not only had word-for-word portions of the original, but the handwritten items fit right on top. Even though there was a Truman signature, a handwritten date (July 9, 1947) and “I approve.” Spacing was perfect. See the emulation (Figure 7) of a supposed July 9 Directive to General Twining. Compare it to the Genuine item from Wedemeyer’s book (Figure 8). A number of the non-emulation documents had direct quotes from the phony ones establishing that they were phony as well.

One of the phony documents (Figure 9) had some handwritten portions from two documents that I had copied at the Marshall  Archives with Truman saying “I approve” or “holding for further study” etc. I had sent off copies of the 23 sign offs I had collected to some people including Tim Cooper. Also, all had mistakes in the text that made no sense such as “when finished in New Mexico go to Sandia.” This was to Twining, an emulation of a real directive to Wedemeyer in which it was said “when finished in China go to Korea.” Korea is not in China, but Sandia is in New Mexico. The handwritten date on the Wedemeyer directive (which according to Ref. 16, he wrote) is July 9. But Twining went to New Mexico on July 7. It makes sense for

Wedmeyer to take along specialists from State, Treasury, the Navy because he had to look at the total Chinese picture. Not only would those people make no sense as a part of the Twining expedition, but we know who went with Twining from an article in the Alamogordo paper saying Twining had made a routine inspection of Alomogordo Army Air Field (later Holloman AFB).

The fraudulence is further noted by the supposed letter from Twining to the President dated Sept. 19 (see Figure 10) about presenting his findings. Compare the almost identical wording to that of the real items from Wedemeyer to the President’s Office. (Figure 11). Twining’s flight log proves he was only gone from July 7 – July 11 (hardly 2 months). Could Twining’s small group really have generated the same exact number of documents — 1200 — as Wedemeyer’s?

Note from The Black Vault: When Stanton published this article, he accidentally doubled figure 10, and there was no Figure 11.

Note also the big paragraph on the first page of the supposed First Annual Report from Twining (Figure 12). It is clearly lifted from the emulation of the Wedemeyer “… In consonance…” (see Figure 11). Repeating a phony portion of a document in another document doesn’t make it genuine.

Bob and Ryan Wood have suggested that General Marshall must have prepared both directives. Not only did General Wedemeyer (an expert on China) say he had prepared his own directive, but he was based in Baltimore in the Army, knew many of the key figures in China, and was reporting to Secretary of State Marshall who had spent most of 1946 in China. Twining was based in Dayton, was head of the Air Material Command, had been head of the 15th and 20th Air Forces and served on The National Advisory Council on Aeronautics with a very strong technical background. The two situations (China in a political upheaval) and an alien saucer in New Mexico were drastically different. Wedemeyer needed presidential authority to speak for the US in China. How could Marshall have used almost identical language and why would he be instructing Twining??

There is a detailed discussion in Ref. 7. This phony boloney stuff clearly established almost all of the documents were phony and is discussed in Ref. 7. Some people insist that if I can’t provide the identity of the forger and the reason for forging, that they must be real. I can’t follow the logic. My concern is if they are genuine. I can’t find a motive for serial killers, for grown men who sexually attack small children, for parents who abuse their children. But it happens. One quite obvious motivation would be to cast doubts on the legitimate documents, a sort of guilt by association. Another might be to waste the time and money of researchers. Ryan Wood of Majesticdocuments.com claims that all the Cooper documents are genuine. However, in his paper (Ref. 17) he talks at length about the various versions of the Truman to Wedemeyer Directive but never shows the full page from Wedemeyer’s book next to the Twining one so that one can’t see the identity in placement and handwriting of the three handwritten comments. This same problem holds on the Humelsine documents. He shows several different versions of the directive to Wedemeyer, but never shows all the other pairs of original and emulation documents as noted here. He also seems to feel that Marshall was in charge of both Wedemeyer, based in Baltimore, and Twining; though Marshall was Secretary of State and not in the War [soon to be Defense]Department. Twining was Head of the Air Materiel Department in Ohio — definitely in the chain of command of the Army.

It also makes perfect sense for the Wedemeyer directive to say “In presenting the findings of your mission you should endeavor to state as concisely as possible your estimate of the character, extent and probable consequences of assistance which you may recommend, and the probable consequences in the event that assistance is not given.” China was a major foreign policy headache with the communists taking over. But what sense does this comment make in the Twining Directive “In presenting the findings of your mission you should endeavor to state as concisely as possible your estimate of the character, extent and probable consequences in the event that assistance is not given?” Assistance to whom for what? Makes no sense at all. One document claims that Air Force General Carl Spaatz met with Twining in New Mexico on July 7, 1947. I was able to show via Spaatz’s flight log, his desk calendar, and a newspaper article, that he was fishing in Port Aransas, Texas, several hundred miles away.

There are a whole host of false claims in others of the Cooper documents including a number of technical errors such as referring to “deuterium, light hydrogen.” But Deuterium is HEAVY hydrogen. Other errors are noted in Ref. 7, p. 207.

OVERALL SUMMARY

The Majestic 12 documents problem is complex and extensive. On balance it appears that the EBD, TFM and CTM are almost certainly genuine, the SOM 1.01 memo is very likely genuine (see Dr. Robert Woods paper (Ref. 18)) and the Tim Cooper Documents are emulations and fictional. It is perhaps not surprising that a documentary movie “Do you Believe in Majic?” is being prepared by Paul Kimball of Redstar films who had dug into a great deal of UFO material in preparation for the documentary “Stanton T. Friedman IS Real!” (Ref. 19) first broadcast on the Canadian Space TV channel in June 2002. Critics have been interviewed. One strange criticsm was made by Karl Pflock when he claimed twice that because Menzel was famous for doodling small cartoon Martians that the statement in the EBD that Menzel was saying the aliens were from Mars was an inside joke. I am afraid the joke is on Karl. The EBD (p. 4) says exactly the opposite:

… considerable speculation has centered around what their point of origin might be and how they get here. Mars was and remains a possibility, although some scientists, most notably Dr. Menzel, consider it more likely that we are dealing with beings from another solar system entirely.

REFERENCES

19. Video “Stanton T. Friedman IS Real!” by Redstar Films, 2002, 48 minutes, TV Documentary, $20.00 From UFORI.

The post Update on Operation Majestic 12 Documents first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Update on Operation Majestic 12 Documents appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

Government UFO Lies

by Stanton T. Friedman

ABSTRACT

For almost sixty years the public has been hearing about flying saucers and then UFOs. Press coverage has ebbed and flowed, but polls have always shown a very high awareness score. Motion pictures, tabloids, and TV programs have picked up the slack with a mélange of fiction and some truth. Unfortunately, much of what we have been told by the “powers that be” has been false. Many different government agencies have shared in the misrepresentation and have provided outright LIES as well. These include the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, United States Air Force, etc. The press and certain other academic and supposedly scientific groups, such as SETI (Silly Effort To Investigate) have often blindly accepted and promulgated nonsense without any effort to get at truth. Hopefully, the LIES presented in this paper will help cause these protectors of the public to do their job: seek and present truth.

LIE: An untrue statement made with intent to deceive (Webster’s)

BACKGROUND

For many years much of the focus in serious ufology has been on the government’s cover-up of UFO information. I can guarantee a laugh when at my lectures I show the 1980 NSA 21-page legal-sized TOP SECRET UMBRA justification (a legal affidavit) for withholding 156 UFO documents in response to an FOIA suit by CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy). Initially it was 75% blacked out. I turned page after page on which one could read nothing. This also went over well on television since one needn’t read anything. I also quote from the November 18, 1980, response by Federal Judge Gerhart A. Gesell, who wasn’t allowed to see any of the disputed documents. His comment in his ruling was that “The public interest in disclosure is far outweighed by the sensitive nature of the materials and the obvious effect on national security their release may well entail.” The Federal Court of Appeals agreed with him and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. In about 1997 the NSA decided that because of the new Executive Order 12958, making it much tougher to continue to keep documents more than twenty-five years old classified, they released a much more lightly censored affidavit with only 20% blacked out. In addition they “released” all 156 UFO documents.

Unfortunately, they used Wite-Out to cover-up all but one or two lines per page. Whited out pages don’t have quite the same impact on television as solid black areas. A number of people in ufology then gave me a hard time saying that now it was clear that there was no cover-up. They reluctantly admitted that one couldn’t read what was under the Wite-Out. Still they insisted, per the NSA, that everything covered up was just about Sources and Methods, which by law could not be released. They also took note of the fact that the lines one could read often said “Probably a Balloon” after the mention of a UFO. This seems highly unlikely considering that NSA’s job is to monitor foreign military communications. Why was the material filed under UFOs, if there was nothing of substance? I should point out that I have very quietly talked to a number of former NSA people who told me they often intercepted UFO reports from foreign pilots.

Another important aspect of the cover-up is the October 20, 1969, statement by USAF Brigadier General Carroll Bolender, while reviewing Project Blue Book, with which he had no previous connection: “Moreover reports of UFOs which could effect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not part of the Blue Book System.” Two paragraphs later he noted “However, as already stated, reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.” I spoke with Bolender and it was clear that he understood the distinction between civilian reports and ones which could effect national security. Clearly the sightings of most interest are the ones that could effect national security. Blue Book wasn’t even on the distribution list for sightings reported under JANAP 146 or AF Manual 55-11. I well remember the frustration expressed by Blue Book Scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek when I told him about the Bolender memo at a West Coast MUFON Symposium in 1979. He felt very used.

But if they weren’t part of Project Blue Book, where were the important cases documented? Why haven’t we been told about them? Why does the USAF always respond to queries about UFOs by referring to Blue Book and the fact that it was announced as being closed in December, 1969? I have heard, for example, of flying saucers being observed going right down the runway of a Strategic Air Command base. Unfortunately, my informants don’t provide classified documents. There is testimony, but no proof. I must admit it is also true that people have found plenty of Project Blue Book sightings that were brushed off by Blue Book that, upon much more careful investigation, turned out to be significant cases. Dr. James McDonald in his congressional testimony (Ref. 1) talked about some of these. Brad Sparks and Jan Aldrich of Project 1947 have also been working on these sorts of cases. USAF Pilot manuals still have instructions for reporting UFOs despite the USAF still claiming they now have no interest in UFOs.

In this paper what I intend to do is provide numerous examples of flat out LIES by various government agencies and individuals about UFOs.

LIES about Roswell

LIES about the recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947, have gone on for fifty-eight years. Evening newspapers across the USA from Chicago west on July 8, 1947, carried front page headlines stating that the government had recovered a flying saucer on a ranch outside Roswell. That the cover-up went into effect quickly is shown by the full-width front page headlines later that same day in the Los Angeles Herald Express “Army Finds Flying Saucer.” In smaller print on the next line the LIE was in place: “General Believes it is Radar Weather Gadget.” Earlier, newspapers east of California only had the “finds saucer” story. Within just a few hours of the press release from Roswell announcing the find, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, then Commander of the Eighth Air Force based at Ft. Worth Air Field in Texas was LYING to the press and the public that it was just a radar reflector balloon combination. Pictures were taken in his office showing phony wreckage not matching at all the description given by Major Jesse Marcel who had retrieved a small part of the wreckage located by rancher Mack Brazel “last week” according to all the July 8 stories. Ramey really had chutzpah since he was holding a folded piece of paper in his hand with printing on it that Dr. David Rudiak has deciphered including such phrases as “victims of the wreck.”

The Army Air Force solidified the weather balloon radar gadget explanatory LIE with the launching of such a device for the press over at Alamogordo Army Air Field on July 9. The full-width July 10 front page headline of the Alamogordo News, with three related pictures, was “Fantasy of ‘Flying Disc’ Explained Here.” There was a 24-column-inch front page article. It was accepted, though it was perfectly obvious that the weather balloons could not explain all the sightings of high speed objects such as those observed by Kenneth Arnold on June 24.

It took until 1994 for the USAF to make a preemptive strike against the GAO, searching for Roswell information for congressman Steven Schiff, by finally admitting that they had LIED about the weather balloon explanation. They LIED again to do it, now falsely, in a two-inch-thick volume The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert  (Ref. 2 ) by USAF Colonel Richard Weaver (he provided the fiction). He claimed that the Roswell wreckage had been a super secret Mogul balloon train found on June 14, 1947, by rancher Brazel. In the first place, June 14 is hardly “last week” from July 8. In the second place, the characteristics of the wreckage described by witnesses don’t match Mogul balloons. For the latter the paper-backed foil could easily be torn, the balsa wood sticks were easily broken, cut, and burned. The I-beams described by Jesse Marcel could not be broken, cut or burned. In the third place, it was claimed that the unusual symbols described by people like Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. were from a toy manufacturer’s tape used to hold the radar targets together. Isn’t it amazing that the Air Force has not been able to show a picture of any such tape nor are such symbols visible in the high-resolution photos taken in Ramey’s office?

In the fourth place, USAF Colonel Richard Weaver, a disinformation specialist, in his huge, grossly misleading report (Ref. 2) carried a LIE by Counter Intelligence officer Colonel Sheridan W. Cavitt claiming “The area of this debris was very small about 20 feet square and the material was spread on the ground, but there was no gouge or crater or other obvious sign of impact. I remember recognizing this material as being consistent with a weather balloon. We gathered up some of this material which would easily fit into one vehicle.” Cavitt also LIED in saying that he had not met the rancher. The only way he and Jesse Marcel could have found the crash site would have been to follow the rancher out. Jesse indicated that Brazel had given them a can of beans and they stayed overnight in their sleeping bags. Considering that a Mogul balloon train consists of 20-25 standard neoprene weather balloons tied with string at twenty-foot intervals, with ballast packs, sonobuoys and radio transmitters, and stretched over 500 feet, it would have been impossible to fit such a pack in one vehicle. If Cavitt’s description had been accurate, there would have been absolutely no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to follow the rancher out, much of the trip cross country at that. The debris would all have fit in Brazel’s pick-up truck and would have all been left in town. The reason Marcel went out to the ranch was because there was nothing conventional in what Brazel brought in and because Brazel had indicated that the wreckage had covered an area hundreds of feet wide and three quarters of a mile long, and his sheep wouldn’t cross the debris field. Remember that Brazel had recovered weather balloons before and also had first heard on July 5 in Corona about flying saucers and a reward for recovery of one. It is interesting indeed that Weaver also quoted heavily from the Roswell Daily Record of July 9 with the new story for Brazel (“Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It”), but left out the final comment “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Weaver also left out the comment in the article that the debris covered an area 200 yards in diameter or 1000 times greater than that stated by Cavitt. Nobody mentioned that neoprene balloons left in the hot dry air of New Mexico turn to dust in a couple of weeks. In the fifth place, the many Air Force claims about how classified Mogul was were LIES. Results that showed they had picked up sound waves from a Soviet nuclear explosion with their constant altitude balloon train would indeed have been TOP SECRET. But the equipment was standard conventional balloons, sonobuoys, etc. Some launches were allowed to just come down in the desert, no chase planes, no ground crew following. The guys cleared to work on it were cleared through Confidential according to a June 1946 memo at the National Archives.

Another LIE from Weaver was his absurd statement: “In 1978, an article appeared in a tabloid newspaper the National Inquirer [sic]which reported the former intelligence officer, Marcel, claimed that he had recovered UFO debris near Roswell in l947. Also in 1978, a UFO Researcher Stanton Friedman, met with Marcel and began investigating the claims that the material Marcel handled was from a crashed UFO.”

This neatly tabloidizes the story. After all, how could the Enquirer know about the story unless Marcel had taken it to them? Where else does a UFO researcher (can’t say scientist, after all) get his leads, except from the tabloids? Weaver finishes with another LIE: “Similarly two authors William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz also engaged in research which led them to publish a book The Roswell Incident  in 1980.” One would think falsely that there was no connection between me and Berlitz and Moore who must also have gotten their lead from the Enquirer.

The fact of the matter is that the article in the Enquirer by the late Bob Pratt appeared in 1980 not 1978. I gave Jesse’s contact info to Bob because Bill Moore and I had already talked to sixty-two people about Roswell and the first Roswell book The Roswell Incident  by Bill and Charles Berlitz, with Bill and I doing more than 90% of the research, was about to come out. I had previously met Bob at MUFON Symposia and had read a number of articles that he had written. He was far more accurate than the UFO articles I have seen in the New York Times and Washington Post. Bob also served as the liaison between the Enquirer and their panel of 5 professionals, including Dr. J. Allan Hynek, Dr. James Harder, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, and aerospace engineer John Schuessler, now MUFON’s international director.

Weaver LIED again when he supposedly quoted from a July 8, 1947, FBI memo, about the wreckage “The object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector … disc and balloon being transported.” The rest of the sentence after “reflector,” intentionally left out by Weaver since, despite the size of the report, he doesn’t include the memo itself, was: “but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief.” This reverses Weaver’s false statement.

Weaver also LIED when he stated in his Volume that it would be the last official word on Roswell. As a matter of fact on June 24, 1997, his assistant on his volume, Captain James McAndrew, issued Volume 2 The Roswell Report: Case Closed.  McAndrew LIED in claiming that the small alien bodies which Roswell witnesses had supposedly seen were, thanks to his “in-depth research,” crash test dummies dropped by the USAF all over New Mexico. He includes a map “Anthropomorphic Dummy Launch and Landing Locations” three times. The map does show the debris field and the Plains of San Agustin crash sites and a host of dummy-drop locations, none of which were near either crash site. Furthermore, Corona isn’t even on the map. A picture in the report shows officer Raymond A. Madson with Sierra Sam, one of the infamous crash test dummies. I managed to locate Madson, who had been in charge of the program. He noted two important facts that rule out the crash test dummies:

1. The dummies had to be six feet tall and weigh 175 pounds for the tests to be meaningful (witnesses all described small skinny guys with big heads and big eyes).

2. No dummies were dropped prior to 1953.

When the announcement had been made at a press conference about the dummies in 1997, the official said — when it was noted that the crash happened in 1947, not 1953 — that peoples’ memories were fallible! This is one of the more bizarre LIES around. Perhaps the USAF had invented time travel for crash test dummies? Another lie was that pilot Joseph Kittinger was responsible for the stories I had heard about a nasty red-haired officer at the Roswell base hospital. He was there in 1959!

McAndrew also LIED when he stated that Don Berliner and I had bad-mouthed balloon experts Duke Gildenberg and Charles Moore when we interviewed them separately in Socorro during a research trip. That is a bald faced LIE. Don and I did agree after the meetings that neither seemed to know anything about Roswell other than what was in the July 9 Roswell Daily Record article. We were courteous and friendly to both of them.

Weaver also LIED when he stated in a letter to researcher Nick Redfern, then living in England, on April 11, 1994, “I can state that the Air Force considers the ‘MJ-12’ (both the group and the purported documents) to be bogus.” In reply to FOIA requests from both Nick and myself for any memos, letters, documents, etc. on which this conclusion was based “We have nothing in response to your request.” I appealed this and was told again they have nothing. So there was a grandiose claim (LIE) backed by nothing. Unfortunately, the FBI accepted the LIE and even reprinted on their website the identical set of Weaver MJ-12 documents with the hand printed BOGUS on each page.

Weaver, who seemed to be quite willing to LIE at any opportunity, was not the only one who LIED about the MJ-12 Documents. Probably more innocently, the National Archives issued a letter on May 9, 1988, stating: “The Acting Director of the FOI Office at the National Security Council informed us that TOP SECRET RESTRICTED is a marking that did not come into use at the NSC until the Nixon (1969-1974) administration. The Eisenhower Presidential Library also confirms that this particular marking was not used during the Eisenhower Administration.” Both statements are false. TSR is used on the Cutler-Twining memo. Here is a quote from the large volume published by the General Accounting Office reviewing all their efforts to find Roswell related documents for NM Congressman Steven Schiff: “December 7, 1994 … reviewed records pertaining to the air Force’s atomic energy and certain mission and weapons requirements. These files are classified up to and including TOP SECRET … period covered by these records was from 1948-1956. There was no mention of the Roswell Incident … [I]n several instances we noted the classification Top Secret Restricted used on several documents. This is mentioned because in the past references to this classification (Majestic 12) we were told that it was not used during this period.”

The Eisenhower Presidential Library had also LIED (again innocently) when they had claimed that all onionskin carbon copies of Robert Cutler’s memos were done on onionskin with an Eagle Watermark. This statement was changed after I had pointed out to an archivist a number of carbons done on other onion skin paper. The Cutler-Twining memo of July 14, 1954 was done on Dictation Onionskin, manufactured only in bid lots between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. I have discussed the MJ-12 research in Refs. 3 and 4.

BLUE BOOK LIES

Much less innocent was the LIE told by Secretary of the US Air Force, Donald Quarles, on October 25, 1955, as quoted in an official press release about a large study concerning UFOs. “On the basis of this study, we believe that no objects such as those popularly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States. I feel certain that even the Unknown 3% could have been explained as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been obtained.” That the two supposedly factual statements (3% Unknowns, incomplete observation data), are bald faced LIES is easily demonstrated by this table where the data are compiled from “the study” whose title was NOT given in the press release (“Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14,” Ref. 5) and which was not distributed, though the press release got very wide coverage.

UNKNOWN — This designation in the identification code was assigned to those reports of sightings wherein the description of the object and its maneuvers could not be fitted to the pattern of any known object or phenomenon.

INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION — The identification category was assigned to a report when upon final consideration there was some essential item of information missing…. It is emphasized that this category was not used as a convenient way to dispose of what might be called poor unknowns.”

Here is the quality distribution of the same 3201 sightings. Note especially that the better the quality of the sighting the MORE likely to be listed as an UNKNOWN. A statistical comparison between UNKNOWNS and KNOWNS showed that the probability that the UNKNOWNS were just missed KNOWNS was less than 1%.

Another typical Government UFO LIE was uttered by Dr. Donald Menzel, a professor of Astronomy at Harvard. However, I had discovered in his papers at the Harvard Archives after receiving the required permission from three different people to view them, that he had a TOP SECRET Ultra clearance with the CIA and a very long history of work for the National Security Agency, the CIA, and many other companies. He said in Physics Today “All the non-explained sightings are from poor observers.” Menzel was earning his pay as a member of Majestic 12.

I should also point out that subsequent annual USAF Project Blue Book Press releases consistently LIED by using a sneaky tactic of not including those cases still under investigation at the end of the year in their annual tabulation and by suddenly deciding that any one-witness UNKNOWN would have to be dumped in the Insufficient Information category, no matter how competent the witness. Obviously sightings that are still under investigation at the end of the year are more likely to be Unexplainable than those quickly identified. Testimony from one witness has been used to provide the death penalty for a convicted murderer. When the numbers are put back in the tabulations, again the percentage of UNKNOWNS was around 20%. Anybody searching for a cancer cure would be delighted if 20% of the drugs being tested actually did much more good than harm. Anybody with cancer would probably be satisfied if one drug worked.

Note especially General Bolender’s comment above about sightings which could effect National Security, not being a part of the Blue Book system.

MORE AIR FORCE UFO LIES

Here are three claims from an August 25, 1993 letter from USAF Lt. Colonel Thomas W. Shubert, Congressional Inquiry Division, Office of Legislative Liaison, to Senator Patty Murray (of Washington State) who had asked about UFOs and Roswell for a constituent. The entire letter and my five-page rebuttal are in TOP SECRET MAJIC (Ref. 6). The same language (and misleading LIES) has been used since 1969.

LIE 1. “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.”

Again note Bolender’s claims about sightings which could effect national security. Furthermore note that if any of the three noted functions was performed by somebody else … CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, MAJESTIC 12, etc., THE STATEMENT WOULD BE TRUE AND TOTALLY MEANINGLESS. Some recently obtained newspaper clippings from 1952 also clearly indicate that UFOs were considered a threat to national security. Frank Feschino Jr. (author of The Braxton County Monster: Coverup of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed for which I wrote the foreword and epilog — Ref. 7, 2004) and I had been searching through volumes of old sources such as The UFO Evidence, books by Donald Keyhoe and H. Wilkins, the Blue Book unknowns, and clipping collections of such outstanding researchers as Dr. David Rudiak and Barry Greenwood. We turned up such headlines as “Air Force Orders Jet Pilots to Shoot Down Flying Saucers if They Refuse to Land.” Lt. Col Moncel Monte, an Air Force Information officer, is quoted: “The jet pilots are and have been under orders to investigate unidentified objects and to shoot them down if they can’t talk them down,” [Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 29, 1952 page 1]. Here is another: “Jets told to Shoot Down Flying Discs,” [Fall River, Massachusetts, Herald News, July 29, 1952]…. “Jet pilots are operating under 24 hour alert to challenge the mysterious objects and to ‘shoot them down’ if they ignore orders to land.” I was particularly interested in a clipping from the Louisville Courier, July 30, 1952, in which Major General Roger Ramey (same man connected with Roswell), now Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force Staff for operations, “told the news conference that interceptor planes have raced aloft several hundred times as a result of reported sightings of unidentified objects. He said that was just standard procedure.”

Normally aircraft don’t get scrambled to chase and shoot down unknowns in the sky unless the unknowns are considered a threat to our national security. Some people had doubted that there were dogfights between UFOs and our interceptors as Frank had suggested in the book. We found many examples of just that. I have over the years heard six accounts of more fighter planes going after a UFO than coming back from the chase. I believe we will find many more such accounts especially after noting how many military aircraft “accidents” there were in the 1951-1954 time frame and how many aircraft either crashed or disappeared on “routine training” missions. Some of the pilots had flown more than a hundred combat missions in Korea or during WW 2. It might be useful to point out that, while the penguins in Antarctica are definitely not a threat to the security of the United States, they are certainly real.

2. Colonel Shubert’s second claim, another LIE, was “There has been no evidence submitted to, or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “UNIDENTIFIED” represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge.” In other words, we can imagine all sorts of technology such as the ability to use a silent round magnetoaerodynamic device to make right angle turns, move at very high speed horizontally and to hover. We just haven’t done it yet. And what if the evidence was submitted to Majestic 12 or the CIA, DIA, NRO, NSA instead of the Air Force? Furthermore, the use of fusion rockets for deep space travel is not beyond the range of present scientific knowledge. I worked on fusion rockets at Aerojet General Nucleonics in the early 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, we haven’t built any full size systems yet. We have operated a number of nuclear fission rockets on the ground similar, for example, to the NRX A-6 nuclear rocket engine built by Westinghouse Astronuclear Lab in 1968 and on which I worked. I don’t think we have operated any in space. Of course this also ignores the very special characteristics of the wreckage found at the Roswell crash site … extraordinarily light weight and strong metal, foil that could be folded over many times and would open on its own and could not be torn….

3. Colonel Shubert’s third LIE to Senator Murray: “There has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified are extraterrestrial vehicles.” Really? So manufactured objects flying under intelligent control performing extraordinary maneuvers as observed all over the world both in the air and, as noted by researcher Ted Phillips, on the ground (more than 3000 Physical Trace cases in 90 countries) are not of ET origin? What if they are categorized as Interstellar Alien Craft? What can be said about the wreckage and bodies recovered in New Mexico in July, 1947 as described in Crash at Corona  (Ref.8 )? Could we Earthlings in 1947 really make wreckage with the unusual characteristics described by rancher Brazel and the intelligence officer for the only atomic bombing group in the world?

Another false statement from Colonel Shubert to Senator Murray (I would call it either a LIE or an admission of total ignorance): “We are not aware that any other government department or agency other than the National Archives possesses any records pertaining to UFOs.” I guess he is claiming that no navy sailors or marines or army, navy, marine pilots have seen or chased UFOs and that the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc, etc, have no UFO files. I guess ignorance is bliss. John Greenewald’s “Black Vault” web site contains many thousands of documents from agencies other than the USAF such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, Department of State etc….

FBI LIES

Here is a statement (February 22, 1972) from J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI: “The investigation of UFOs is not and never has been a matter within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI.” As noted in my movie UFOS ARE Real  and in the book UFO-FBI Connection  (Ref. 9) by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Hoover was able to obtain more than 1600 pages of FBI files about UFOs back in the late 1970s. Nick Redfern in his book The F.B.I. Files: The FBI’s UFO TOP SECRETS EXPOSED  (Ref.10.) also notes FBI involvement in detail. Even Colonel Weaver quoted from an FBI memo about Roswell though in a grossly misleading fashion. How about the CIA? Is Colonel Shubert really unaware that a suit brought against the CIA by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (back in the 1970s) brought forth 900 pages of UFO material (after LIES that they had nothing) and a list of 57 documents from several other agencies including the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency? Eighteen of the documents listed were from the National Security Agency, which after considerable prodding from the courts as described above “released” 160 of its own UFO documents. They were almost entirely whited out.

There is also a funny story about the FBI and UFOs. I had written back in 1988 to both the CIA and FBI, under Freedom of Information and the Privacy Act, for any and all files they had on me. I provided my full name, Stanton Terry Friedman, date and place of birth, the fact that I had a Q security clearance from 1956 until 1970, etc. I know from talking to friends that had been interrogated by the FBI for my initial clearance and renewals five and ten years later, that the FBI had conducted the investigations. However, the FBI wrote saying they had no file on me. A LIE. Then the CIA responded that all they had on me was a negative name check request from the FBI and gave the file number. I sent a copy of the small CIA response to the FBI and asked that they recheck their files. They responded that indeed they did have a file, but it was classified. I asked how big the file was and at what level it was classified (I doubt if it was TOP SECRET RESTRICTED like the Cutler-Twining memo). They responded saying that both the size and level of classification of my file were classified. Eventually Larry Bryant, with my permission, was able to get a small portion of my file. The passport records were noted. At one point it appears as though they thought Stanton was Terry’s brother! It is hard to believe that they are totally incompetent … just arrogant in thinking they can get away with LYING.

CIA UFO LIES

The CIA, not surprisingly, has also LIED. When they were first approached by CAUS for UFO documents, they claimed their only involvement with UFOs had been in the Robertson Panel of 1953 and that they had no other UFO documents. Their 900 pages of released UFO documents (none of it classified higher than secret) proved that was a LIE. When the NSA finally did a court-ordered search, not only did they find their own 160 old UFO documents, but they also found 23 more from the CIA, which somehow hadn’t found them in its court-ordered search. In other words the CIA LIED to a federal court judge. It took me two years to get nine of those (they’re supposed to provide FOIA responses in ten working days). They were unclassified English translations of Eastern European newspaper articles about UFOs. It took another three years in response to my appeal to get four more very heavily censored CIA TOP SECRET Code word UFO documents. On two, one could read only eight words that weren’t blacked out. One said “DENY in TOTO!” I am convinced that the CIA also LIED when they claimed they had nothing in response to an FOIA request from me for any information related to four national security briefings provided to President Elect Dwight Eisenhower by DCI Walter B. Smith between November 4, 1952, and January 9, 1953. I had given the CIA dates and times of two of the briefings and a copy of the letter from Smith to President Truman describing that he had kept Ike abreast of national security matters. The CIA in response to my appeal said they still had nothing. It is impossible for me to believe there was no record of four such high level briefings which we know took place according to a letter found at the Truman Library. They LIED.

There were also a number of LIES in a paper by CIA Historian Gerald Haines in 1997, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs.” For example, it was stated that the U-2 and Oxcart (Spy Plane) projects were responsible for over half of the UFO sightings from the late 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Bruce Maccabee has checked the statistics and there was no increase when they started flying. Surely these high altitude aircraft were never observed to appear to be round, able to hover, to move straight up and down, to make right angle turns all without noise or visible external engines or wings or to land and take off vertically as so many UFOs can. Haines said the first wave of UFO sightings was in 1947. Sweden had a huge wave in 1946. Haines says there are no original MJ-12 documents. He LIED. The Cutler Twining memo is at the National Archives. It is stated that 57 UFO documents were withheld because of national security and sources and methods. LIE. They were withheld because they originated from other agencies. Haines states “most scientists dismissed flying saucers as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s….” He provides no data. Polls taken for more than 30 years have shown that the greater the education the MORE likely to accept UFO reality. Two polls of engineers and scientists involved in research and development activities showed that more than 60% of those who expressed an opinion said they were likely real.

The NAVY has LIED in claiming they have no information on UFOs, even after I sent a formerly TOP SECRET UFO report by the Navy and the Air Force. They found it interesting, but they still had nothing!

An interesting LIE illustrates the need for cover up of TOP SECRET data in documents having a lower classification. USAAF General Nathan F. Twining was commanding officer of the Air Materiel Command in July, 1947. According to his flight log, which I found in his papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, as confirmed by the flight log of his pilot, which I was allowed to copy, he spent the week of July 7-11, 1947 in New Mexico and had obviously been tasked to look into UFOs. In his famous letter of September 23, 1947, to the Commanding General of Army Air Forces, he stated “Due consideration must be given to the following: … (2) The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects.”

Many have claimed that this statement proves that no alien craft wreckage had been found in New Mexico in July. They ignore the fact that this letter had been only classified SECRET. Clearly crash wreckage would have been TOP SECRET Code word (note the NSA and CIA TS Code word UFO documents and an FBI memo claiming that the Air Force and Navy considered the subject of UFOs TOP SECRET). TOP SECRET material cannot be referenced in SECRET documents. Twining went on to be Chief of Staff of the USAF and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He certainly deserved his spot on Operation Majestic 12.

I by no means intend to imply that only government officials or employees lie about UFOs. Debunkers have often made false claims. A number of so called whistleblowers have lied repeatedly about their backgrounds. These include Robert Scott Lazar, who is not a scientist, did not get degrees from MIT or Caltech, did not work for Los Alamos (he worked for a subcontractor), did not figure out how saucers work, did not steal any element 114 or 115. Frank Kaufmann was not a Roswell witness. Guy Kirkwood, a.k.a. Mel Noel, was not an Air Force pilot who took pictures of UFOs from the air. Michael Wolf Kruvant had none of the six degrees he claimed, was not a colonel/pilot in the Air Force or a consultant to MJ-12. Lt. Colonel Philip Corso was not a member of the National Security Council, etc. etc.

One can understand lying to really protect national security such as was done after the successful Atomic Bomb test in New Mexico July 16, 1945, with a story that an ammunition dump had blown up and nobody was injured. But with all the (False) claims that UFOs are no threat to the security of the USA, how can they continue to lie? If they are a threat, don’t we as citizens of a democracy have the right to know? I, for one, don’t want technical data — such as could be used by Osama Ben Laden, or Iran, or North Korea for military purposes — to be put out on the table. I do think it is of extraordinary importance for the future of this planet that we recognize we are NOT alone. We all on this planet do have something in common much as we hate to admit it. We all are Earthlings. It is time we started acting like it.

REFERENCES

10. Redfern, Nicholas The F.B.I. Files: The FBI’s UFO TOP SECRETS EXPOSED Simon & Schuster, 1998, 354 pp. Hardcover.

The post Government UFO Lies first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Government UFO Lies appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

UFOs: Challenge to SETI Specialists

by Nuclear Physicist / Lecturer Stanton T. Friedman

Major news media and many members of the scientific community have taken strongly to the radio-telescope-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program as espoused by its charismatic leaders, but not supported by any evidence whatsoever. In turn, perhaps understandably, they feel it necessary to attack the ideas of alien visitors (UFOs) as though they were based on tabloid nonsense instead of on far more evidence than has been provided for SETI. One might hope, vainly I am afraid, that they would be concerned with The Search for Extraterrestrial Visitors (SETV). I would hereby like to challenge the SETI specialists, members of the scientific community, and the media to recognize the overwhelming evidence and significant consequences of alien visits and to expose the serious deficiencies of the SETI-related claims. I have publicly and privately offered to debate any of them. No takers so far.

Here are my challenges for the SETI SPECIALISTS (SS):

1. Why is it that SS make proclamations about how much energy it would take for interstellar travel when they have no professional competence, training, or awareness of the relevant engineering literature in this area? As it happens, the required amount of energy is entirely dependent on the details of the trip and CANNOT be determined from basic physics. If one makes enough totally inappropriate assumptions, as academic astronomers have repeatedly done down through history in their supposedly scientific calculations about flight, one reaches ridiculous conclusions. But it is not necessary, for example, to limit the flight to 1G acceleration, or to provide all the energy needed for the round trip at the launch, or to use an utterly foolish trip profile (as devised by a Nobel Prize winning Harvard physicist) that involves accelerating at 1G for half the outward bound portion and the decelerating at 1G for the second half, etc. Do note that it only takes one year at 1G to reach close to c.

Cosmic freeloading can be very, very helpful in reducing fuel requirements and has been used for all our deep space missions such as Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, etc. A splendid example of the wrong assumptions to make was provided by Dr. John William Campbell¹, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Alberta, in 1941, when he attempted to compute the required initial launch weight of a chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back. Our successful trips to the moon beginning in 1969, still with chemical rockets, showed that the weight he “scientifically” calculated was too high by a factor of 300 Million!! Dr. Alexander Bickerton² in 1926 proclaimed that it would be impossible to give anything sufficient energy to place it in orbit around the earth. Professor Simon Newcomb³ “proved” in October, 1903, that it would be impossible for a man to fly except with the help of balloons. This was two months before the first flight by the Wright Brothers (two very sharp bicycle mechanics). These three bright professors made a whole host of totally inappropriate assumptions because of their ignorance of the technical situations with which they were faced. They hadn’t read the ample literature available to any professional seeking truth.

For example, Dr. Campbell assumed a single stage chemical rocket, launched vertically and limited to 1G acceleration. He assumed much too low an exhaust velocity. The rocket had to carry a huge amount of fuel for use in the retrorocket supposedly required to slow down the rocket upon return to Earth. For Apollo we used multi-stage rockets (reducing system weight at each stage) launched to the East from near the equator (to take advantage of the Earth’s rotation), a peak acceleration of many Gs (the faster to orbit, the less the losses to gravitation), the moon’s gravitational field (to provide some free energy going in) and earth’s atmosphere to do the deceleration upon approaching the earth, as highlighted, for example, in the movie Apollo 13. Cleverness was more important than power.

The exhaust velocity was certainly much higher than assumed by Dr. Campbell. Of course Campbell knew nothing about fission or fusion rockets (on both of which I have worked). The latter using D-He3 reactions exhaust charged particles which can be directed electromagnetically and are born with 10 million times as much energy per particle as can be obtained in chemical rockets. Most academics in my experience and in their publications (i.e. Krauss ⁴) are ignorant of the fact that the most powerful fission rocket reactor propulsion system (Phoebus 2B, made by Los Alamos) operated at a power level of 4,400 Megawatts before 1970. Man has produced many controlled fusion reactions. See Luce⁵ about fusion rockets. Any study of the history of technological development reveals that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. Pocket calculators are not built with vacuum tubes. Supersonic flight is not achieved with propellers. Lasers are not just better light bulbs. In short, the future is definitely NOT a mere extrapolation of the past.

2. Why do SS assume that radio is the ultimate means of long distance communication, when we have only had this kind of technology for roughly 100 years? Just down the galactic street there are two sun-like stars (Zeta l and Zeta 2 Reticuli) only 37 light years away and a billion years older than the sun. Of great interest is the fact that they are less than 1 light year apart from each other. It is good to see recent recognition of the fact that we can already, with our primitive technology, create laser signals able to be observed by other civilizations in the neighborhood. Optical SETI is coming in to its own. But remember progress comes from doing things differently. What new communication techniques will we master in just 50 or 100 years??

3. Why do SS make proclamations about how aliens would behave, when, as physical science professionals, they have no training, experience, or special insights as to how Earthlings, no less aliens, would behave, or what their motivations are. One might consult psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, lawyers, nurses, etc, but radio astronomers?? This is a field which, by its nature, has little to do with people other than those directly involved. We hear such comments as that aliens, once radio contact is established, would teach us about all the secrets of the universe. Just why would an advanced technological civilization share its secrets with a primitive society whose major activity (judging by how its wealth is spent) would certainly appear to be tribal warfare and for whom every new frontier is a new place to do battle? Earthlings killed about 50 million other Earthlings during WW II and destroyed 1700 cities. Currently almost $1trillion per year is spent on the military while 30,000 children die needlessly every day of preventable diseases and starvation.

4. Why is it that SS take every opportunity to attack the notion of alien visitations without any reference to the many large scale scientific studies? They act as though the tabloids are the only possible sources of UFO data. There are at least six large scale scientific studies ^6-11, more than ten PhD Theses, and many dozens of published professional papers by professional scientists. These are all almost always ignored. There are, for example, thirteen anti-UFO books and dozens of pro-SETI books that don’t even mention the largest scientific study done for the USAF. The work was done by the engineers and scientists at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. They found that 21.5% of the 3201 cases investigated were UNKNOWNS completely separate from those cases deemed to provide “Insufficient Information.” They found that the better the reliability of the reports, the more likely to be unidentifiable. Statistical cross comparisons between the UNKNOWNS and the KNOWNS showed that the probability that the former were just missed KNOWNS was less than 1% for six different characteristics.

The basic rules for the lack of attention to the relevant data by well educated, but ignorant-about-UFOs-professionals, especially SS, seem to be:

1. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.

2. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them.

3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people; it is much easier.

4. Do one’s research by proclamation. Investigation is too much trouble and nobody will know the difference anyway.

How else can one explain such totally baseless, but seemingly profound, proclamations as “The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable. Unfortunately there are no cases that are both reliable and interesting.” (See Sagan¹²).

The fact is that 35% of the EXCELLENT cases in BBSR14 were UNKNOWNS and therefore Interesting. Only 18% of the POOR cases were Unknowns. Surely professional scientists are supposed to base their conclusions on study of the relevant data, rather than proclamations?

5. Why don’t SS understand that there are very clear-cut national security aspects of the entire UFO problem including the possibility of duplicating the far out technology and the concerns with the impact on the public of any announcement? Clearly if any earthlings could duplicate the saucer technology, the systems would make wonderful weapons delivery and defence systems. It is a lot easier to dream about distant civilizations whose existence will have little impact, if they can never reach here, or never have been here. Many quite extraordinary scientific and technological developments were conducted in TOP SECRET programs including the development of the atomic bomb, the proximity fuse, radar, etc. There is overwhelming evidence, never noted by the SS, that the subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate including the recovery of two crashed saucers in New Mexico in 1947 ¹³. According to Pulitzer prize winning journalist Tim Weiner¹⁴, the annual Black Budget (Not under congressional control) was running $34. Billion.. several years ago. The NSA had openly admitted withholding 156 UFO documents even from a Federal Court Judge given a high security clearance. When these were “released” more than 15 years later, only 1 or 2 lines per page were not covered by whiteout. I have received formerly classified CIA UFO documents on which only 8 words are not blacked out.

USAF General Carroll Bolender stated¹⁵ that “Reports of UFOs which could effect national security… are NOT part of the Blue Book System.” One should note that the very high quality military monitoring systems operated by the Air Defence Command and the NRO and NSA produce data which is born classified and is not released to the public.

6. If the SS are truly interested in the SETI, why don’t they examine the best UFO data instead of ignoring it? Without that data, they have no evidence to support the many assumptions they make about ETI. For example, it is assumed that there is intelligent life all over the place, that some of this life is more advanced than we are; but that ET communications and flight technology are stuck at the level of radio and chemical rockets, and ETs are trying to attract our attention via radio!! No evidence has been provided that any of these assumptions are true. And yet these same SS insist on ufologists providing them with an alien body!! SS have been joyous about finding 37 radio signals out of several billion that were tantalizing. But they choose to ignore the 21.5% of 3201 investigated UFO sightings that might indeed signal the existence of ETVs. The false reasoning is incredible. Since most sightings can be explained, therefore all can be. But since some very few radio signals were thought to be intriguing, we should follow that path of study!

7. Why is the assumption made that aliens wouldn’t know there was a technological civilization here until they picked up our TV or radar signals? We are already, though in our technological infancy compared to a cosmic time frame, considering building a radio telescope with segments on opposite sides of the solar system that could directly observe earth size planets around all the stars in the neighborhood. Other civilizations in the neighborhood could have done this a billion years ago. As Sagan noted ¹⁶, signs of biological life here could have been observed at Earth by an alien spacecraft at our level of technological development two billion years ago. Why not assume that every library in the local galactic neighborhood has known of our existence as a result of explorations done millions of years ago? One should note that Columbus did not wait for a smoke signal from the Western Hemisphere’s natives before sailing westward. One of Magellan’s ships sailed around the world in about two years. The Space Shuttle does it in 90 minutes. Progress comes from doing things differently.

8. Why is it that the SS don’t understand that, at the end of WW II, it was quite obvious to any visiting alien intelligence agents that soon (less than 100 years) these primitive earthlings, whose brand of friendship is obviously hostility, could be traipsing around the local galactic neighborhood? Three new readily observable technologies: atom bombs, powerful V-2 rockets, and powerful radar systems set the pace. It is probably not a coincidence that the crashed saucers were recovered in Southeastern New Mexico near the only place on Earth (White Sands Missile Range) in July, 1947, where all three could be observed.

During any one century, because the progress from no space technology to deep space travel takes such a comparatively short time, it doesn’t seem likely that there would be any other civilization in the local neighborhood going through the same transition. They are either ahead of us or behind us. Of course we would be of interest to them; if for no other reason that the equivalent of national security concerns. Compare the world’s budget for National security with that for radio astronomy. One reasonable purpose from that viewpoint for visiting here would be to assure that we don’t go out there until we get our act together. The word quarantine comes to mind. Does anybody really believe that aliens would want this primitive society out there before we get our act together and can even qualify for admission to the Cosmic Kindergarten?

9. Why is it that SS seem to assume that aliens would want to deal with them? They don’t speak for the planet any more than ham radio operators speak for their countries. If their annual budget were even $100 Million, that is miniscule compared to the $1 Trillion for national security.

10. Why is it that SS so often try to stress how big and how old the universe is? In fact the sphere centered on the sun and having a radius of only 54 light years includes 1000 stars of which about 46 seem to be sun-like and suitable for planets and life¹⁷. At least two of these sun-like stars are 1 Billion years older than the sun. If my car were stolen near my home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, it wouldn’t make much sense to suggest that the thief might be any one of 6 billion Earthlings. It would appear to be much more likely that the thief was one of 725,000 New Brunswick residents or one of only 50,000 Frederictonians. The odds of finding the thief would be greatly enhanced. Note, too, for example, that residents of Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, being less than one light year apart, could directly observe planets around the other star.

11. Why do SS focus on the Drake Equation which supposedly tells how many inhabited planets there are capable of sending radio signals? There is no evidence to support the many assumptions that are made and it takes no account of the processes most important for the distribution of intelligent life on Earth, namely migration and colonization. We have data on one planet in one solar system at the present time. We don’t even know how many civilizations there may have been here on earth 10 million or 200 million years ago. Heinrich Schliemann had to dig down 75 feet to find Troy dating from just a few thousand years ago. How much of earth has been explored that deep, no less the much greater depth that would be needed to tell us about civilizations that were lost due to asteroid collisions or nuclear wars or continental drift since hundreds of millions of years ago? One might just as well throw a dart at a dart board with numbers on it.

12. Why are proclamations made by SS that aliens can’t possibly be humanoid, as described by UFO witnesses? We have no catalog of aliens in the neighborhood combined with travel schedules so we could predict how many would have three heads or four eyes, etc. After all, these claims of non-humanoidness are based on the assumption that any ETI has developed indigenously and independently of life from anywhere else and there has been no migration or colonization. Funny how the laws of physics and biology might even suggest that there are favored directions for how things develop. For example, we find few examples of mammals with three legs or three eyes. There may well be advantages to certain configurations. Colonization and migration would lead to the dispersal of particular features. Proclamations without data are hardly scientific. Reports from all over Earth indicate humanoids are visiting in strange vehicles with extraordinary capabilities. This, of course, does not mean that all aliens are humanoid. Presumably the ammonia breathers go to Jupiter.

13. Are the SS really unaware that public opinion polls have consistently shown that believers in alien visitations outnumber non-believers and that the greater the education the more likely to accept ETV? Two polls of engineers and scientists involved in research and development activities ¹⁸ even showed that 2/3 of those who expressed an opinion believe that some UFOs are ET spacecraft. After all, certain knowledge that Earth is indeed being visited would provide the best incentive for bigger budgets for space exploration. Of course if aliens are indeed visiting, than the Radio Telescope Search for ET signals would seem a useless exercise and might indicate the SS have been on the wrong track all along. Learning sign language might be more productive in terms of Communicating with ETI. I have twice heard independent reports of military personnel recording radio signals from a UFO that was being monitored by nearby military radar. One wonders how many similar instances there have been.

14. Why do SS, who should know better, or at least should have done their homework, so often pronounce that it would be impossible for anyone to withstand the “enormous” accelerations of UFOs so often observed for brief times? They quote no data to support their pronouncements despite the huge amount of data that NASA and others have compiled over the past half century. It turns out that trained and properly constrained humans can withstand “enormous” accelerations, for significant times, so long as the acceleration is in the appropriate direction vis a vis the body. Astronauts are launched while on their backs for a good reason. For example, a pilot can perform a tracking task while being accelerated for 2 minutes at 14 Gs. That is from zero to 36,000 miles per hour in 2 minutes. They can successfully withstand 30Gs for one second. Dr. Paul Stapp’s rocket sled reached over 600mph in the early 1950s and he successfully withstood 43Gs when slowing down more rapidly than expected. Data should take precedence over proclamations.

15. Why do SS cite the Fermi Paradox as though it demonstrates that nobody is coming here or that we haven’t been colonized, perhaps many times, in the past? Fermi was well known at the University of Chicago for trying to teach by asking questions. Remember that he assumed it would only take a few million years for the entire galaxy to be colonized once those activities had begun. The beginning could have been a billion years ago.

16. Finally there seem to be no signs that either SETI leaders or UFO debunkers are willing to note the false reasoning of their own kind . This lack of internal evaluations provides a scientifically unhealthy and dogmatic, almost cult-like atmosphere, with charismatic leadership, a strong dogma, and irrational resistance to outside or new ideas. Scientists and journalists have a serious obligation to study the relevant data rather than to make pronouncements having no factual basis. Does the end (presumably public rejection of flying saucer visitations and enhancement of the status of SETI) really justify the means of misrepresentation based on ignorance and arrogance? Ufologists are, in contrast, very critical of each other. Party Lines should be for politicians, NOT for scientists.

REFERENCES

1. Campbell, Dr. John William “Rocket Flight to the Moon,” PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE, Ser. 7, Vol. 31, No. 204, January 1941

2. Bickerton, Dr. Alexander William, Speech Before British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1926 (Professor of Astronomy U. of New Zealand, Christchurch, NZ

3. Newcomb, Dr. Simon “Flying Machine” INDEPENDENT, 55:2508-12

4. Krauss, Dr. Lawrence Maxwell BEYOND STAR TREK, Basic Books, 1993, 203 pp.

5. Luce, Dr. John S. “Controlled Fusion Propulsion” PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRD SYMPOSIUM ON ADVANCED PROPULSION TECHNIQUES, Vol. 1 / Gordon and Breach, New York, 1963 pp343-380

6. No authors listed “Project Blue Book Special Report #14” 256 pp., 240 tables and charts. Done by Battelle Memorial Institute for USAF, 1955. $25.00 Including S&H; from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0956

7. Symposium on UFOs / House Committee on Science and Technology, July 29, 1968, NTIS, PB 179541, 247 pp. (testimony of 12 scientists). See also McDonald, Dr. James E., “Congressional Testimony” 71 pp., 41 sightings, $10.00 Includes P&H; from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958

8. Hall, Richard “The UFO Evidence I, 1961, Vol. 2, A Thirty Year Report” Scarecrow press 2001, 650 pp.

9. “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects” / Univ. of Colorado, Directed by Dr. E.U. Condon 1969 (963 pp.), Bantam Books. 30% of 117 cases unexplainable.

10. Hynek, Dr. J. Allan “The UFO Experience,” Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1973

11. The Cometa Report “UFOs and Defence: What Should We Prepare For.” 90-page English Translation of French Report, 1999, $10.00 From UFORI includes S&H.;

12. Sagan, Dr. Carl “Other Worlds” Bantam, 1975, p.113

13. Friedman, Stanton Terry and Berliner, Donald “Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident” Anniversary Edition, 1997, Marlow Books, Autographed. $15.00 From UFORI.

14. Weiner, Tim “Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget,” Warner Books,1990, 288 pp.

15. Bolender, General Carroll “Memo: UFO, October 20, 1969″

16. Sagan, Dr. Carl “The Search for Extraterrestrial Life” SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 1994, pp. 93-99

17. Dickinson, Terence “The Zeta Reticuli Incident” Astromedia Corp. 32 pp., full color booklet, $5.00 Postpaid from UFORI.

18. Friedman, Stanton Terry “Who Believes in UFOs?” International UFO Reporter, Jan./Feb. 1989 pp. 6-10

The post UFOs: Challenge to SETI Specialists first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post UFOs: Challenge to SETI Specialists appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

UFO Propulsion Systems

By Stanton T. Friedman

If we deduce from the mountain of evidence that some flying saucers come to earth from nearby solar systems (there are one thousand stars within fifty-five light-years, forty-six of which are like the sun), we are immediately faced with two questions:

(1) How can a spaceship travel from a nearby solar system to earth in a reasonable time?

(2) Once here, how can flying saucers behave the way they are observed to behave? How do they achieve their reported high speed flight in the atmosphere (thousands of miles per hour), their ability to stop and start abruptly, to move up and down and back and forth seemingly with none of the limitations of conventional aircraft?

Typically there are no visible external engines, wings, or tails. Usually the objects are relatively silent compared to conventional craft. Often unusual colored glows are seen adjacent to the craft, and a variety of physical and physiological effects are produced on living and inanimate objects in the vicinity. These are the truly technological challenges we face.

The problem must be divided into two parts because there is no good reason to assume that the same propulsion system is used for both the long haul and local portions of the trip. It seems reasonable to assume that the huge cigar-shaped “mother ships,” into and out of which the smaller disc-shaped craft fly, are the interstellar vehicles and the others are Earth Excursion Modules for local travel only. Mother ships are rarely observed cavorting or flying close to ground level. In Ted Phillips’s huge collection of trace cases more than 90 percent of the low-level vehicles are disc-shaped. A useful analogy here is the aircraft carrier Enterprise, which is nuclear-powered and operates at low speed for many months or years on the surface of the ocean. The much smaller aircraft it carries cannot operate on the ocean but can fly at high speed and altitude for short periods and are highly maneuverable. But they are not nuclear-powered. Neither craft could replace the other.

The problem of traveling to the stars must also be viewed from an entirely different perspective than is useful for understanding our recent flights to the moon and flights of instrument packages to other planets. Distances within the solar system can be measured in light-seconds, light-minutes, or at most in a few light-hours. Stars are at least several light-years away. Our chemical rockets carry astronauts to the moon in about sixty-nine hours, and the Viking spacecraft to Mars took about ten months to reach its destination. But they are propelled by forces other than gravity for only seventeen minutes or one hour respectively. The rockets are coasting and slowing down until they are close to the target for almost the entire trip. The Apollo spacecraft, at an altitude of two hundred thousand miles, is going only two thousand mph although it left the vicinity of earth at twenty-five thousand mph. If it had been able to accelerate at just one G (a twenty-one-mph increase every second) for just one hour, the final velocity would have been 79,000 mph; for just one day it would have been 1.9 million mph! Peak acceleration during an Apollo launch is actually close to eight Gs (a 168-mph increase every second). To understand the foregoing a bit better, note that an acceleration of one G at the surface of the earth equals 32.17 feet per second, which in turn means that as each second passes velocity is increasing by an additional 32.17 feet. Translated into miles per hour one-G acceleration means that velocity is increasing at the rate of 21.9 mph every second! At the end of two seconds it is 21.9 mph plus 21.9 mph, or 43.8 mph, and at the end of three seconds it is 64.7 mph, and so on.

In just one day at one-G acceleration a velocity of almost two million mph would be reached and the craft would be far out of the earth’s gravitational field. For each minute of operation near the earth, gravity effectively pulls the craft at 1260 mph. While in space there is practically no gravitational or atmospheric friction. It is extremely important to recognize that it takes only approximately one year at one G to approach the speed of light—about 670,000,000 mph—-and we can speculate that any space travelers may have refueling or rest and relaxation centers at locations between the stars, so that our earth visitors need not have come directly from their home planet.

Unfortunately, chemical rockets such as we have been using are by their very nature extremely limited in their ability to provide high velocities in their limited operating times because of their great inefficiency.

Starship and Earth Excursion Module designers thus face two obvious questions: (1)How much acceleration can people stand for how long? (2)What method can provide more miles per hour than chemical rockets, either by operating for longer times or at higher accelerations?

The amount of acceleration a person can stand depends on many factors. The three most important are the duration of the acceleration (the greater the force, the shorter the time it can be tolerated), the direction of the force in relation to the body (back to front acceleration is much easier to handle than head to foot acceleration, and for this reason Apollo astronauts have their backs perpendicular to the direction of thrust, rather than along it, as in an elevator), and body environment is important (a person immersed in a fluid can withstand greater acceleration than one not so immersed).

Let’s consider some of the variables. A trained and highly motivated pilot can perform a tracking task while being accelerated at fourteen Gs (about three hundred mph increase every second) for two minutes. Starting from rest he would be moving at three hundred mph in one second, at three thousand mph in ten seconds and at thirty-six thousand mph at the end of two minutes! Obviously conventional propulsion systems such as airplanes, trains, buses, and cars cannot provide fourteen Gs. A drag racer achieving 210 mph in ten seconds would have an average acceleration of only one G. A trained person properly constrained can stand thirty Gs for one second without damage. Data suggest that much higher accelerations could be withstood for shorter times. Reports of EEM (Earth Excursion Module) flight often indicate that the high acceleration—as when making a nearly right-angle turn or changing altitude—takes place in an extremely short period of time. In modern physics and technology the primary method for providing very high forces for relatively short periods of time is the use of electromagnetic forces such as with lasers, magnetoforming of complex shapes, and the acceleration of nuclear particles to velocities close to that of light.

In the mid-1960s and electromagnetic submarine designed by Dr. Stuart Way, who was on leave from Westinghouse Research Laboratory, was successfully tested. It made use of the fact that electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other produce a (Lorentz) force at right angles to both. The force pushes against the surrounding electromagnetically conducting fluid (seawater) which pushes back and moves the submarine. It is possible to envision an airborne analog in which seawater is replaced by ionized electrically conducting air, and conventional electromagnetic fields are produced by superconducting magnets which need little space, very little power and weight, and generate very high magnetic fields. Substantial research, much of it classified, has been done showing that a magnetoaerodynamic system would be capable of solving all the problems of high-speed flight by controlling lift, drag, heating, and sonic-boom production—all electromagnetically rather than mechanically or chemically. The resulting system would be symmetric, highly maneuverable, relatively silent, often have a glow around it, and be capable of sudden starts and stops. It could carry its own power supply or be charged up on board its mother ship in much the same manner as a golf cart which carries only a storage battery.

The reason much of the research on MAD propulsion systems is classified is that the nose cones of ballistic missiles create an ionized air region around them as they reenter. Modifications of the nose cones can be used to vary the radar profile, lift, drag, and light direction and other important parameters without carrying along fuel or propellant which would normally be required. It should be stressed that such systems work by interacting with their surroundings and not by carrying along something thrown out the back end. A real benefit is derived from producing very high magnetic fields since a field ten times as great produces one hundred times as much force.

For the interstellar trip the obvious first choice, although undoubtedly not the ultimate choice, for replacing primitive chemical rockets is a nuclear rocket. Although most people are unaware of nuclear propulsion systems other than those the Navy developed for submarines and surface ships, there have been several other programs for the development of airborne or space-propulsion systems. Jet engines were successfully operated on nuclear power for the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. A nuclear ramjet was successfully ground-tested as part of the Pluto program. An entire family of nuclear rockets were successfully ground-tested during the NERVA (Nuclear Engines for Rocket Vehicle Applications) program. Most of the work involved in these multimillion-dollar-a-year programs was classified and conducted by industrial contractors in conjunction with national laboratories under the direction of NASA, the Air Force, and/or the old Atomic Energy Commission. All of the above systems utilize nuclear fission of the uranium-235 nucleus to produce huge amounts of heat by the conversion of a small amount of mass into a large amount of energy. Millions of times more energy per pound can be produced in this way than by burning rocket fuel.

The design and development of nuclear flight-propulsion systems requires the solution of very real problems associated with complex nuclear physics, sophisticated hardware operating at very high temperatures, and the lethal radiation produced by the fission process. Similar problems, although not as difficult, were solved first for nuclear weapons and then in the production of a large, relatively low-temperature submarine and stationary nuclear-power plants. The primary difficulty in employing fission for space or atmospheric propulsion systems is associated with the weight and high performance limitations of such systems. Large ships weight more than a hundred thousand tons. Airplanes weigh fewer than four hundred tons, and even the Saturn 5 rocket weighed only three thousand tons. Despite the problems, the NRX A-6 nuclear-rocket-reactor propulsion system was successfully tested in December 1967 by Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory at a power level of 1.1 billion watts in a package less than ten feet long and under five feet in diameter. In June 1968 the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory successfully tested the Phoebus-2B at a power level of 4.4 billion watts; it had a diameter under six feet. The old Grand Coulee Dam produced 2.2 billion watts by comparison. All the NERVA (and preceding KIWI and Rover) systems used solid fuel, through which was pumped liquid hydrogen which changed to a gas and was exhausted through a nozzle. Because hydrogen has the lowest weight of any molecule, for the same energy expended it will achieve the highest exhaust velocity. The weight of the oxygen and its associated tankage is also eliminated. More advanced systems have been designed in which the U-235 is in a very high-temperature gas-plasma form and thus provides far higher exhaust temperatures for the hydrogen. Reactors actually have operated with the fuel in a gaseous form.

Of considerably greater interest from a long-term viewpoint would be fusion propulsion. Fusion is the nuclear process involving the combining of light nuclei to make heavier nuclei and, as in fission, convert a small amount of mass into a huge amount of energy. It is the primary process by which energy is produced in most stars and in so-called hydrogen bombs. Every civilization—even on distant stars—would become aware of the fusion process as it reached a minimal level of scientific maturity. There are many different reactions and processes which can be used in both fission and fusion devices. One of the most attractive for a space-propulsion system would be to cause the reaction of just those particles which, when made to fuse, produce only charged rather than neutral particles. These very high-energy particles then could be directed out the back of the rocket, using appropriate electric and magnetic fields. Neutral particles come off in all directions and cannot be directed or controlled, only slowed down and their heat absorbed . . . a very inefficient process. Using the right reactions in the right way, a space fusion-propulsion system could be designed to exhaust light ions having more than ten million times as much energy per particle as they can receive in a chemical rocket. A second advantage of considerable interest is that the fuel or propellant for a fusion rocket would be isotopes of hydrogen and helium, which are not only the lightest elements but are also by far the most abundant in the universe. Thus one could be certain of finding the raw materials for a fusion fuel stockpile in any star system to which one traveled.

There have been a number of studies published showing that staged fission and fusion deep-space propulsion systems are capable of round trips to nearby stars in a shorter time than an average life span. Chemical rockets would be used to launch starships into orbit or to the moon for relaunching from there because of the greatly reduced energy requirements on the moon. Clever design would be employed such as was used by the lunar landing program. Full advantage would be taken of every “free loading” possibility just as the Apollo vehicle takes advantage of the earth’s high rotation to the east near the equator and of the gravitational field of the moon and of staged rockets which fire in programmed succession on the way and by counting on the earth’s atmosphere to slow it down rather than carrying and firing retrorockets to slow it down on the way back. The final weight and cost depend almost entirely on the design assumptions rather than (as academic calculations so often assume) being independent of those design features. An early study of the required launch weight of a chemical rocket capable of sending a man to the moon and back concluded that the launch weight would have to be a million million tons. The launching was accomplished less than thirty years later with a chemical rocket weighing three hundred million times less.

Stars and planets along the way also would be used both for their fuel and solar energy and for gravitational assistance, just as the Pioneer spacecraft, which was without propulsion systems after leaving the vicinity of the earth, used the gravitational field of Jupiter to hurl itself past Saturn and eventually out of the solar system.

Earthlings are capable of building both fission and fusion deep-space propulsion systems if they are willing to spend the tens of billions of dollars required. However, these are not the only possibilities for interstellar travel. Other possibilities include:

1. Lasers based on the earth, or in orbit, or on the moon, to be aimed at the back of the rocket, spilling off material which would exhaust toward the laser and push the rocket forward. This has the advantage of putting the power supply elsewhere than on board the rocket.
2. Systems producing energy by some as yet unknown process power the strange stellar beasts known as quasars. Watts per gallon of fuel are enormously greater in a quasar than in a typical fusion-powered star like the sun.
3. Systems utilizing whatever type of force holds subnuclear particles together are also a possibility. In the nucleus involved in fission and fusion the amount of energy per particle is much greater than in the larger atoms involved in chemical processes. Going inside the nucleus should also decrease the size of the particle but greatly increase the amount of energy available per particle.
4. Systems using some means of bending space and time so as to “pop” from one place to another without having to really travel along the path between the points would do the trick. Picture a flat sheet of paper and then bend it so that diagonally opposite corners touch each other. Obviously travel between these touching corners would be more rapid than travel across the paper had it remained flat.
5. We also must remember there undoubtedly are systems that we cannot yet imagine—just as fusion as the primary energy-producing process on the sun wasn’t understood until 1937 although it had been going on for five billion years. Any study of technological progress clearly shows us that progress comes from doing things in an unpredictable way. The future, technologically speaking, is not an extrapolation of the past.

An important aspect of the design of any interstellar propulsion system involves taking full advantage of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Theory and experiment have both clearly demonstrated that as things having mass such as people, particles, and starships approach the speed of light (c), time slows down for them as compared to those not moving so rapidly. The extent of the time slowdown depends on how close one approaches c, the speed of light. For example a one-way trip of thirty-seven years (the distance to Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli) at 99.9 percent c would take only twenty months’ crew time; at 99.99 percent c it would take only six months’ crew time. Thus even a trip to a distant galaxy such as Andromeda, two million light-years away, would take under sixty years’ crew time if the intergalactic ship somehow could manage to keep accelerating at one G, using some yet unknown technique.

An important point to bear in mind in any discussion of interstellar travel is that it would be done in a systematic fashion. Observations would be made, unmanned craft would be sent, followed by orbiters, the installation of refueling stations, manned craft, colonizers, travelers, and all the rest. It took only twelve years from the time the first small satellite was launched before we accomplished a manned landing on the moon.

Considering that there are stars in our local neighborhood that are billions of years older than the sun, it would not be surprising if interstellar travel has been commonplace for billions of years. Several published papers have concluded that our Milky Way galaxy already has been colonized. Furthermore, it must be noted that travel between star systems is more likely to occur the closer the next system is. Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli are both sunlike stars that are less than three light-weeks apart. Observers on a planet around one of them could easily observe planets around the other. One would certainly expect interstellar travel to develop earlier there than in our isolated corner of the neighborhood, where the nearest star to us is one hundred times farther away than the Zeta Reticulans are from each other.

The post UFO Propulsion Systems first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

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My Letter to the New York Times

By Stanton Friedman

The following article was published in the New York Times weekly Science section.
The author is head of the physics department at Case Western University.

Odds Are Stacked When Science Tries to Debate Pseudoscience

By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

I vividly remember the first time I was hijacked on the radio. I had agreed to participate in a debate for a Florida radio program that specialized in alien visits and U.F.O. sightings. My better judgment suggested that I should be wary. But I thought if I kept my focus purely on the physics challenges involved in space travel, I might be able to persuade some listeners to be skeptical of the claims that aliens were regularly visiting, abducting and experimenting with our fellow earthlings.

I should have known better. After 45 minutes defending myself against the claim that I was close-minded, when I argued that science did in fact impose constraints on what is possible, and politely responding to demands that I must first scrupulously review all the specific claims of alien sightings before I could possibly have the temerity to make general statements about plausibility or implausibility, I felt that any uninformed listeners who might have been waiting to be swayed probably found themselves merely confused at the end of the show.

In a debate that confronts the results of science with pseudoscience, from alien abductions and crop circles on one hand to the health benefits of weak magnetic fields or young earth creationism on the other, the odds are stacked against science.

Part of the problem is uniquely American. We in the United States are constantly regaled by stories about the limitless possibilities open to those with know-how and a spirit of enterprise. Combine that with a public that perceives the limits of science as targets that are constantly being overcome, and the suggestion that anything is absolutely impossible seems like an affront. Indeed, modern technology has made the seemingly impossible almost ordinary. How often have I heard the cry from an audience, “Yeah, but 300 years ago people would have said it would be impossible to fly!”

Although true, the problem with that assertion is that 300 years ago people did not know enough about the laws of physics to make the assertion, so the claim would have been improper. Had they made a simpler claim like, “Three hundred years from now, if you drop this cannonball off the Tower of Pisa, it will fall down,” they would have been right.

Although it is probably true that there is far more that we do not know about nature than that we do know, we do know something! We know that balls, when dropped, fall down. We do know that the earth is round and not flat. We do know how electromagnetism works, and we do know that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands.

We may not know how spacecraft of the future will be propelled, whether matter-antimatter drives will be built or even if time travel is possible. But we do know, absolutely, how much on-board fuel will be needed to speed up a substantial spacecraft to near the speed of light — an enormous amount, probably enough to power all of human civilization at the present time for perhaps a decade. That means that aliens who want to come here from a distant star will probably have to have some better reason than merely performing secret kinky experiments on the patients of a Harvard psychiatrist.

As difficult as debating ultimate limits of the possible may be, there is another debate that is even harder to win. But it is a debate that may be even more important. It is a debate on the “fairness” of science. The reason for the difficulty is simple. Science is not fair. All ideas are not treated equally. Only those that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by experiment have any currency. Beautiful ideas, elegant ideas and even sacrosanct notions are not immune from termination by the chilling knife edge of experimental data. In Ohio, a debate is raging over whether to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution in high school biology classes. Intelligent design is based on the belief that life is too complicated to explain by natural causes alone and that some intelligence, ultimately some divine intelligence, must have created the original life forms on earth or guided their development.

Proponents of that idea suggest that including it in the curriculum is simply a question of fairness. If a significant number of people do not believe that evolution provides an adequate explanation of the origin of species, they argue, then it is only fair to present both sides of the argument in a high school science class.

But at least half of Americans polled in a recent survey by the National Science Foundation did not know that Earth orbits the Sun, and that it takes a year to do so. Does this mean we should teach that Earth is the center of the universe? Of course not. It merely means that we are not doing a very good job informing the public about physics.

Science is not a democratic process. It does not proceed by majority rule and it does not accept notions that have already been disproven by experiment.

Intelligent design makes assertions that cannot be tested by experiment. Those assertions that can be tested, say about blood clotting or the claimed irreducible complexity of various components of cells, seem to have thus far failed those tests. So intelligent design does not belong in a science class. End of story.

Nevertheless, recently the Ohio State School Board felt it necessary to run a hearing on evolution vs. intelligent design in a debate format, with two proponents of evolution to face off against two advocates of intelligent design in Columbus.

One might think that I would know better than to agree to participate in such a debate. But I did, because I felt the education of schoolchildren in Ohio was so important. Nevertheless, I tried to learn from my earlier mistakes. Merely having a debate inevitably suggests that each side has some credibility. As a result, opponents of the scientific method like creationists try very hard to appear in debates with scientists. Merely being on the same stage represents a victory!

I made sure that I emphasized this intrinsic inequity in my opening remarks in Columbus, and it colored much of the subsequent discussion, as well as the later reporting of the event. I do not know whether it was sufficient to let listeners focus on whether there was really anything worth debating in the first place. But it at least allowed for that possibility.

In the meantime, for those scientists who find themselves thrust in such public debates, I have found at least one useful tool. When debating U.F.O. experts, ask them whether they believe in “Young Earth Creationism.” When debating young earth creationists, ask them whether they believe in alien U.F.O.’s. When they say no, ask why. Their answers will inevitably shed light on the weakness of their own positions.

Of course, as has once happened to me, you might find yourself debating a U.F.O.-believing creationist. But you can’t win them all. My hope is that you can win at least some of the time.

The post My Letter to the New York Times first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

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Debunkers At It Again

By Stanton T. Friedman

I hated wasting the money to buy the January/February 2009 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (Vol. 33, Issue 1) which has for years been trying to debunk all sorts of so-called paranormal phenomena. But the cover said: Special Issue “The New UFO Interest: Scientific Appraisals.” This is an excellent example of false advertising since the appraisals are anything but scientific. SI is published by what is now labeled “The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” (CSI Lite??). In actuality, the active writers and “investigators” aren’t skeptics. They are Debunkers doing their best to pull the wool over the eyes of a curious public. They know the answers, and so don’t really need to investigate. Proclamation is more their style. Deception is the name of the game. For example, inside the front cover is a very impressive list of about 75 scientists, writers, philosophers, etc., including three Nobel Prize winners. Also included on the list is Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” whose purpose is to Deny… judging by his Larry King appearances. Unfortunately, most of the highly credentialed people aren’t the ones who write the articles or “investigate.” The dirty work in the trenches is normally done by the debunkers in residence. The primary tools are those of the propagandists such as very selective choice of data, positive and negative name calling, and misrepresentation.

Listed under Investigative Files is an article “Return to Roswell” by Dr. Joseph Nickell. Joe’s three degrees are in English and he spent a lot of time as a magician. Not much science there. Of course the stock-in-trade of magicians is intentional deception with another sterling example being the Amazing Randi. Joe’s been attacking Roswell for over a decade. At the 50th Anniversary celebration in Roswell, I was being interviewed there, and he was in California. We couldn’t see each other, but could hear. He explained Roswell by saying the press release was put out by the PR person from the base to attract attention to himself! Joe didn’t even know Walter Haut’s name. I pointed out that I had known Walter from almost twenty years and that the notion that the PR person for the most elite military organization in the world, the 509th Bomb Group, would put out such a press release without his boss’s blessing was completely absurd. Of course in SI Joe never mentions the 509th or that it had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and set off two more at Operation Crossroads in the Pacific in 1946. It is of some interest that Walter Haut was chosen to drop the instrument package during one of those tests, that he had flown over twenty bombing missions as a bombardier over Japan during WW2 and was quite close to Colonel Blanchard, 509th Commander. Some inexperience!

Apparently Joe had learned nothing from our exchange and stated “On July 8, 1947, an unauthorized press release from an eager but relatively inexperienced public information officer at New Mexico’s Roswell Army Air Field propelled the Roswell Incident into history.” It has been known for thirty years that Blanchard ordered (authorized) Walter to put out the release. Walter after years in the far east during WW2 was hardly just wet behind the ears. Joe even goes on to claim Kenneth Arnold’s sighting two weeks earlier may well have been nothing more than mirage effects caused by a temperature inversion. That is as sensible as saying the moon may be made of green cheese. This crazy notion was thoroughly destroyed by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a physicist. But why let the facts get in the way?

Nickell goes on to say the young officer was reprimanded. He provides no evidence. I and others have asked both Walter and his wife and both denied there was any reprimand. Why would there have been, since Blanchard had ordered the release? Nickell then moves right over to the baseless Project Mogul explanation which has been thoroughly destroyed by Brad Sparks and Dr. David Rudiak and Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. (Ref.1) despite the assertions of Dr. Charles Moore who worked on the program.

Nickell describes in some detail tests run by Engineer Robert Galganski with the Discovery TV Channel crew and Nickell in attendance. They put up a half size Mogul Balloon Train carrying some radar reflectors and then shot down the balloons showing that the area covered by the debris was much smaller than described by Major Jesse Marcel. Joe was there and doesn’t really buy the test because he notes that Jesse’s estimate, 3/4 of a mile long by hundreds of feet wide, was much greater than described by Rancher Mack Brazel in the July 9 Roswell Daily Record article. He quotes that article at length, but somehow never mentions that Brazel was sure what he had found wasn’t balloons. He also fails to mention that testimony from Brazel’s son Bill, neighbor Loretta Proctor, and others all saying that Brazel was brought back into town on July 9 and given a new story to tell the press. Also not noted is that if all there had been was the “bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick and the another rubber bundle 18-20 inches long and 8 inches thick with a total weight of maybe 5 pounds,” it would easily have fit in Brazel’s small truck and there would have been no reason for Marcel and Counter Intelligence Corps Captain Sheridan Cavitt to follow Brazel the long way back to the ranch on July 6 as they did. Joe, of course, never mentions that the July 8 article, carried all over in Evening papers from Chicago West, said the wreckage was found “last week.” The phony July 9 explanation says “found June 14” — hardly last week from July 8.

Joe also notes that though the news story died almost immediately, “but the event continued as the subject of folklore and fakelore [much provided by Roswell Debunkers]… there emerged amateurishly forged government conspiracy documents.” He has a note saying “The ‘MJ-12 Documents’ fooled arch Roswell-conspiracy writer Stanton T. Friedman who has continued to tout the bogus documents (Friedman 1996).” WRONG, Joe. I have done far more detailed investigation (not Nickell-style proclamations) to show that the great majority of the MJ-12 documents are indeed fakes — but that the four major ones are solid. As I recall Joe claimed the “Eisenhower Briefing Document” was an obvious fraud because of the comma in the date “18 November, 1952.” As it happens that was one of many date formats in use at the time. I found seven original documents which were used as a basis for phony emulations and was able to dispose of the other objections to the four good ones in Ref. 2, 2005, and a number of papers — none noted by Nickell, of course. Ref. 3 by myself and Don Berliner is also not noted.

Robert Sheaffer also contributed a “historical” overview: “Ufology 2009: A Six Decade Perspective.” Sheaffer clearly shows his disdain for UFO abductions and the rest of the UFO scene, and for the facts as well. Speaking of Betty and Barney Hill: “Under hypnosis, they each told a UFO Abduction story that largely matched Betty’s nightmares (which Barney had heard her repeat many times).” The comment is nonsense. Barney read Betty’s dreams once, and the notes were put in a drawer. There was no repetition and the comparative analysis of what they said under hypnosis and what was in the dreams is detailed by Betty’s niece Kathleen Marden, in our book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experiences (Ref. 4) — also not referenced. Sheaffer theorizes a “New Age” vs. “Science Fiction” ufology. Both are junk science and consistently ignore Occam’s razor (all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best).” By far the simplest solution to the UFO problem is that the best cases (Multiple witness radar visual, landings etc.) involve alien spacecraft. Debunking ufology of the SI variety ignores science all together. He also claims “The FBI investigated the documents [MJ-12] and quickly concluded that the documents were “completely bogus.”

Not so. The FBI on its website carries the USAF Colonel Weaver’s set with his hand written comment “BOGUS.” They accepted his word. Sheaffer also claims one document was typed on a typewriter that was not manufactured until “fifteen years after the date on the document.” This, too, is nonsense as noted in Ref. 2 on page 227 which quotes forensic document examiner James Black that the typeface preceded the document date by seven years.

Dr. David Morrison, a NASA senior scientist, chimes in in SI with “UFOS and Aliens in Space.” He says “If UFOs are alien spacecraft visiting Earth, then it seems reasonable that evidence of alien civilizations might be seen by astronomers or the radio signals from alien spacecraft might be picked up by the sensitive receivers we use to communicate with our own spacecraft.” Frankly this is absurd. Astronomers (some of whom have indeed seen UFOs) aren’t looking for signals from alien spacecraft which are very likely using techniques about which we are ignorant. Maybe secret NSA listening devices pick up alien signals, but then the NSA doesn’t release info about what signals it receives. They did release 156 pages of UFO related intercepts. All but one or two sentences per page are redacted (whited out). Another astronomer, Andrew Fraknoi, has a brief piece bemoaning the lack of sightings by even amateur astronomers. There is no mention, of course, of Stanford astrophysicist Dr. Peter Sturrock’s discussion of astronomer UFO sightings as noted in Ref. 5.

Retired air force major and pilot, James McGaha, also an avid astronomer, with his own observatory, lists fourteen areas of astronomical knowledge needed to be a good UFO observer. He, too, has appeared on Larry King attacking “unqualified observers.” One hardly needs to be very astronomically knowledgeable to describe the silent slow flight at low altitude of the huge “Phoenix lights” taking four minutes to fly right overhead blotting out the stars as it did so. I can enjoy and benefit from eating various foods without being an expert on the digestion process. He and I tangled in a spirited formal university debate as can be seen in Ref. 6.

Another SI anti-Roswell article is “Roswell Update: Fading Star?” by Dave Thomas, a scientist in New Mexico and President of “New Mexicans for Science and Reason.” Dave has certainly demonstrated his lack of knowledge of both the Roswell and Aztec UFO crash retrieval cases. I am looking forward to a soon-to-be-published book by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey about the Aztec case. Unlike Thomas, they did an enormous amount of serious research.

There are a few other articles as well. Suffice to say that the Skeptical Inquirer provides many examples of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of anti-ufology.

REFERENCES

1. Marcel, Jesse Jr. and Marcel, Linda, The Roswell Legacy: The Untold Story of the First Military Officer at the 1947 Crash Site, 2008, New Page Books Div. of Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ. Foreword by Stanton T. Friedman
2. Friedman, Stanton T, TOP SECRET/MAJIC, Marlowe and Company, NY, 2nd Edition 2005, 282 pp. Foreword by Whitley Strieber

3. Berliner, Don and Friedman, Stanton T., Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident, 2nd Edition, Marlowe and Co. NY 1997

4. Marden, Kathleen and Friedman, Stanton T., Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, New Page Books Division of Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ 2008, 320 pp., 2008. Foreword by Dr. Bruce Maccabee

5. Friedman, Stanton T., Flying Saucers and Science, 2008, 320 pp., New Page Books Div., Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ. Forewords by Dr. Edgar Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Maccabee

6. Are Flying Saucers Real? DVD 2 hrs. Debate between James McGaha and Stanton T. Friedman, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, January 24, 2004

The post Debunkers At It Again first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post Debunkers At It Again appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.

The Bob Lazar Fraud

By Stanton T. Friedman

Incredible claims have been made about Bob Lazar for years. He supposedly is a physicist with an MS in Physics from MIT and an MS in Electronics from the California Institute of Technology. He was a “Scientist” for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and obtained a job back-engineering UFOs at a very secret site S-4 near Area 51 in Nevada through noted Physicist, the late Dr. Edward Teller.

Supposedly he figured out how saucers work using Element 115 — matter/anti-matter, etc. He was able to steal a small quantity of 115 from the 500 pounds available, but this was stolen back. There was indeed an announcement in early 2004 about the production of 4 atoms of element 115 by operating a huge European accelerator for many weeks. It has a very short half life so there is no way to accumulate pounds of it. He supposedly came forward with his story despite death threats because he thought the public has a right to know. Videotapes are available with his claims.

It is all BUNK.

Not one shred of evidence has been put forth to support this story: No diplomas, no résumés, no transcripts, no memberships in professional organizations, no papers, no pages from MIT or Caltech yearbooks. He also mentioned, in a phone conversation with me, California State University at Northridge and Pierce Junior College — also in the San Fernando Valley, California. I checked all four schools. Pierce said he had taken electronics courses in the late 1970s. The other three schools never heard of him.

The page from the Los Alamos National Lab phone book with Lazar’s name on it clearly states that it includes employees of the DOE and outside contractor, Kirk Meyer. “K/M” follows Lazar’s name. This proves he worked for K/M, not LANL.

I checked with LANL’s personnel department for Lazar’s name and that of an old colleague. They found my guy, but not Lazar.

He was publicly asked when he got his MS from MIT. He said “Let me see now, I think it was probably 1982.” Nobody getting an MS from MIT would not know the year immediately. He was asked to name some of his profs, He said: “Let’s see now, Bill Duxler will remember me from the physics department at Caltech.” I located Dr. Duxler. He’s a Pierce Junior College physics prof, and never taught at Caltech. Lazar was registered in one of his courses at the same time Lazar was supposedly at MIT! Nobody who can go to MIT goes to Pierce JC, not to mention the rather long commute between LA and Cambridge, Mass.

I checked his High School in New York State. He graduated in August, not with his class. The only science course he took was chemistry. He ranked 261 out of 369, which is in the bottom third. There is no way he would have been admitted by MIT or Caltech. An MS in Physics from MIT requires a thesis. No such thesis exists at MIT, and he is not on a commencement list. The notion that the government wiped his CIVILIAN records clean is absurd. I checked with the Legal Counsel at MIT — no way to wipe all his records clean. The Physics department never heard of him and he is not a member of the American Physical Society.

When he declared bankruptcy in the mid 1980s for almost $300,000.00 he listed his occupation as a self-employed film processor. With MS degrees from MIT and Caltech? Caltech would not have accepted him for an MS program, if he already had one from MIT.

His propulsion scheme sounds good (as do many science fiction stories), but makes no real sense especially in view of how difficult it would be to add protons to #115. Gravity wave amplification sounds great but what does it mean?

He could not have gotten a Compartmentalized Security clearance having operated a brothel. His W-2 form from the Department of Naval Intelligence totals under $1000.00, at most a week’s pay for a scientist. You can’t get a security clearance in a week.

Scientists leave trails. Lazar is NOT a scientist. He couldn’t even answer scientific questions put to him. An excellent review of Bob’s “Physics” can be seen at web.archive.org/web/20061220030435/http://www.serve.com/mahood/lazar/critiq.htm.

I should add that Bob is a bright and talented guy who operated a jet powered car, put on fireworks displays, and apparently helped physics professors working at the Los Alamos Meson accelerator facility.

The post The Bob Lazar Fraud first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

The post The Bob Lazar Fraud appeared first on The Black Vault Case Files.