The NSA and a 1978 MUFON Conference: More Lost UFO Material

For decades, an NSA document has circulated recounting an NSA employee’s experience at a MUFON symposium in 1978. The memo was written in order for them to chronicle their experience, but also express their a concern about one of the presenters at the symposium, Todd Zechel. This NSA employee’s concern was that Zechel, a well known UFO researcher and co-founder of the Citizen’s Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) group would potentially tout an “inside contact with NSA”.

This memorandum also outlined how they ultimately felt that Zechel may have fraudulently hoaxed CIA letters shown at the conference.

For many years, Zechel’s name was redacted. It wasn’t released until a 2017 MDR case by Jack Brewer brought it out.

In 2021, The Black Vault filed an additional MDR case to see if the final piece of the puzzle, the identity of the NSA employee who wrote the memo, could be revealed.

In a May 26, 2022 letter, though not sent to The Black Vault until a postmarked late July 2022 envelope was received, the NSA claims they “could not locate the original, unredacted copy” of the memo. What this means is that the NSA will never be able to disclose any still redacted information either now, or in the future.

This revelation now sits atop a growing number of UFO related documents that are “lost” and unable to be reviewed for further release. Some of those stories can be seen here and here.

Note: Although the NSA still redacts the name of who wrote the memo, the late Phil Klass wrote about this when the document got first released in 1997. He believed the author was MUFON board member Tom Deuley, who worked briefly for the NSA at the time. The newsletter can be found here, and the pertinent section is below:

Document Archive

NSA and a 1978 MUFON Conference: More Lost UFO Material [11 Pages, 4.8MB]

 

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