In addition, something that both the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Air Force worried about then was UFOs as a means of clogging communication channels in a national crisis, and confusing visual and radar sightings of enemy aircraft – a signal-to-noise problem that in a way is the flip side of spoofing.
In view of all this, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that at least some UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public which pays the bills. The Cold War is over, the missile and balloon technology is largely obsolete or widely available, and those who would be embarrassed are no longer on active duty. The worst that would happen, from the military’s point of view, is that there would be one more acknowledged instance of the American public being misled or lied to in the interest of national security. It’s time for the files to be declassified and made generally available.
Another instructive intersection of the conspiracy temperament and the secrecy culture concerns the National Security Agency. This organization monitors the telephone, radio and other communications of both friends and adversaries of the United States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world’s mail. Its daily intercept traffic is huge. In times of tension, vast arrays of NSA personnel fluent in the relevant languages are sitting with earphones, monitoring in real time everything from encrypted commands from the target nation’s General Staff to pillow talk. For other material there are key words by which computers cull out for human attention specific messages or conversations of current urgent concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is possible to go back to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first appearance of a codeword, say, or command responsibility in a crisis. Some of the intercepts are made from listening posts in nearby countries (Turkey for Russia, India for China), from aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in Earth orbit. There is a continuing dance of measures and counter-measures between the NSA and the security services of other nations, who understandably do not wish to be listened in on.
Now add to this already heady mix the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A request is made to the NSA for all information it has available on UFOs. It is required by law to be responsive, but of course without revealing ‘methods and sources’. NSA also feels a deep obligation not to alert other nations, friends or foes, in an obtrusive and politically embarrassing way, to its activities. So a more or less typical intercept released by NSA in response to an FOIA request will be a third of a page blacked out, a fragment of a line saying ‘reported a UFO at low altitude’, followed by two-thirds of a page blacked out. The NSA’s position is that releasing the rest of the page would potentially compromise sources and methods, or at least alert the nation in question to how readily its aviation radio traffic is being intercepted. (If NSA released surrounding, seemingly bland, aircraft-to-tower transmissions, it would then be possible for the nation in question to recognize that its military air traffic control dialogues are being monitored and to switch to communications means – frequency hopping, for example – that make NSA intercepts more difficult.) But UFO conspiracy theorists receiving, in response to their FOIA requests, dozens of pages of material, almost all of it blacked out, understandably deduce that the NSA possesses extensive information on UFOs and is part of a conspiracy of silence.
In talking not for attribution with NSA officials, I am told the following story: typical intercepts are of military and civilian aircraft radioing that they see a UFO, by which they mean an unidentified object in the surrounding airspace. It may even be US aircraft on reconnaissance or spoofing missions. In most cases it is something much more ordinary, and the clarification is also reported on later NSA intercepts.
Similar logic can be used to make NSA seem a part of any conspiracy. For example, they say, a response was required to an FOIA request on what the NSA knew about the singer Elvis Presley. (Apparitions of Mr Presley and resulting miraculous cures have been reported.) Well, the NSA knew a few things. For example, a report on the economic health of a certain nation reported how many Elvis Presley tapes and CDs were sold there. This information also was supplied as a few lines of clear in a vast ocean of censorship black. Was NSA engaged in an Elvis Presley cover-up? While of course I have not personally investigated NSA’s UFO-related traffic, their story seems to me very plausible.
If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens from us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can push for declassification of relevant information from decades ago, of which the July 1994 Air Force report on the ‘Roswell Incident’ is a good example.
You can catch a flavour of the paranoid style of many UFOlo-gists, as well as a naivete about the secrecy culture, in a book by a former New York Times reporter, Howard Blum (Out There, Simon and Schuster, 1990):
I could not, no matter how inventively I tried, avoid slamming into sudden dead ends. The whole story was always lingering, deliberately, I came to believe, just out of my grasp.
Why?
This was the single, practical, impossible question that was balanced ominously on the tall peak of my mounting suspicions. Why were all these official spokesmen and institutions doing their collusive best to hinder and obstruct my efforts? Why were stories true one day, and false the next? Why all the tense, unyielding secretiveness? Why were military intelligence agents spreading disinformation, driving UFO believers mad? What had the government found out there? What was it trying to hide?
Of course there’s resistance. Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It’s a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
One of the most provocative purported intersections of UFOs and secrecy are the so-called MJ-12 documents. In late 1984, so the story goes, an envelope containing a canister of exposed but undeveloped film was thrust into the home mail slot of a film producer, Jaime Shandera, interested in UFOs and government cover-up, remarkably, just as he was about to go out and have lunch with the author of a book on the alleged events in Roswell, New Mexico. When developed, it ‘proved to be’ page after page of a highly classified ‘eyes only’ executive order dated 24 September 1947 in which President Harry S. Truman seemingly established a committee of twelve scientists and government officials to examine a set of crashed flying saucers and little alien bodies. The membership of the MJ-12 committee is remarkable because these are just the military, intelligence, science and engineering people who might have been called to investigate such crashes if they had occurred. In the MJ-12 documents there are tantalizing references to appendices about the nature of the aliens, the technology of their ships and so on, but the appendices were not included in the mysterious film.
The Air Force says that the document is bogus. The UFO expert Philip J. Klass and others find lexicographic and typographic inconsistencies that suggest that the whole thing is a hoax.
Those who purchase fine art are concerned about the provenance of their painting – that is, who owned it most recently and who before that . . . and so on all the way back to the original artist. If there are breaks in the chain, if a 300-year-old painting can be tracked back only sixty years and then we have no idea in what home or museum it was hanging, the forgery warning flags go up. Because the rewards of forgery in fine art are high, collectors must be very cautious. Where the MJ-12 documents are most vulnerable and suspect is exactly on this question of provenance – the evidence miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out of a fairy story, perhaps ‘The Shoemaker and the Elves’.
There are many cases in human history of a similar character -where a document of dubious provenance suddenly appears carrying information of great import which strongly supports the case of those who have made the discovery. After careful and in some cases courageous investigation the document is proved to be a hoax. There is no difficulty in understanding the motivation of the hoaxers. A more or less typical example is the book of Deuteronomy – discovered hidden in the Temple in Jerusalem by King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.