this is audiobook in mp3, of extract from, Secret History, And Why Barack Obama Must End It,   
By Tony Brunt.
 
 
 
 

FOREWORD. 
 
History is hard enough to do even when all the facts are on the table.                 
But when crucial events have been hidden or, even worse, convincingly denied and ridiculed, keeping your balance becomes extremely difficult. 
Historical writing in the 20th century has been irreparably damaged and at best debased by the UFO cover-up. The century‘s front page lead – the discovery that we were not alone – was censored. Other large font stories replaced it: wars,  technological revolutions, a population explosion. These events deserved banner headlines but they paled before the discovery that mankind had company. 
In consigning the hard UFO evidence to a place of safe sequestration officialdom not only diminished 50 years of historiography, it changed the course of history itself. It precluded history. It prevented alternatives – perhaps better scenarios – from arising.  

The architects of the plot may argue that they saved us from social instability and the disintegration of important institutions. But any defense of their hidden  paternalism looks decidedly shaky as ecological disaster and a violent and myopic religious fundamentalism threaten the planet. It would be a brave man who could say with any confidence that neither of these intractable problems, one technical and the other doctrinal, could have been lessened by the expansionary impact of disclosure and purposeful contact.  

From this perspective the cover-up begins to look less like kindness and more  like tragedy, a public manipulation whose opportunity cost was, in the end,  not worth it. 

It was with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that these thoughts began to sharpen in my mind. The ascension of an impressive young President seemed like the perfect opportunity to advocate a new start, to convince the powerful to throw off the hidden baggage of the past that had become a deadweight on sensible   decision-making. 
To try and make sense of it all, to apply an historical perspective and use this to chart a way forward I spent some months in 2009 preparing the first three essays in the .Secret History. series that were uploaded progressively to the UFOCUS NZ website. There was no overarching architecture to the articles, they reflected rather an impulsive decision to leap into the water and go with the current.  
As things turned out there was a rough structure to the final product. They were not essays in the strict sense, more a combination of narrative and struggling   insights that dropped out of the bottom. The best historians, as with the best     scientists, have kept away from the UFO subject for their own professional      survival. So only the observations of a second-rate mind are available. 

I trumpeted the Secret History series as an attempt to go behind the approved, standardized version of the 20th century to assess the post-war impact of the UFO phenomenon. This was pretentious hype but yet still pointed in the intended     direction of travel. Part One, .The Challenge for a New President. proffered  advice to the Obama White House that was likely to run counter to what the  President‘s cautious insiders would tender. It also looked back at early events in the 1940s to see how we had got ourselves into such a mess.                             

Part Two,
The Price of Deceit. segued off to deal in some depth with the advent of =the Grays‘ in the 1940s and the high price, mentally, suffered by some of those who designed the cover-up and were exposed to a disturbing new            cosmology. (These two instalments are included as appendices to this book).   Part Three, .George Adamski: The Toughest Job in the World. was an attempt  to show that there was a more hopeful side to this business. There was a definite benevolent potential to the alien interaction. It contradicted America‘s gloomy preoccupation with the Grays, and the dismal policy choices that were made.  (The Adamski book is available as a free download on the Scribd website). Part Four, .Secret History: And Why Barack Obama Must End It. which now appears here for the first time, tries to come to grips with the impact of the whole thing in a larger sense. It looks at the drivers of the official head-in-the-sand approach   and some of the actors who brought us to the truly astonishing (and paralytic) situation that we now find ourselves in. 

There is, of course, a book in all this, a thick one, rather than a series of essays. But I am not smart enough or patient enough to write it. Nor is the UFO field a particularly profitable area – mentally – in which to dwell for long. It suffers from the problem of lying outside the consensus reality on which our current society operates. As a consequence it is a disorienting and uncomfortable place to be. It  is a foggy shore best used for a quick dip near the water‘s edge rather than       prolonged immersion.  

In addition, our lives are generally happier when played out on the smaller stages of family and community. National and global affairs tend not to be prime sources of human contentment. To add another layer of extraterrestrial affairs on top of all this is not a sure-fire formula for increasing the sum of human happiness.       Nevertheless, the visitors are here and we must deal with them openly and extract from the relationship all that we can to improve and perhaps rescue our planetary situation. To allow this novel dialogue and diplomacy – which will clearly be multilateral in nature because there are many of them visiting – to be carried out in secret will most assuredly not lead to the best outcome. 
These essays are a small part of the global campaign to try and force disclosure of the truth. They are acts of journalism rather than acts of scholarship, as the reader will quickly realize. They contain just about all that I want to say on this vexed subject. There is some originality in them; I have tried not to repeat the work and insights of others. I have departed from the rest of the literature by assuming - on good evidence - that the cover-up exists rather than wasting valuable time trying to prove it. Severing the link with flying saucer forensics frees one to float       upwards and achieve a higher perspective. 
If you find these articles readable and instructive I will be happy. If they act as a spur to some sort of action, personal or political, even better. 
Tony Brunt, June, 2011.







The Start of the Trail 
These days Raymond Fowler, of Kennebunk, Maine, is in his late 70s but you wouldn‘t know it from his busy schedule. Sure, he recently sold the planetarium and observatory that he ran in his spare time for 39 years, but other activities have taken up the slack. He promotes sales of his 11 books through his own website and he teaches adult education classes in astronomy and other subjects. Fowler jogs, bikes, flyfishes, canoes, skis andzrehearses for his roster as a bass soloist at the local church. Oh, and there‘s also the small matter of a vegetable garden that he tends with his wife, Margaret. .We grow and freeze enough vegetables to last al-most a year. he says with deserved pride.  Despite the passage of time Ray Fowler still displays the energy and enterprise that marked him out years ago as one of the most skilled and respected UFO researchers in the United States. Never one to take a story at face value, Fowler displayed 
a tenacity and thoroughness that made his investigation reports    models of their kind; they always found an attentive and respectful  following among the staff at NICAP headquarters in Washington D.C. NICAP – the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena – was a conservative organization that collected UFO reports between the years 1957-1969 and lobbied hard for official recognition of the UFO phenomenon. Ray Fowler was one of its star East Coast investigators.  
 
 These days his appetite for travel and sleuthing in search of a good para-normal yarn has faded but he still has clear memories of the intriguing case that propelled him into the spotlight 35 years ago. This widely quoted account did not require much     gumshoe work at all – in fact it was almost delivered to his door.  
 
In 1973 Fowler was working for  Sylvania Electric Systems, at Needham, Massachusetts, as a senior 

planner on the Minuteman missile project, when he heard on the grape-vine about a local who claimed to have attended a flying saucer crash in Arizona some years before. Fowler picked up the scent and    followed it in a trail that circled back to his large Sylvania campus, to an engineer working in a nearby build-ing on software support for the Apollo space project.                     
 
Arthur G. Stansel headed up the soft-ware project and was willing to talk about his otherworldly experience so long as his identity was protected. Fowler coined the cover name .Fritz Werner. to shield his informant from ridicule and retribution. The two men had a lot in common and be-came fast friends, so much so that Stansel revealed in extraordinary depth the details of his experience and the broad outlines of the classi-fied work that he had been involved in for the Air Force. Fowler‘s report on his Stansel interviews and careful background checks would stretch to 65 pages and take its place as a   classic of UFO crash/retrieval report-age. As a measure of the tale‘s    subsequent fame a Google search of .Fritz Werner UFO. yields 430,000 results. 
 
Before we deal in any depth with the Kingman, Arizona, UFO crash of 1953 we should flesh out the      character of Arthur Stansel to show that he was not your typical phantom lurking in the margin of flying     saucer folklore. His death in New Hampshire in 2006 frees researchers to draw on the full depth of the  eulogies and life account that his wife, Doris, and his three children traversed at the time of his passing at age 82. 
 
When he graduated from high school in Kettering, Ohio, Stansel was a 
member of a national champion high school band as well as an athlete on the baseball, basketball and track teams. Trained as a combat infantry-man during World War II he took part in the D-Day landings at Nor-mandy in June 1944 at the age of 19. Here he was wounded for the first of three times. He took another hit as his unit fought their way across France, then at the Battle of the Bulge he was wounded for a third time and evacuated back to the States with a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts on his dress uniform. Stansel was a man who clearly had no qualms about putting himself in harm‘s way, a courage which showed in his later revelations to Fowler, which though disguised by a pseudonym, were easily back-tracked by determined Air Force  investigators.  
 
After the war, Stansel attended     Miami University of Ohio where he graduated in 1948 with a degree in Math and Physics. He then obtained a Masters Degree in Diesel Engi-neering at North Carolina State. From 1949 to 1958 as a civilian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, he worked on a wide range of sensitive projects, firstly as an engi-neer, and then in supervisory roles. At the time of the Kingman crash, Stansel was working in the Air    Material Command Installations   Division, within the Office of      Special Studies, whose chief was Dr Eric Wang. Stansel was on special assignment to the AEC at the atomic proving ground in Nevada measuring blast effects on various types of buildings when he was co-opted for an unusual assignment. 
 
On May 20, 1953, I worked most of the day at Frenchman Flat. In the evening, I received a phone call from the test director, Dr. Ed Doll,        

informing me that I was to go on a special job the next day. Stansel told Fowler.  .On the following day, around 4:30 P.M., I reported for  special duty and was driven to Indian Springs Air Force Base near the proving ground where I joined about fifteen other specialists.  
 
We were told to leave all valuables in the custody of the military police. I gave them my wallet, watch, pen and other things I don't remember. We were then put on a military air-plane and flown to Phoenix. We were not allowed to fraternize.  
 
There, we were put on a bus with other personnel who were already there. The bus windows were all blacked out, so that we couldn't see where we were going. We rode for an estimated four hours. I think we were in the area of Kingman,       Arizona, which is northwest of  Phoenix and not too far from the Atomic Proving Ground in Nevada. During the bus trip, we were told by an Air Force full-Colonel, that a   super-secret Air Force Vehicle had crashed and that since we were all specialists in certain fields, we were to investigate the crash in terms of our own specialty and nothing more. 

Finally, the bus stopped and we dis-embarked one at a time as our names were called, and escorted by military police to the area that we were to inspect. Two spotlights were       centered on the crashed object, which was ringed with guards. The lights were so bright that it was im-possible to see the surrounding area. The object was oval and looked like two deep saucers, one inverted upon the other. It was about thirty feet in diameter with convex surfaces, top and bottom. These surfaces were about twenty feet in diameter. Part of the object had sunk into the ground. 

It was constructed of a dull silver metal like brushed aluminum. The metal was darker where the saucer =lips‘ formed a rim, around which were what looked like slots. A curved open hatch door was located on the leading end and was vertically lowered. There was a light coming from inside, but it could have been installed by the Air Force.  
 
My particular job was to determine from the angle and the depth of im-pact into the sand, how fast the vehi-cle's forward and vertical velocities were at the time of impact. The im-pact had forced the vehicle approxi-mately twenty inches into the sand. There were no landing gear. There also were no marks or dents, that I can remember, on the surface--not even scratches. Questions asked, having nothing to do with our own special areas, were not answered.  
 
An armed military policeman guarded a tent pitched nearby. I managed to glance inside at one point and saw the dead body of a four foot human-like creature in a silver metallic-looking suit. The skin on its face was dark brown. This may have been caused by exposure to our atmosphere. It had a metallic skullcap device on its head.  
 
As soon as each person finished his task, he was interviewed over a tape recorder and escorted back to the bus. On the way, I managed to talk briefly with someone else who told me that he had glanced inside the object and saw two swivel-like seats as well as instruments and displays. An airman, noticing us talking to-gether, separated us and warned us not to talk with each other.. 
 
Stansel was returned to his job in Nevada and tendered a written report as instructed. He told Ray Fowler that he sympathized with the secret 

handling of the UFO problem. Back in 1953 the Air Force did not know where UFOs originated, apart from the belief that they were interplane-tary vehicles. 
  
Fowler checked out Stansel‘s profes-sional resume by calling former   employers. All held him in high   esteem. .Everyone described him as a highly competent, technical, and moral individual. reported Fowler. 

Neither of the two former Blue Book officials that I talked with would confirm the incident. One asked, =Where is the object now?‘ The other got very nervous when I mentioned Dr. Eric Wang's Office of Special Studies [where Stansel was working at the time]. He asked me to leave him alone, as he wanted to live out his life in privacy.. 
  
The AEC (Atomic Energy Commis-sion) in Washington and in Nevada both confirmed the dates and names of the atomic tests that Stansel had  mentioned to Fowler. They also con-firmed the name of the test director, Dr. Ed Doll, and the chief of the   Office of Special Studies as the  technical and scientific monitor for the atomic test project. Further in-vestigation revealed that Dr. Wang had died. .I did manage to track Dr. Doll to Stanford Research Institute. Fowler wrote, .but their personnel department did not know his where-abouts. They felt he had died.. 
 
On June 7, 1973, Arthur Stansel signed an affidavit, at Fowler‘s    request, that attested to his role at  the Kingman crash site.  
 
Though the UFO cover-up has been a sad American invention, the Fowler-Stansel report casts the Stars and Stripes in a more positive light. Here we have two impressive and upright citizens acting with conscience and clarity in the freedom of their democracy to      reveal a truth that they believed shouldn‘t be hidden;
 
After his years in the Air Force, Stansel went on to put the seal on his rookie-to-rockstar CV. He worked on activation mechanisms for the Curtis Wright Corporation in Cald-well, New Jersey, and then on air-craft landing systems, a task that took him to Greenland and the South Pole. He moved to New England in the 1960's as an employee of Raytheon Cor-poration where he spent 12 years as princi-pal engineer of the company‘s Apollo space program before mov-ing to Sylvania.  
 
It appears that Stansel was not      targeted for reprisal following his gutsy confession to Fowler. Probably he knew that his record of service to his country in both war and peace gave him a moral ascendancy that no denizens of MJ12* could diminish. He retired in 1987 and moved to leafy New Ipswich, in rural New Hampshire, where he gave his time generously to the local community hospital – volunteering over 2,000 hours – and to the New Ipswich Congregational Church, where he served as assistant treasurer. He had 

an interest in music and sports, ac-cording to an obituary. He was an avid reader, enjoyed hiking and bird watching with his wife, and spending time with his seven grandchildren. Arthur Stansel‘s life and integrity stand as a testament to all that is good about America. 
 
The Torch Passes to Steinman 
Fowler did not publicize the .Fritz Werner. story until 1976. It raised eyebrows among UFO buffs who had rarely seen such detailed      revelations from an insider. Then the case faded from the headlines. Seven years went by… 
 
In the early 1980s, another            researcher decided to gather up a loose end from the Fritz Werner story. He began digging for          information about Eric Wang. 
 
William Steinman, a quality         assurance worker in the California aerospace industry, began sustained and passionate research into uncov-ering the truth about UFOs after reading Frank Scully‘s book, .Behind the Flying Saucers.. His record of achievement in the few years that he devoted to the subject is impressive, especially his ability to winkle out remarkable revelations from insiders who were prepared to talk about crashed discs and the    reverse-engineering programme.  Steinman blazed across the firma-ment like a, well, UFO, for five or six years before he quietly exited the flying saucer field. His risky         activities earned him the close      attention of intelligence agencies: his home in Los Angeles was buzzed by unmarked helicopters (an harassment tactic occasionally reported by other US researchers), his mail was      tampered with and his phone appar-ently tapped. One day he even found a tracking device fitted to the bottom 
of his van. Today Steinman lives in retirement, keeping his head well below the parapet. 
 
His initial attempts to find references to Wang in scientific and engineer-ing journals drew a blank. He began to think that the man‘s existence had been deliberately covered up.    Eventually a brief reference was found to a Wang obituary having appeared in the April, 1961, issue of .Mechanical Engineering.. Stein-man travelled all over Los Angeles trying to find the magazine but in each of the library collections he searched, that particularly issue had been removed. Eventually he found one at Long Beach Public Library. .That was the only oversight. he wrote later. 
 
Steinman found that Eric Henry Wang had been born in Vienna,  Austria, in 1906. He received his  engineering degree at the Technical University of Vienna in 1935. His movements over the next few years are unknown but by 1943 he was on the staff of the University of Cincin-nati, in Ohio, where he taught       engineering and mathematics until 1952. Wang started working on        government projects at the Air Force‘s Wright Air Development Center in 1949 and left the university to take up fulltime civilian employ-ment there in 1952. In 1956 the    department he headed was moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to    Kirtland Air Force base Sandia Laboratories complex. Wang        remained there until his death in   December, 1960, at the age of 54. The dogged Steinman built a       confidence with another insider who supplied more details about Wang. The low-profile Austrian had        apparently been involved with the early stages of the flying disc       designs of fellow Vienna Tech 

graduate Victor Schauberger. After his emigration to America, Wang became involved in the Air Force attempts to figure out the propulsion mechanisms of the crashed discs, work which became an all consum-ing passion. In 1956 the Department of Special Studies was relocated 2,000 miles to Albuquerque so that Wang could work hands-on with the craft recovered from Roswell, Aztec and elsewhere. 
 
Steinman now had the bit between his teeth. On March 23, 1984, he wrote to Mrs Maria Wang, Eric‘s widow, asking if she was able to  provide more details about his work. There was no reply. If attempts had been made to cover up her late    husband‘s existence, Maria Wang had not cooperated. Several years after his death she had endowed the Eric H. Wang Civil Engineering    Research Facility, at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She increased her own profile, becoming a leading light in the Albuquerque Woman‘s Club, which she served for some years as president. When Maria Wang failed to reply to his letter, Steinman picked up the phone one day in May and called her. The conversation went as follows: 
 

WS: My name is William Stein-man. I wrote a letter to you on the 23rd of March in regards to Dr Eric Henry Wang and his work involving analyses on recovered flying saucers, and the attempted duplication of them. 
 
MW: Yes, I do remember the   letter but I no longer have it. 
 
WS: What happened to the letter? 
 
MW: I turned it over to the      authorities. 
 
WS: Which authorities? 
 
MW: Military intelligence at Kirtland Air Force Base. 
 
WS: Can you tell me something about Dr Wang‘s involvement in the flying saucer project? 
 
MW: How did you know that Dr Wang was involved in that kind of work? Why do you want to know about that? Who are you? How do I know that I can trust you? 
 
[Steinman went into a long ex-planation of his interest and his belief in the need for openness. He believed the entire scientific community should be involved in studying the crashed saucers…] 
 
MW: How can I help you? Dr Wang‘s papers were all confis-cated by Military Intelligence when he died. His notes were written in his own unique version of German scientific shorthand. Those papers were placed behind lock and key within a special sealed-off section of a highly  secret section of the Library at Kirtland Air Force Base. 
 
WS: Can you please describe exactly what kind of work Dr Wang was doing on the saucers? 

 
MW: I can‘t tell you over the phone. I don‘t know you at all, and besides, the entire subject is classified above Top-Secret. 
 
WS: Were the saucers made on Earth? And if so, were they origi-nally of German technology? 
 
MW: No! To both questions.   The person you should write to  in government is Dr Henry       Kissinger. He is deeply involved in the Flying Saucer Program. In fact, he was completely in charge of it at the time that Dr Wang was still alive and involved with it. 
 
WS: Can you please write to me in detail describing Dr Wang‘s work with the Flying Saucer  Program? 
 
MW: Give me your address and phone number and I will see what I can do.* 
 
So there we have it, the end of the trail: a sneak peek through the veil to the forbidden zone where one of the most famous power players of the last 50 years – Henry Kissinger – was shown to act in a remarkable role unknown to historians. That is what we have been reduced to in  divining the true outlines of the    secret history of the 20th century –   relying on such things as a chance remark by a 78-year-old                Albuquerque widow whose honesty seems above question. On such  slender threads hangs so much that we should have known. 
 

 
A Look at Henry Kissinger. 
 
The exposure of Kissinger as a    central figure in the cover-up and technical exploitation of recovered discs is yet again a grim reminder of the vast dimension of the problem we are dealing with: the scale and effectiveness of both the conspiracy and the administrative machinery that was put in place to sustain it. Its successful operation required a    control structure that could monitor and manipulate multiple facets of  American society and, by proxy, world society. Its imperatives would      impact on politics, science, commu-nications, the news media,            diplomatic endeavour, military     activity, espionage policy, budgetary practices, academia, and research and development, both public and private. In other words, the        maintenance of =the secret‘ and the technical programme that was its raison d‘être, required a vigilance and broad surveillance that is the closest America has ever come to totalitarianism in peacetime. And yet it was a .soft. totalitarianism, a web of eyes and ears and levers that was, for the most part, camouflaged from its victims by a propaganda coup that persisted not just for decades but for generations. The cover-up and its machinery did not get in the way of happiness and the conduct of        fulfilled lives. Therefore it could never become a visceral political  issue. It was the deception that     millions of Americans knowingly allowed their government to indulge in. It was marginal to their interests. It could be tolerated almost with a nudge and a wink; it looked like a victimless crime. There were many close shaves for the conspirators, many times when UFO activists nearly scored a =Gotcha!. moment. Henry Kissinger once famously said 

that academic disputes were so bitter because the stakes were so low. Americans tolerated their govern-ment‘s indignant protestations of  innocence because the stakes were so low. And yet it can be argued that the cover-up and the activity it shielded represents, in its duration, one of the most ruinous public    policies in American history. 
Springing Henry Kissinger as a   central figure is not so surprising when we look at his background. Kissinger was a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1937 who returned to Europe in 1945 as a sergeant in the United States Army Counter Intelli-gence Corps (CIC). He returned to America in 1947 at the age of 24 and gained entry to Harvard University. Here he dabbled in chemistry and math but then went on to perform distinguished scholarship in philoso-phy, history and government. Dr Kissinger‘s CV headlines a high road that led on to the elitist and   influential Council of Foreign      Relations, public service on    Rockefeller family projects, and  then a professorship in Harvard‘s 

Government Department. In the CV‘s small print were interesting assignments in the secret world; Kissinger not only had a doctorate in his back pocket, but a bulletproof security clearance that proved to be a      passport to the inner sanctum. Until 1949 he continued to serve in the CIC Reserve as a Captain. Within that organisation there existed the baldly named CIC Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) that General Marshall had constituted in March, 1942, and which survived until the late 1950s when its role – investiga-tion of crashed UFOs in situ– was moved elsewhere. Perhaps it was here that Kissinger first became   involved with covert UFO-related   activity. He became a consultant to the Operations Research Office in 1951 (a murky outfit under the con-trol of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), a consultant to the director of the   Psychological Strategy Board in 1952 (a covert arm of the National Security Council) and then to its  successor organisation, the           Operations Coordinating Board until – it seems – 1961. The OCB was re-portedly the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine operations. Among numerous other moonlighting roles was a             consultancy to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint  Chiefs of Staff from 1959-1960. At the height of the Cold War,           advanced alien technology doubtless qualified for description as a         potential .weapons system..All these assignments were concurrent with the Wang period. 
   
And later came Henry‘s career        pinnacle – service as National      Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, firstly under Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford. In these roles he stamped his imprint on world  

affairs like few other diplomats of the 20th century. He became the modern era‘s most famed exponent of diplomatic realpolitik, the practice of international relations as a      muscular, pragmatic exercise rather than one driven by ideals and courtly behaviour. The shrewd balancing of interests and the hard-eyed use of available instruments of power, both open and hidden, to further      America‘s national interest were hallmarks of his style. Kissinger had a mind with the bite of a leghold trap but it also contained a scent of   paranoia and a penumbra of Spenglerian gloom. He had no qualms about reaching out and    pulling secret levers when the    mental clouds gathered. In 1969 when he was National Security    Advisor Kissinger began a creeping barrage of wiretaps on his own staff and others who raised his suspicions. The net reached out to include news-men, and Defense Department and State Department targets. Kissinger pored over the juicy verbatim     transcripts (provided by the FBI) looking for leaks, disloyalty and  useful gossip. In 1973 when the eavesdropping was exposed by the press he moved the blame sideways. An embarrassed Nixon, who had known of the wiretaps, grumbled to an aide: .They never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.. Kissinger spent .a hell of a lot of time on these things. 

he told another interviewer. New York Times‘ columnist, William Safire, one of the wiretap targets, came out of the experience a wiser man. A deeper understanding had come to him, he observed, .when one is lied to by men who are con-vinced that consistent lying can be the right thing for the country.. Two years later Safire‘s paper reported a    Kissinger quip: .The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.. Does this sound like someone who could    participate in history‘s most stifling and scary cover-up? Was there an      éminence grise lurking in the wings from administration to administra-tion recycling the same old spooky stuff to timid new Presidents-Elect? Still, we must not let Henry become the lightning rod for all of our         frustrations merely because his is the only name to have been reliably           implicated in recent times. There were doubtless other establishment Brahmins involved, gray-coiffed   Guardians of the Secret Knowledge dining at the Cosmos Club before their silky conclaves in the Oval   Office.   
 
But of one thing we can be sure – Kissinger‘s appetite for the exercise of power and his popularity with successive Presidents right into    recent times makes him a good    candidate for MJ12‘s Cardinal Emeritus of the 20th century. 

 
 





     Chapter One 
   The Trail That Led To. 



 
SNAPSHOT: Gleason v. Goldwater - Which One Gets to See the Alien? 
 
Secrecy not only breeds corruption and criminality but also – on a lighter note – farce. Where the light of public scrutiny cannot shine lies an existential vaudeville waiting to happen, a place where separating the men from the munchkins may be hard to do and where the yellow brick road can lead to the silliest of destinations. 
 
Take, for example, the contrasting fortunes of two UFO buffs – sitcom comedian Jackie Gleason and politician Barry Goldwater. Both were keen to get to the bottom of the mystery and find out what lay behind the wall of secrecy that the US government had erected. 
 
You.d think that Goldwater, of all people, deserved to know the truth. He had served his country in the Second World War as a pilot. Remaining in the Air Force Reserve for decades afterwards, he eventually retired with the rank of Major General having flown 165 different types of aircraft. He was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party.s candidate for President in the 1964 election. Goldwater, who died in 1998, was an honourable man with a solid family life and a widely respected record of achievement and principled behaviour on Capitol Hill. By any standard, Barry Morris Goldwater stood in the front rank of American citizenship and leadership in the 20th century.  
 
In the early1960s after he had served in the Senate for a decade Goldwater telephoned his friend, General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the USAF, to ask a special favour. He sought access to the “Blue Room” at Wright Patterson Air Force Base which was       reputed to house preserved alien bodies and other recovered     extraterrestrial artifacts. In 1994 Goldwater reflected on his UFO beliefs and the LeMay phone call in an interview with Larry King that ran on CNN.  
 
“I think the government does know,” he told King. “I can.t back that up. But I think that at Wright-Patterson Field if you could get into certain places, you.d find out what the Air Force and the government does know about UFOs. Reportedly, a spaceship landed. It was all hushed up.... I called Curtis LeMay and I said, „General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Could I go in there?. I.ve never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out, and said, „Don.t ever ask me that question again!. 
 
Clearly, Goldwater had not made it into the Blue Room at the time of the Larry King interview (when he was 85) – this despite the fact that for the last 20 years of his time in the Senate, Goldwater had specialized in defense policy. 
 
By contrast, Jackie Gleason put in no public service apart from moonlighting as an official “contact” for the FBI Miami office. He was a hard-drinking bon vivant whose career as a        comedian, actor and musician spanned 40 years. The long running TV series that cemented his place in American popular culture was “The Honeymooners”, which ran through the 1950s and 1960s. In this, he portrayed a character called Ralph Kramden whose brashness would serve as a template for many of Gleason.s other television, film and stage roles. He spent the latter part of his life living in Florida where he formed a close friendship with President Richard Nixon. The two played golf together and socialised when Nixon took breaks from the White House at his home at Key Biscayne. 
 
In February 1973 the President took his entourage to Florida. White House records show that he hung out with Gleason at the Inverness Golf and Country Club where he had come to open 

a charity tournament run by the comedian. Gleason told others later that both he and Nixon shared a close interest in UFOs. Gleason.s interest was more like an obsession – he had a vast library on the subject and had built a home in Peekskill, New York, where much of the         furniture had been manufactured in circular shapes to mimic flying saucers, including the    garage. 
 
At the golf tournament, Gleason and Nixon played a round together and the subject of UFOs came up again at about the 15th hole. A Gleason acquaintance, former USAF airman Larry  Warren, was told what happened some hours after drinks with Nixon concluded in the club house. Mark down the date February 19, 1973, as yet another day in the career of Richard   Milhous Nixon which demonstrated his unique ability to move from banality to burlesque with as much comedic ease as his portly golfing buddy. 
 
Around midnight, Gleason and his wife at the time, Beverly McKittrick, answered a ring on their doorbell. It was Nixon. “He was all alone for a change. There were no Secret Service agents with him or anyone else,” Gleason told Warren. Nixon invited Gleason to get into the car        because he wanted to take him somewhere to show him something. Perhaps Nixon had seen his friend star in the musical, “Take Me Along” in 1959. In any case, he had come to take Gleason along on the journey of a lifetime. The two sped off in Nixon.s private car to Homestead Air Force Base 25 miles away. This was where Air Force One always landed when it brought the President to Florida. “I remember we got to the gate and this young MP came up to the car to look to see inside and his jaw seemed to drop a foot when he saw who was behind the wheel. He just sort of pointed and we headed off. We drove to the very far end of the base in a segregated area finally stopping near a well guarded building. The security police saw us coming and just sort of moved back as we passed them and entered the structure.” Inside Nixon showed     Gleason the wreckage from a flying saucer enclosed in several large cases. “Next we went into an inner chamber and there were six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers,” recounted Gleason. Inside these were the mangled remains of small aliens, of the Gray type. When Nixon dropped his friend home later, McKittrick found her husband badly shaken, she later revealed to friends. Gleason told Warren that for three weeks after the visit to Homestead he had trouble sleeping. 
 
This is the tawdry vaudeville waiting to happen inside the chamber of secrets, a place where a decent US Senator cannot make it to first base in the quest for the truth while a five-pack-a-day comedian with a Rob Roy cocktail in his hand schmoozes his way to a home run. 





Those who are historically minded will be hoping that somewhere in the American bureauc-racy there are researchers who have been tasked with the writing of the 20th century‘s hidden history.       Perhaps a team of Daniel Ellsbergs with let-me-pass red cards in their hatbands combing the classified   filing cabinets, doing the oral       interviewing, brainstorming,       mind-mapping, and distilling it all into incisive prose for archivists of the 21st, 22nd and 23rd centuries.  
But it‘s doubtful. The unadmitted will all too easily become the       unrecorded. In the 2,500 years of  recorded history since Herodotus picked up his quill and began scratching away at his history of the Greco-Persian Wars this blank space in humanity‘s narrative is likely to   become the greatest tragedy of     historiography that will ever occur. The gravitational pull of this black hole in mankind‘s story has already seen thousands of riveting accounts sucked into the grave untold with no diary entries left for a nosy posterity. Oaths of secrecy and fear of reprisal have brought about a genocide of primary sources. And who knows how many seminal documents have been gutted; ultra vires episodes passed through the shredder with a nervous look over the shoulder. 
There‘s a good precedent for a secret .internal. history on a touchy matter carried out for high-minded          historical purposes – the Pentagon Papers, which a small task force in the Defense Department completed in mid-1969 after a concentrated 18-month effort. This study of the faulty 

decision-making that led to      America‘s involvement in Vietnam consisted of 47 volumes: about 7,000 pages in total, including 3,000 pages of narrative and some 4,000 pages of appendices. It was classified         Top-Secret and only 15 copies were made, one of which was leaked to the New York Times and other   newspapers in 1971. The Pentagon Papers is a good template that needs to be followed for the UFO cover-up – right down to the denouement in the world press.   
 The right man to do the stylish  overview would doubtless be Henry Kissinger himself, a key player and a sharp thinker. His Harvard doctoral thesis, books and articles            demonstrate a voluminous mind with a philosophical depth and pitch-perfect feel for power and its chords that make for pleasurable reading. What we would give for a tell-all tale from the twilight zone complete with trademark Rococo flourishes and nimble epigrams. Let us hope that in addition to his three volumes of   autobiography the man has had the good sense to pen a magisterial    account of the untold story.  
Regardless of who writes this     magnum opus, let us hope that it   answers the following questions:  
When the strategic advantage of beating the Russians to alien-derived technology faded after the Cold War why wasn‘t the whole thing          disclosed? 
Was an agreement concluded with the Grays that traded off their     technology for a green light on    

covert operations in the American     hinterland? 
If so, what was the Constitutional basis for this arrangement?  
With the molestations largely      confined to the mainland USA, did the deal with the Grays change from favorable to Faustian? 
Did the enticement of novel new technology result in a lop-sided    dialogue with interlopers whose physiology, culture and intentions were unprofitable to planetary      interests? 
Why weren‘t favorable protective agreements put in place with       contactee-type visitors whose       cultural compatibility and             benevolent communications were more attuned to Earth‘s interests? 
Is the conduct of concealed           diplomacy more likely to lead to positive outcomes than arrangements subject to legislative and public  scrutiny? 
If so, what is the historical evidence to support this contention? 
With disclosure so long delayed, does its execution become increas-ingly impractical the more extensive and intensive the alien interaction       and technological exploitation      become? In other words, is the story now so big that its disclosure is    unmanageable? 
Heads in the Sand 
With the nuts-and-bolts evidence squirreled away behind barbed wire, millions of people still saw through the cover-up. Opinion polls         confirmed that a big slice of the American public did not believe their government. The circumstantial evidence and hearsay reports were 

too convincing. Besides, thousands had seen their own UFOs so they knew that the disclaimers could be      discarded. 
What protected the conspirators from overthrow was not just their        concealment of the evidence but the timidity of the scientific community and its reluctance to question the 20th century‘s hot new paradigm – the Theory of Relativity. Einsteinian physics was still oven-fresh when the modern flying saucer era began and no one had an alternative recipe that could explain how the aliens got here. Therefore they weren‘t here. 
Newtonian physics had lasted for more than 230 years before          Einstein‘s General Theory displaced it. After Newton, science had had time to adapt and thrive, to coalesce harmoniously around a new frame-work. Orderly structures of learning and career progression had been put in place. An even longer era of   tranquility – nearly 2,000 years – had occurred between Aristotle‘s doctrines and Sir Isaac‘s Annus  Mirabilis in 1666.  
 

Scientific historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn has unwittingly     provided a framework for under-standing the UFO dilemma in his ground-breaking work, .The    Structure of Scientific Revolutions. published in 1962. This book has sold more than one million copies in 16 languages and offers a made-to-measure tout ensemble for the    problem. .Normal science. will  generally sideline .counter-instance. or anomaly because of its disruptive effect on the profession, he wrote. Research is not about discovering the unknown, but rather .a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.. Dominating the scientist‘s response is the .educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for profes-sional practice.. Because of this      in-built inertia, science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge but a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectu-ally violent revolutions when a new scientific .paradigm. triumphs.  
Einstein‘s theory of Special       Relativity put in place creation‘s top speed, the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, which no physical object could surpass. Moreover, as it approached this speed, an object‘s mass would balloon out towards   infinity, his equations showed. Therefore, space was virtually      unbridgeable. With our nearby planetary neighbors barren waste-lands extra-terrestrial explorers would have to travel years to reach Earth. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, was four and a half light-years away. ET‘s would have to travel for tens, hundreds,        thousands of years to take a          Hawaiian vacation. Without reliance on exotic articulations like multiple 

dimensions, galactic wormholes and the like, interstellar space travel was inconceivable. Sadly for Albert and the pulpiteers of physics a paradigm-shattering anomaly arrived 33 years after Einstein first promulgated his celestial speed limit: a manned UFO crashed to Earth near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1941. Its quick concealment, and that of    subsequent crashes, was the savior of many sleepless nights in the Halls of Learning. .Normal science. could proceed happily while abnormal   science was delegated to the Eric Wangs of the world. The challenge of nutting out a new theory to       explain propulsions systems that could traverse interstellar space was hereafter to be done in private. 
But Thomas Kuhn‘s lethal .counter-instances. were still out there and still looking ugly – reports of close encounters, pilot sightings, radar confirmations, multiple witness events, photographs. Kuhn said that all crisis was resolved in one of three ways: normal measures that got the profession off the hook (Venus,   

meteors, swamp gas, bogus camera work, alcoholic overindulgence), for the tougher cases =label and leave‘ (more research needed into atmospheric plasma effects, cloud physics not fully understood etc), or, more disastrously, paradigm war breaks out (no, we‘re not going there, we‘ve only just got here!). Joe Bloggs could see that flying saucers were the real deal, it was just      commonsense, but Professor Bloggs tied himself in knots. 
The profession‘s prestigious journal, .Science., published a circle-the-wagons article in September 1967 entitled .The Physics and          Metaphysics of Unidentified Flying Objects: Reported UFO‘s cannot be under extraterrestrial control if the laws of Physics are valid.. Valiant wagon train captain was William Markovitz, professor of physics at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In five and a half pages of tightly argued orthodoxy,     Markovitz loosed off round after round into the tumbleweed of    Ufology. A clever dime-in-the-air shot proved that there never had been any high quality UFO sightings at all. At the end of the fusillade,  science‘s Holy Writ stood             unvanquished: .UFO‘s are not under extraterrestrial control. he          concluded, and .the laws of physics do not need revision to                  accommodate UFO sightings.. Whew. The paradigm stood intact. The arguments presented by     Markovitz were indisputable within the context of known physics;      text-book stuff that would confirm tenure at any self-respecting univer-sity. But then the good professor made his only serious misstep, he strayed into matters of strategy and politics, for which Einstein had    offered no guidance. .In regard to 

secrecy. he concluded, blowing smoke out of the still hot barrels, .the charge that the U.S. Air Force is withholding information that UFO‘s are extraterrestrial is absurd.. He squinted towards the article‘s sunset. .The prestige of announcing the   existence of extraterrestrial beings would be so great that no scientist, journalist, politician, or government – whether of the United States,   England, France, the U.S.S.R., or China – would hesitate for a moment to release the news. It could not be kept a secret.. Twirl of pistols and then back into the holster. 
Lest anyone think our erstwhile   Science contributor has been        satirized here, spare a thought for the thousands of UFO witnesses and  believers who have been ribbed and ridiculed over the decades. It takes courage to question orthodoxy not defend it. 
The Condon Committee Tragedy 
The final nail in the coffin of serious scientific interest in UFOs was the University of Colorado study into UFOs which ran from 1967-1968. The negative conclusions that this investigation reached made it well nigh impossible for scientists to   obtain funding or approval for       serious work in the field for the next 40 years. It was like the Vatican findings against Galileo in 1633 which shut down serious scientific discussion of heliocentrism for    generations. The Church used capital punishment to enforce obedience to the required canon; American       science enforced obedience with the tacit threat of professional ruin. Here and there a courageous individual bucked the trend* but generally the subject became a .no-go. zone for 

the rest of the 20th century and      beyond. Serious work in the field was devolved to the layman, where it had sat comfortably in any case since 1947. Public UFO studies would be the first instance in the modern era where the bulk of the cutting edge scientific work – observation and data recording – was carried out  outside the profession. 
The Colorado study was funded by the U.S. Air Force as a reluctant   response to heavy congressional pressure by, among others,          Representative (and later President) Gerald Ford, of Michigan. Michigan had been the subject of a UFO flap which started in 1964 and continued into 1966, attracting headlines all round the world because of           numerous close encounter sightings of clearly mechanical objects by scores of reliable witnesses (including 12 law enforcement     officers). To quell public concern not so much at the sightings themselves but at the ludicrous and facile       explanations that were offered by the Air Force, a government sponsored university study was announced in mid-1966.  
The Air Force sounded out a number of universities but had difficulty finding a taker for the contract. It has always been assumed that this was because of the leprous odor that clung to the subject of flying sau-cers, but we may have been doing academia a disservice. Their         reluctance may have been due to a sense of honor rather than disdain. Twenty two years after the USAF hunt for a contractor, came a reliable report that a confidential condition of the UFO study contract was that the conclusions to be reached had to be negative.  
In April 1988, author Whitley    Strieber spoke before an audience at 

the University of Colorado. He was introduced by Dr Walter Orr       Roberts, President Emeritus of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Roberts, 73-years-old at the time, had founded the richly funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado, in 1960, which was an arms-length affiliate of the university. He was one of the first scientists to warn that technology was changing Earth‘s climate. It is a matter of public record that in 1966 NCAR had been approached by the Air Force to carry out the UFO study after Harvard, MIT, the University of North Carolina and the University of California had turned the job down. Strieber found his venerable master of ceremonies at the       Colorado gathering to be .an      open-minded and very fair man.. He asked him why he had refused the Air Force request in 1966. Roberts responded .that he had done it      because he was told at the outset that the project was intended to draw the conclusion that there is nothing in the UFO controversy, and he did not feel comfortable with the fact that public claims were being made that the study was impartial..  
A few weeks after Roberts turned the Air Force down (citing pressure of other commitments), they found a willing taker in the Physics           Department at Colorado University. Professor Dr Edward U. Condon agreed to take the job on. He would be the project director and chief   scientist. Condon was a nuclear physicist with a distinguished track record in research, invention and government service. He had         participated in the wartime         Manhattan Project and served a six-year stint as director of the National Bureau of Standards from 1945-1951.  

There is a 50:50 chance that Condon was party to the hidden world of crashed UFOs and the government reverse-engineering programme.   He was appointed to the board of        the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the         predecessor of NASA, in 1946,    and resigned when he departed the Bureau of Standards. We know from an authentic looking .Majestic.     document leaked in 1996 that NACA had been one of the agencies enlisted to help in the assessment of          recovered debris from the Roswell UFO crash in July 1947. Would the NACA board have been informed of staff involvement in this peculiar business? Probably. The NACA chairman was Dr Jerome Hunsaker, of MIT, who was present eight months after Roswell at the recovery of the crashed disc near Aztec, New Mexico. People all around Condon were involved in this thing. Further tentative confirmation that he was part of the .in. crowd surfaced in February 1991. California researcher Tim Cooper interviewed a retired 

Air Force colonel who was in a key position to know the secret UFO  developments in the post-war period. The colonel spoke convincingly about a wide spectrum of the secret activity that went on, including the technical exploitation of the          recovered discs in the early days. Cooper asked him, .Who was in charge of the scientific research?. The reply: .Von Braun, Condon, Oppenheimer and Teller..  
There is a point at which cynical  behavior and deceit reach such  pro-found depths that, for the victims reviewing it in retrospect, the whole thing causes sadness and even  physical distress. This nadir in the UFO timeline was probably reached on October 7, 1966, when Secretary of the Air Force, Harold Brown,   announced the appointment of    Condon and his team to do the job. Brown announced that all .UFO  information in the possession of the Air Force will be made available to the team.. By a conservative      reckoning, the United States military had in its possession at that time 8-9 recovered alien craft and a large number of bodies. The combined efforts of US researchers Ryan Woods and the late Leonard    Stringfield suggest that that the    actual number of craft or crashed wrecks could have surpassed 20. A sinister turn of events had also      become apparent by the time the Condon Committee swung into    action in 1967. The alien craft being worked over by the Air Force in   private now included intact vehicles in perfect running order rather than damaged wrecks. Simultaneously, evidence of disturbing night-time activity by the Grays in rural areas in central and southern USA began to proliferate. A Byzantine set of   processes was now under way – in 
public view a simpleton‘s study of =lights in the sky‘ with a stacked set of cards, in private an opaque and frightening official intrigue with a reciprocal feel about it. 
It is not profitable to revisit the     history of the Condon Committee‘s work here. Suffice it to say that many, indeed most, of the 20 scientists and staff members who participated in the project‘s work came to disagree with Condon‘s negative attitude towards the       phenomenon which began to show itself almost immediately. Within three months of the project‘s        initiation Condon told an audience of two science societies, in New York, on 25 January 1967 that UFO‘s .are not the business of the Air Force.. Condon was doing his devious work well. He added, .it is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there‘s nothing to it.. Condon gave a wink and a smile, .but I‘m not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year.. Staff noticed that he was not interested in the more impressive reports that came through the door, such as visual-radar sightings, but took delight in joking about the crackpot cases. Six months after his New York talk he was back in the city again spending the weekend at a Congress of Scientific Ufologists, an expo of colorful flying saucer     characters at the Commodore Hotel. He drew on this fun experience to entertain his audience at the          National Bureau of Standards, in Washington D.C., in September when he appeared as an after-dinner speaker at a bureau get-together.  The diners expected a serious       account of the work going on at Colorado on which all eyes were  focused, but Condon spent his     

time talking about three crackpot cases.  
Resignations and sackings roiled the project. To draft the conclusions of the $500,000 study, Condon shut himself away from the rest of the team. When the report was released it was a total demolition of the UFO phenomenon. .Our general          conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Condon advised. .Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." The new Air Force Secretary, Robert Seamans, Jr, moved quickly to support Condon. As hundreds of his scientists and  engineers pored over the hidden   flying saucers at bases in New   Mexico, Nevada and Texas,        Seamens stated that there was .no evidence. that the UFO reports .represented advanced technology or might be vehicles from another world.. He announced the closure of the long-running, three-man PR front on UFOs, Project Blue Book. It was   being shut down, Seamens said with a straight face, because further   funding "cannot be justified either on the grounds of national security or in the interest of science." Where     before there had been at least the pretence of official government    interest in UFOs, now the public were pushed out into the cold. They were on their own. No one was    interested in their plight should they suffer the trauma of a close           encounter. There was .no evidence. to support their experience, whether it had occurred in the past or would occur in the future. The citizens of America, whose welfare was the 

government‘s overriding mission, were consigned to a cruel isolation. 
Gamboling with the Gullible 
But there were rewards: the        paradigm had been restated; the   secrecy of the technical studies had been protected; the Russians had been put off the scent. The UFO   infection had been quarantined from open science until such leisurely time in the future as the government decided that disclosure was          appropriate.  
Over the next four decades not even astronomy‘s sensational discovery of numerous exoplanets (more than 500 at last count) and the realization that a substantial fraction of stars had planetary systems, could rehabilitate the study of UFOs. With the     planetary count rising every month, ET now had a place to live but    Einstein‘s equations still marooned him (and us) in hopeless isolation. A knowing public resigned themselves to acceptance of the official line;   the more gullible still found     stimulation in portraying Earth as     a cosmological cul-de-sac.     
One typical example was an article published in .Time. magazine on March 28, 2011 by science and space writer Jeffrey Kluger. It      appeared in a feature entitled, .The 10 Ideas That Will Change the World – For the Better.. Kluger‘s contribution was hardly a new idea. It was headlined, .Relax: You Don't Need to Worry About Meeting E.T.. and was aimed at disabusing UFO hopefuls of their unscientific      cravings. The chances of Earth being visited was microscopically small because of Einstein‘s red line on the speedo, Kluger argued, and because of the low odds of other-wordly life developing anywhere. For those with 

an expectation that one day we might be visited, he was dismissive: Too bad – or maybe very good – you‘re never going to see them.. 
 
Outside the hidden UFO programme, science only condoned practical steps to contact aliens of a type that lay within the paradigm, namely the Search for Extraterrestrial             Intelligence (SETI) programme    using radio telescopes to listen for signals from space. SETI allowed scientists to appear open-minded  and trendy but still toe the line:    interstellar space travel was    achievable but only if you happened to be an electromagnetic wave or a photon of light. It was Ufology in top hat and tails. SETI was .nowhere near as fringy as belief in UFOs. wrote Skeptics Society bigwig,     Michael Shermer, in 2002. .In a way, SETI is elitist, UFOs populist; SETI is highbrow, UFOs are low-brow; SETI is dominated by Ph.D. astronomers, physicists, and mathe-maticians, UFOs are predominantly the domain of non-credentialed  amateurs..  
 
Since SETI began in 1960, a total of approximately US$100 million has been spent on this activity in    America, drawn from both public and private funding sources. The  numerous sincere scientists involved in SETI cannot be blamed for the official deception that has allowed their work to proceed for 50 years uninformed by conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence    buzzing round the skies above their radio telescope arrays. In its cynical tolerance of – and occasional     funding support for – the SETI    programme, the US government has created some of the saddest victims of the cover-up, those who            established, staffed and funded the 

initiative in good faith. Viewed on its own terms as a blank-page       scientific investigation with the  prospect of advancing human  knowledge, the SETI programme stands uncompromised. Drake‘s equation and the stimulating debate around the likely incidence of       intelligent life in the cosmos remain valid. However, if the proven       evidence for ET activity closer to home had been known in the 1950s it seems highly unlikely that SETI would have got off the ground. When the UFO cover-up ends, the policy justification for the            conspiracy‘s marathon duration will need to be potent in order to justify the waste in human and financial  resources that SETI represents. And yet regardless of the suppression of the evidence, there were still      thousands of citizens and scientists who could see that the circumstantial evidence presented by the UFO   phenomenon made SETI a highly arguable proposition. That the     project persisted despite this shadow of misgiving is attributable to the toxic atmosphere that science created around the subject of UFOs and the phenomenon‘s exclusion from     consideration.  
    
Galileo‘s victimisation in the 17th century for saying that the Earth   revolved around the sun rather than vice versa was the most famous case of scientific suppression until its consummate eclipse in the 20th    century with the ridicule of UFOs. The triumph of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and the legal prohibition of Mendelian     genetics was a good dummy run for for the sponsors of anti-science. It was a communist-style precursor to an equally effective but less         draconian style of sanction against aberrant behavior in the West.    

Galileo was threatened with burning at the stake, Lysenko‘s opponents were thrown in jail, but in the    western democracies conformity on the UFO question was enforced through the carrots of tenure,     funding and publication, and the stick of professional humiliation. After Galileo‘s death the Catholic Church was able to hold the line on heliocentrism for a hundred years. The UFO rejection is 70 years and counting. When it ends it may be the first time in the history of science that an upheaval has toppled a belief system from the bottom up rather than the top down. Science will take generations to recover from its    negligence and culpability. 
The Cost of The Lid 
With the fire put out, the government could devote itself to stamping out the embers – monitoring or           discrediting any of Shermer‘s     .non-credentialed amateurs. who strayed too close to the truth. The machinery of surveillance and      disinformation had been perfected in the 1950s and would roll on decade after decade. Usually it was harmless sort of stuff – wiretaps, black bag jobs, hidden microphones, tracking devices – but occasionally it passed from the merely illegal to the    criminal. On the benign end of the spectrum, were such things as the telephone taps on NICAP (.We were tapped, yes, in fact I‘m sure my home phone was. recalled Dick Hall, assistant director from 1958-1967), and the group‘s penetration by undercover types who brought about its demise. On the malign end of the spectrum were vile episodes by spooks who acted as if they were untouchable. When the chips were down, the cover-up‘s enforcers     displayed a freedom from restraint that suggested an open-ended      warrant existed, one that stood above constitutional checks.  

Take for example, the =Ray Thomas Affair‘, an explosive Bourne Identity-type detonation that entangled   Tucson‘s APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation) in July and August 1980. This bizarre ruckus, which was extensively researched by investigator Wendelle Stevens,     began with an innocent phone call to APRO from a former US marine, Ray Thomas, living in Las Vegas, who gave details about a possible UFO crash retrieval incident he had been involved in 13 years before. The call was apparently tapped and the authorities swung into action. A cinematic scenario was played out over the next few weeks with a     revolving cast of characters –     Thomas, police officers, undercover agents, AEC workers, casino card dealers and bewildered APRO staffers who were caught way out of their depth. In the escapade reported by Stevens, it appeared that MJ12 had met their match: =black bag‘  intruders were caught on camera, handguns were pulled, government 
agents were handcuffed to a sofa, identities expunged, police inquiries overridden, and a fugitive trail      unwound that led all the way to a lethal denouement in west Florida. In the final scene, on a beach road at Singing Sands, a young woman, an innocent party caught up in the plot, was apparently deliberately side-swiped as an act of intimidation. Her small Volkswagen flipped, throwing her out and then landing on her, killing her instantly. Without the  fatal mishap one could have  observed coolly that all that was missing from this hectic screenplay was Matt Damon leaping from a         skyscraper to fight another day. But there was no happy ending; Stevens‘ research seems calm and meticulous; by all accounts a precious life was snuffed out for the phoniest of      reasons; collateral damage. Even the shortened version of this affair stretches for eight riveting pages but it‘s enough to leave a sick feeling in the stomach for anyone with an    attachment to the rule of law and the idea of government as a benevolent force. 
 
The civil rights abuses that caught the headlines when the Nixon era wiretaps and dirty tricks were       exposed, led to decisive               congressional action. In January 1975, in the first in-depth inquiry into the domestic activities of the intelligence community since the end of the Second World War, a special Senate committee, chaired by Frank Church, began a 12-month            investigation. Operating in a rare show of purposeful, bipartisan     harmony the 11-man committee and its investigative staff dug deep to scoop out all the rotten apples and fumigate the barrel for the future. They held 126 full committee meet-ings and scores of subcommittee 
meetings. Some 800 witnesses were examined, yielding 30,000 pages of transcript. Approximately 10,000 document pages were obtained from intelligence agencies. No corner of the secret bureaucracy seemed to escape examination. Even J.Edgar Hoover‘s sleaze files were            unearthed. But still, MJ12 flew     below the radar. The committee‘s 400-page summary issued in April 1976, .Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. gave a sweeping account of the abuses of the past and laid out recommenda-tions for the future.  
.The root cause of the excesses which our record amply              demonstrates. wrote Church in the report‘s letter of transmittal, .has been the failure to apply the wisdom of the constitutional system of checks and balances to intelligence activities. Our experience as a nation has taught us that we must place our trust in laws, and not solely in men. The founding fathers foresaw excess as the inevitable consequence of granting any part of government   unchecked power.. 
There is no mention of the UFO crowd in the Report‘s long list of domestic interest groups who had 

been unfairly targeted. Perhaps this was because the Air Force got off very lightly when Church and his team ran their magnifying glass over the intelligence community. The  obvious targets, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Army intelligence were given a hiding, but the commissars of the cover-up stood safely in the margins, untroubled by the Senate dragnet.  
Without public, legislative or       judicial accountability MJ-12 (also known apparently by other        monikers, .the Special Committee. .the Committee. .the Special Group. .the Special Studies Group. the  .54-12 committee. etc) had a blank check to write policy on alien affairs in consultation with Presidents hard-pressed by other  issues of the day. This autocratic  approach on such an immense issue was a sweeping rejection of the    tenets of America‘s constitutional democracy. Its off-balance-sheet  expedience bordered on profanity when compared with the idealistic        sentiments of the founding fathers that Frank Church had mentioned. Thomas Jefferson had staked out a position that Presidents 150 years later decided was rendered obsolete by special circumstances. "I know no safe depository of the ultimate   powers of the society but the people themselves. Jefferson had written, .and if we think them not       enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true       corrective of abuses of constitutional power."  
Jefferson‘s highfalutin ideas were outmoded and unworkable in the considered opinion of a series of post-war American Presidents. 





     Chapter Two 
   Perfect Marriage —  
      Conspiracy Meets Conservatism. 



Question: What happens when four of the world.s smartest physicists get together for a talk about flying saucers and only one of them knows about the cover-up? 
Answer: The odd-man-out sticks with the paradigm and bulls his way through the session. 
That.s what happened at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, in the summer   of 1950 in a delightful pas de quatre that involved Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil           Konopinski and Herbert York. The exchange over lunch was initiated by Nobel laureate Fermi.s curiosity about the wave of UFO sightings occurring across America. Fermi was   visiting from his home in Chicago for a catch-up on the latest nuclear developments when he and Teller, the “father” of the H-bomb, and the two others headed off to get a bite to eat.  
Teller had been pulled into the UFO programme after the crash recoveries in New Mexico in the late 1940s and, by reliable       accounts, would remain involved until the 1990s. All the others had top security clearance but not “need to know”. 
On the walk to Fuller Lodge, Fermi wondered aloud at the flying saucer reports. He asked Teller, “Edward, what do you think? How probable is it that within the next ten years we shall have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than light?” Teller knew that 50 miles away at Kirtland Air Force Base were recovered craft that might well have had that capability. Teller replied, “10 to the power of minus 6.” In other words, hopelessly unlikely. “This is much too low,” replied Fermi. “The probability  is more like ten per cent.” 
Over lunch the discussion continued. In a reminiscence written in 1984 Teller followed the party line, remembering that the conclusion about the origin of the flying saucers was “purely negative” in relation to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. At the lunch table              Konopinski mentioned a recent cartoon he had seen in the “New Yorker” magazine           explaining why public trash cans were disappearing from the streets of New York City –  they were being stolen by “little green men”. Fermi joked that this was a very reasonable theory since it neatly accounted for the two phenomena, disappearing trash cans and      flying saucer sightings. Discussion ensued about whether the saucers could somehow     exceed the speed of light, and then conversation moved on to other matters. Suddenly, Fermi broke in with the exclamation: “Where is everybody?” The others burst into laughter knowing that the modest and likable Italian was harking back to the earlier conversation.  
Fermi then embarked on a series of mental calculations on the probability of Earth-like planets, the probability of intelligent life on those, and the likely rise and duration of high technology. “He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been   visited long ago and many times over,” recalled Herbert York. 
With no help from his good friend Teller, Fermi was not going to have his suspicions       confirmed.   




 
SNAPSHOT:  Was Technology Stolen from the Saucers?  
 
Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman set the cat among the pigeons when he wondered aloud in 1996 if the invention of the transistor had resulted from hardware collected at the Roswell crash in July 1947.  
 
Friedman, one of the most respected and thorough researchers in the UFO field, pointed to some suspicious smoke, if not fire, around the invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, in December 1947. UFO buffs were aware that the military had expended  massive resources on reverse-engineering propulsion methods but Friedman.s chin-stroking was the first time anyone had dropped a hint about other purloined inventions.  
 
Some impressive accounts of the invention of the transistor and the path that led to the    current digital age have been published since Friedman lobbed his high shot over the net.     A careful reading of them suggests that the return ball can be played with relative ease: the  invention by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of the first functioning transistor was the  outcome of incremental work over several years by the two (and by earlier „interim stage.    pioneers) which has been carefully documented. There appear to be no sudden or suspicious points of acceleration in the development programme that led to the crucial invention that made the computer age possible.  
 
After that, the race was on to see who could miniaturize and optimize the transistor and then produce its obvious follow-up, the single-slice silicon integrated circuit. By late 1958 both of these contests had been won by an outsider, Texas Instruments, of Dallas, with crucial      fine-tuning by another dark horse, Fairchild Semiconductor, of California, who provided the architectural tools for the modern computer chip.  
 
Colonel Philip Corso has asserted that the integrated circuit chip came out of Roswell but, again, there is no persuasive evidence. After the transistor there was an obvious line of   dominoes stretching ahead and it is no surprise that these fell, one after the other, through the prolific creativity of American tech firms intent on grabbing their share of the next big thing. There appear to be no inexplicable quantum leaps in the fevered work that led on to  the advent of the modern computer. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the invention [of the silicon integrated circuit] hadn.t arisen at Fairchild, it would have arisen elsewhere in the very near future,” wrote Fairchild.s inventive boffin, Robert Noyce. “It was an idea whose time had come, where the technology had developed to the point where it was viable.” 
 
What did look a little like ET-inspired initiatives were US Navy and Army projects in the 1950s – “Tinkertoy” and “Micro Module” – which were clunky attempts at circuit            miniaturization. These small cubic modules – wafers of circuits bundled together – were quickly rendered obsolete by Noyce.s integrated circuit. They were about as good as it got for journeymen trying to mimic the Roswell material with screwdriver-and-soldering-iron       technology. Eye-opening micro-circuitry etched into monolithic substrates was discovered by the Army at both the 1941 Missouri UFO crash site and at Roswell. Corso, who headed up  the Army.s Foreign Technology desk in Army R & D at the Pentagon from 1961-1963,         examined wafers from Roswell that had microscopic gridlines etched into them. He said that he had discussed these fascinating items with Project Paperclip émigrés, Herman Oberth, Wernher von Braun and Heinz Koelle. But in the end it was the private sector rather than   the government who came up with the goods.  
 
In his gutsy 1997 reminiscence, “The Day After Roswell,” Corso, who also worked on the White House National Security Council staff from 1953-1957, made a better case for other  

notable inventions having flowed, in part, from nuts and bolts collected at UFO crash sites – the laser, fibre optics, super tenacity fibres, night vision technology and radar-proof composite skins such as those used on America.s Stealth bomber. He stated that he had personally handled some of the flying saucer componentry that hinted at these technologies, or read file notes about them. In two cases, night vision and fibre optics, Corso maintains that he fed material directly into existing development programmes to give them a nudge along. The bespectacled Pennsylvanian, who died in 1998, says that he worked closely with Lt General Arthur Trudeau, Director of Army R & D, on the      undercover sleight-of-hand to insinuate alien gizmos (from what he called his „Nut file.)   into the stream of development.  
 
“Nothing is ever out of the ordinary because we.re never starting up anything that      hasn.t already been started up in a previous contract,” Corso says he told his              enthusiastic boss. “…We.ll let the companies we.re contracting with apply for the patent themselves.” 
 
“If they own the patent,” Trudeau replied happily, “we will have completely reverse-engineered the technology.” 
 
Corso.s book made waves not only because of its controversial claims but also because its foreword was written by long time US Senator and Armed Services Committee     member, Strom Thurmond. Thurmond, like Corso, was a trenchant right winger and the two had become friends during the reds-under-the-bed ructions of the1950s. Thurmond employed the diminutive World War II vet (North Africa and Italy) as an aide after his   retirement from the army. He wrote of Corso: “We should all be grateful that there are men and women like Colonel Corso – people who are willing to dedicate their lives to serving the nation and protecting the ideals we all hold dear – and we should honour the sacrifices they have made in their careers and in their lives.” 
 
Perhaps Barack Obama got wind of a lot of iffy R & D when he entered the White House in 2009.  Early on in his presidency he released an interesting policy statement, titled “Scientific Integrity,” that implied, in veiled language, that the practitioners of secret    science needed to watch their step. 
 
“Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions,” he announced. “If scientific and technological information is developed  and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the    public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the            preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in        policymaking.”   
 
Obama called on government agencies to put in place “procedures to identify and        address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and      technological information may be compromised.” Each agency was asked to implement appropriate whistleblower protections to “ensure the integrity of scientific and           technological information and processes…” 
 
With backing like that perhaps more Philip Corso.s will speak out.  




T hat the flying saucer age had started under the shadow of war and then deadly superpower rivalry meant that that the eureka moment in mankind‘s history would be distorted by military imperatives. A            millenarian event which had the power to be exponentially enlarging for cultural horizons was funnelled through the narrow aperture of  weapons policy. Thomas Jefferson had spoken but Hiram Maxim had triumphed.  
In a unique policy response, Earth had managed to miniaturize a       colossus. This sordid reductionism brings us face to face with what we are. We need to change if we are ever to be worthy of travel in space; it is best that Einstein‘s speed limit proves insurmountable than Earth export such a mentality to other parts of the galaxy. But the concealment 

was not America‘s alone. The Soviet Union had known about its           adversary‘s reverse-engineering   programme since 1948, and by 1990 had recovered at least five alien craft of its own. This was revealed during the glasnost period in 1990 by    celebrated Soviet fighter plane test pilot, Colonel Marina Popovich. Popovich had contacts right at the top of the Soviet space programme (her former husband had been a   cosmonaut) and she was able to name the locations where the crashed UFOs had been recovered. So the policy of official denial had existed in the communist world with almost the same effectiveness as in the West. 


The Contactee Cases 
A fearful suppressive reaction might have been understandable if the aliens encountered in the 1940s and 1950s had all been highly exotic forms who offered no easy relation-ship physically, linguistically,      culturally or spiritually. But it       became clear early in the piece that some visits were occurring by people who looked similar or identical to humans. Some had even taken the trouble to learn our languages. More than that – and what a blessing – they offered a range of friendly and useful advice and, on occasions, even spoke of undercover work they had been doing to head off           man-made environmental problems. It would have taken just a fraction of the cost of the millions being spent on technology exploitation for     government officials to have         authenticated and further developed these contacts. All the undercover 

eavesdroppers and disinformation cleverdicks could have been more fruitfully employed pursuing a whole host of tantalising leads rather than fabricating a climate of ridicule that discouraged their reporting. The government-sponsored propaganda campaign was a blunt instrument that not only camouflaged secret projects, it also choked off opportu-nities for a healthier multilateral   dialogue. An extensive diplomacy might have evolved in which Earth‘s interests were advanced rather than jeopardized. Relationships could have been formed in which the     leverage offered by cooperation,  assistance and amity could have been used to moderate or terminate the less agreeable activities of other visitors: in other words, the          application of good, old fashioned diplomacy. A grande entente could have been pursued, a policy of safety in numbers, at the same time that the administration was being              arm-twisted into an entente réticent with one group of visitors. But no such strategy appears to have been implemented on a sustained or     effective basis.  
The benevolent human ET‘s reported in the literature generally evinced a reluctance or refusal to share        advanced technology for fear that it would be used for destructive      purposes, of which they saw ample evidence in their terrestrial        sightseeing. The only indication of an accord put in place in the United States was a blurry arrangement with a species of visitor whose nature and intent seemed incongruent with Earth‘s interests. An examination of the evidence, foggy though it is,  suggests that these favored visitors were willing to assist in the transfer of technology in a military context. Was this transfer an irresistible     

inducement that led decision-makers astray? If the truth is otherwise and these uncomfortable inferences are unfounded then we need MJ12 to come out of hiding and give their side of the story. This is one of the problems of censorship: it cuts both ways, it not only hides the negative but it can hide the positive as well, if such exists.   
There are any number of well       researched contact cases with human types which are convincing in their authenticity: the Billy Meier case in Switzerland (from the 1970s* and ongoing), the Edwin White (=Koldas‘) contacts near Durban, in South Africa (from the 1960s -1980s), the =Norca‘ contacts of the late H. Albert Coe, of Philadelphia (1950s to 1980s), and the Adamski-Steckling contacts in the United States (1952-1991).  
Other genuine cases have doubtless occurred, both reported and          unreported. All of the above named cases were, or are, long running   repeat contact relationships which could have been exploited to deepen an official relationship. They all        

involved friendly visitors whose  goodwill and willingness to help seemed beyond question. The       intimate and trusting nature of these remarkable exchanges with private individuals meant that the relation-ships which had been established were probably amenable to carefully    negotiated third-party involvement. The cost of entry for government people knocking on the door would have been sincerity, tact, patience and non-threatening diplomatic body language. Needless to say, the     purpose of the involvement would have had to have been peaceful,   productive and unrelated to military gain. 
The goodwill in all of these cases was conspicuous. In most there was an indication that unilateral action had already been taken by the     visitors to prevent or ameliorate man-made environmental problems or catastrophes. Both in the Meier case and the Coe case their contacts     inferred that they had interceded technically to  prevent certain nuclear bomb tests from        becoming self-sustaining        reactions that could have     consumed the planet.  
Coe‘s people advised him that they had spent many years developing what they called a .magnetic      drain-off. screen to prevent runaway nuclear reactions. They stated that this high altitude .neutralizer. was activated on a planet-wide basis on 11 February 1958. Interestingly, this date coincides with one of the most remarkable auroral displays of the 20th century, an unusual red aurora, which was seen from Canada to Los 

Angeles and throughout Europe where it caused widespread public concern. The ET‘s in the South    African =Koldas‘ contact said that in 1970 they had openly accompanied the crippled Apollo 13 module for much of its return journey from the moon and would have rescued the three astronauts inside had their craft become incapable of safe return. They even played to Edwin White, the main contactee, and his inner  circle a recording of the astronauts‘ exclamations when their flying    saucer hove into view*. These same visitors also stated that they had   carried out extensive logistical   planning to evacuate and house   elsewhere a large number of people should Earth be overtaken by a    geological or nuclear cataclysm.  
Meier‘s contacts warned him force-fully and repeatedly about a whole range of burgeoning environmental problems, including the hole in the ozone layer which they said (in   February 1975) had been degraded by bromine gases over their 60-year study period by an average of 6.38%. This warning in the early stages of the ozone depletion debate high-lighted the key role of bromine, whose damaging impact was only identified in the scientific literature four months later in June 1975. Meier‘s visitors advised him that, ironically, the most dangerous form of nuclear tests, in their opinion, were underground tests, where the possibility existed of uncontrolled fission reactions spreading to certain natural ground materials.    
But when it came to nuclear         explosions there were no easy      options. George Adamski reported that his visitors had been using a 

type of green ball, sent out from their craft, to counteract or neutralize           concentrations of radiation created through atom bomb tests in the     atmosphere. Such green =fire balls‘ were seen frequently around the AEC test site in New Mexico, and were the subject of an official US Army study in the late 1940s. The Koldas contacts warned of a       complex, carbon-based chemical brew in the Earth‘s ionosphere that had been triggered by nuclear bomb tests and which threatened to        become inflammable. Fine            radioactive carbon particulate mixed with carbon from industrial and    terrestrial sources, as well as      naturally occurring carbon-14 and radioactive and non-radioactive   carbon dioxide, had produced a  critical situation. Over large areas, solar radiation had cooked this mix into a state of near inflammability. This situation teetered on the brink of ignition, which was almost certain to occur if nuclear warheads were exploded in or near this region in the atmosphere. Earth would progres-sively become a fireball over a     period of several days, they said. The visitors reported that on a few      occasions they had intercepted and rendered harmless guided missiles with explosive warheads that had been meant to explode at high      altitudes. The same people gave a warning about global warming and the melting of the ice caps in a con-tact in November 1980. This caution occurred at the very early stages of the international debate on tempera-ture change, before a strong         consensus had formed about the Earth‘s warming trend. 
The wide-ranging benevolence that was indicated in these contact events (and in many others less well    documented or publicised) suggests that it was commonsense to build 

solid official relationships with the human ET‘s who displayed such a willingness to help. It made sense from every angle. Official relation-ships may possibly have occurred out of sight of public scrutiny with cases we don‘t know about. But in all but one of the above mentioned friendly contactee connections there is no evidence that such a formal and sensible government initiative was attempted. Even in this case, the Adamski contacts, the indications are ambiguous.  
There are reports that Adamski had off-the-record meetings with     President John F.Kennedy during the Kennedy incumbency (1960-63).* These meetings were sometimes  attended by the President‘s brother, Robert Kennedy. Both of these men are known to have had a personal interest in UFOs. Whether the       get-togethers reflected active interest by MJ12 and the administration or merely arose from the brothers‘   personal curiosity is not known. The latter seems possible, as the         government interest did not survive 

Adamski‘s death in 1965. His      successor, Fred Steckling, continued to have regular meetings with  Adamski‘s =boys‘ for the next 26 years until his passing in 1991 but apart from a couple of meetings   between Steckling and government officials in the mid-1960s, no       systematic, or even occasional,     liaison appears to have taken place thereafter.  
Eduard =Billy‘ Meier, in Switzer-land, was the subject of wall-to-wall official surveillance but there is no evidence to indicate that officialdom in any shape sought to use his     contacts to open up lines of commu-nication to the visitors. The Koldas ET‘s told White that they had       endeavoured to establish firm links but these had been rebuffed.  
In pursuit of domestic stability the Earth appeared to have turned itself into a galactic =hermit state.‘ This was the planetary equivalent of the   Japanese sakoku (=locked country‘) period which barred foreigners and their alien cultural influences from Japan from 1639 to 1853. The    Japanese Shogunate allowed a crack in the wall with tightly controlled trading posts; in similar vein Earth‘s most powerful government reached out a hidden back hand for technical know-how. 
There was a certain justification to this planetary isolationism. If 17th century Japanese policies appeared heavy-handed the alternative        historical lessons of the 18th and 19th centuries showed their good sense. The potential for cultural devastation when technically advanced societies swooped down on unprepared    communities was obvious to all    students of colonial impact. 

When MJ12 Dropped the Ball 
There was no doubt that the grave dangers of the Cold War             complicated any considerations       of disclosure. There were life-threatening issues to worry about, and the arrival of the flying saucers turned out not to be a security  threat. It was a largely benign, if  sensational, development and the messy business of disclosure could be safely postponed till later. The problem was that the committee of elders who were the main policy ad-visors on this thing dropped the ball. 
Hindsight is easy, but there was a wide window of opportunity that opened up when the conspiracy reached its 50th birthday in 1991. There was a certain symmetry to this year, an anniversary that spoke of timeliness and a season finally     arrived that was pregnant with     possibility. This was the year that marked the final collapse of       communism in Eastern Europe, when the Soviet Union broke up and ceased to be a viable military     competitor to the United States. The dramatic easing of international   tension that accompanied the end of the Cold War offered an obvious  opportunity for carefully handled disclosure to take place. There was a 10-year period of strategic calm that was favourable for these purposes. It cried out for action from a President with courage and an eye for the main chance.  
Had disclosure taken place during this crucial decade there is some  reason to suggest that the event that brought it to a close – the 9/11      attacks – might not have occurred, and the rise of violent religious    fundamentalism might have been blunted. Not only that, but the   

seemingly insoluble problem of   carbon emissions and global    warming could have been more   vigorously and effectively addressed, while there was still time, perhaps with a little help from our friends. 
From the final years of the 20th   century the policy of suppression and isolationism begins to look less like prudent management and more like historical tragedy. These were the years when the linear flow of  history cried out to be released   from its man-made bottleneck. It  was the crossroads where an         alternative historical path for Earth unconstrained by conspiracy and rigid provincialism begins to look better than what actually happened. Precluded history was more          attractive than the history we lived. It was the tipping point where the planet‘s culture, in its widest sense, that the cover-up was designed to protect was no longer worth it. The concealment had outlasted its      usefulness. It‘s =use-by‘ date had passed and suddenly the product it was designed to protect had gone off. A slow motion ecological      catastrophe was unfolding, the     economic system was rent with cracks, and religious violence was mushrooming. It was no longer a healthy thing that our institutions and systems were being shielded from the wider context that galactic citizenship offered. It was a time when we were big enough and ugly enough to know the truth and to   discuss and debate the way forward with all the facts on the table.  
The idea that the evolution of both nations and global affairs could be optimized and endowed with an   orderly gradualism by turning      inwards and presenting a hunched back to the universe was obsolete. The Arab =spring‘ of 2011 showed that sweeping, revolutionary move-

ments that could change the face of nations and international relations could occur whether or not the planet was being exposed to winds blowing from elsewhere. Change is going to happen with or without phony     policies of concealment.  
The narrow religious fundamental-ism that prescribed a single God-given path for all at the point of a gun would not long survive the  revelation that there were millions of other planetary populations, many of which were visiting Earth on a   regular basis and demonstrating an admirable spirituality and success that owed nothing to our creeds. The demolition of the conceit that we were alone in the universe, and somehow at the top of the heap, would likely bring about a humble realization that religious conquest was for the birds. There just aren‘t that many bullets or bombs in the universe.  
And nor will we jettison our         religions just because some ET    professes a different one. The Sages of MJ12 can relent on their        overweening paternalism. We are sufficiently conditioned to the     likelihood of aliens existing to not freak out at confirmation of the fact. We don‘t discard our beliefs now when presented with another        terrestrial theology; why would we do it for a visitor from the stars? If our faith is that weak then it‘s not a faith it‘s a gloss, and conversion may be a good thing. All this will bring about a deepened appreciation of the place of diversity in the scheme of things and the importance and    good sense of tolerance of other viewpoints. Tolerance becomes    non-negotiable when the market-place of peaceful ideas and           philosophies expands dramatically.  Nor will the announcement that ET exists cause social chaos, that other 

old saw of plain thinkers. A huge slice of the planet‘s population has already seen through the conspiracy anyway and there are no signs of people running through the streets foaming at the mouth and tearing at their clothes. Instead, half of them are checking out the latest UFO  footage uploaded to Youtube.   
And who would reject a sustainable, pollution-free technology for     transport and power generation if it was offered to us from trusting    visitors. The likelihood is that it   already exists anyway in the       classified laboratories of military and civilian contractors who have cracked the code. It‘s simply being sat on while Rome burns. If visitors came to the rescue with a technical fix for the carbon problem its     probable that agreed  protocols     and viable international governance structures would need to be put       in place as a quid pro quo.             Compensation to those nations and businesses adversely affected would also need to be considered. But there is a treasure chest of potential     positives waiting for us on the other side of disclosure. It may mean the difference between merely surviving and succeeding. It‘s not a cop out. Hushing it all up 70 years ago was a cop out. When was asking for help ever a cop out? That a community‘s problems must be solved from within that community is not holy writ. Such a blinkered viewpoint would invalidate the whole concept of international aid. We are all in this together and it‘s only a delusion to think that .we. must be defined in planetary terms. 
In order for us to embrace this   brave new world, President Obama needs to implement disclosure.     His government through the        decades has hidden the most. It now needs to admit the most. It needs to take the leadership, not just in suppression but in a prudent and overdue revelation. It is best that our most powerful and admired nation should take the primary role in this  initiative. It should put  right the self-inflicted infringements of its own remarkable charter, a document    admired by all, and reassert its     enduring values, ones that help safe-guard people not just in America but throughout the world. It is time for President Obama to chart a new path, to speak to the American    people and the people of the world on this vital issue. He should do it this year before the 2012 election gets in the way, but most of all he needs to do it. He needs to make sure that power does not pass from his hands without this job having been done. If Barack Obama has an eye for his legacy he must not follow his tongue-tied predecessors in the White House and become part of the    problem; he needs to be part of the solution. The President most self-proclaimedly committed to the rule of law, openness and accountability needs to make a major public speech, and this is the sort of thing he needs to say: 


 At my inauguration as President I declared that your government would do its business =in the light of day,‘ because only then could we restore and strengthen the vital trust between a people and its government that is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. 
I said that America had prospered through its history not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, had remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears and true to our founding documents. 

Today I wish to address myself to a few of the central principles that underlie our founding       documents, namely freedom of speech and the vital necessity of our citizens, our legislature and   our judiciary being fully informed of important matters that guide our national and international policy. Thomas Jefferson once said: =I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the         society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their   control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their     discretion by education.‘  
It is now my intention to take you into my confidence on an issue that is of concern to me and which the time is overdue that your government should share with the people it serves. I wish to .inform your discretion. as Jefferson would say, by the disclosure of important information. 

When I succeeded to the Presidency in 2009 it was brought to my attention by my advisors from within government that there had been a decades-long censorship of sensitive – and amazing – facts. This policy of suppression of remarkable discoveries that we had made was carried out for reasons which seemed reasonable and necessary at the time. These events were viewed as special             circumstances requiring special discretion and confidentiality. The secrecy of these government   activities was supported by many of my predecessors in the White House, and I have thought about these secrets carefully in the first few years of my Presidency. I now feel that it is time that we should bring this unusual, and unprecedented, state of affairs to an end, and that I should reassert our constitutional principles of openness, accountability and freedom of information; that we should make the people once again the safe depository of our society‘s ultimate powers. I have made the irrevocable decision that this unsatisfactory situation that has endured for over 50 years should end today and that we should embark on a challenging new era. 

I refer to our government‘s policy on UFOs – unidentified flying objects. Many years ago our     government recovered craft that had visited Earth from outer space. Some called these objects flying saucers. We not only recovered these craft, which had crashed, but we also established a dialogue with some of the visitors; we began communicating with them. Over the course of many decades these facts were withheld from the American people and the people of the world. Nor were our    citizens taken into the government‘s confidence in the wide-ranging activity and extensive contact that our officials carried out with the visitors. I now inform you of these extraordinary facts and  confirm that contact with extraterrestrials has been achieved by your government. 

I need to add that there is no cause for fear or panic. We found that our planet was being visited on a regular basis by people from outside Earth who came in peace – and I use the phrase =people from outside Earth‘ deliberately, because while some of the visitors are different from us in many ways, there are many who are similar or identical to the human race – many look like us, many talk like us. That is the advice I have received from my officials who have been working in this area. 

I have asked my Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to progressively implement a policy of           disclosure of the key facts of this business to the American people and the people of the world         in the weeks and months ahead. Some will find the information to be released disorienting  
or even disturbing. Others will see it as a welcome opportunity for the citizens of the world to expand their horizons in a positive way. Others will find it a relief – especially those who have recognized over the years that the American government was not being honest with its citizens on this issue. 
I have been informed that the visitors are coming from many origins in space and that their activities have generally proven peaceful and non-threatening. In fact in the communications which have     occurred between the American government and the visitors, repeated expressions of friendship and goodwill have been conveyed to us. We have no reason to doubt these welcome signs of fraternity. 
It is time for our planet to take its rightful place in the galactic community, and for each one of us, in addition to our national allegiances and our identification with the planet we stand on, to ascend to a new citizenship, one unbounded by planetary limits and one which recognizes broader responsibilities – and opportunities. We must not export into space those attitudes that have marred Earth‘s history, and which continue today in acts of intolerance and violence around the planet. We are being called to a higher standard of behavior as a species. This event comes as a =wake-up‘ call for all those who think that we can continue to walk in the old paths of bigotry and confrontation.  
Realization of this profound transition in mankind‘s status is not a cause for disruptive or disturbing changes in the way we live. We will still get up tomorrow morning and go to work, we will still tend to our farms, take our children to school, watch the evening news and sit down and break bread with our family and friends. But in the weeks, months and years ahead our political and social horizons, and our scientific endeavours, will be reshaped by new perspectives and new opportunities that this change in our circumstances brings. Open discussion, open debate and open science flowing from this dialogue with the visitors have the potential to significantly improve the way we cope with the pressing problems that our planet faces. In the ecological crisis that confronts us with seemingly   insoluble symptoms – the problem of carbon emissions and global warming – we have the opportunity to draw on the opinions and experiences of others for the benefit of mankind. 
As the visitors have not posed a security threat to our planet I have asked Secretary Clinton to lead the effort in maintaining our relations with the visitors. It is right and proper that this job should lie with the Department of State rather than the military. At all points she will work in consultation with the President and there will be times when I will take the lead role, as the primary spokesman for our nation. The Secretary of State will conduct this diplomacy in consultation not only with the Executive, but with Congress as well, as our Constitution requires. I have also asked her to bring together a consultative group of people from other nations to assist the United States in the conduct of this     interplanetary dialogue. The Department of State will also work with the United Nations in achieving international consensus on the best way to advance this new diplomacy as it affects the international community.  
A word of caution. Commonsense behaviour should still apply in the unlikely event that people have a close encounter with a UFO or its occupants. The chances of this happening are extremely low, as we all know, but prudent caution should still be exercised, as it is our preference that the government should first confirm and formalise the arrangements with the various visitors before widespread or unscheduled contact takes place. 
With that proviso, I believe that we can move forward to a new and promising era of cultural contact on an interplanetary basis. It is time that the breeze of wider views, wider perspectives and a wider tolerance and humbleness flowed across our planet. Yes, we must preserve all that is good and      appropriate in our societies and cultures. And yes, our customs and creeds and our social and      economic arrangements which serve us well and are sustainable, should be maintained. The sorry    history of damage and injury inflicted on societies by more technologically advanced peoples is well known to all students of colonial impact. We must not fall into the same trap. For that reason I      
caution all people about an unrealistic and submissive reaction to those who may come from beyond Earth. There is still much that is good and wholesome and just, about the way that we behave and   conduct our lives. Our culture is rich and unique, and always will be. But we must also have the good sense to open our minds to other viewpoints and other values that successful societies elsewhere hold. We must come together in a harmonious dialogue marked by mutual respect and constructive intent. Interesting days lie ahead.  
In conclusion, let me say that our government will be measured and peace-abiding as we traverse this new frontier of diplomacy. And I commend to my fellow Americans and the people of the world that they respond in like manner to the news that I have given today: with composure and a peaceful      expectation, with tolerance and goodwill toward others no matter where they should hail from. It is a time for calmness, a time for hope, and a time for humility in the challenging and promising days that lie ahead. 
 
 





     Chapter Three, 
   From Prudence to Tragedy. 


 
“Should I go public?” That was the question that Dr James E. McDonald put to his           colleagues at the University of Arizona in the mid-1960s when he was wrestling with the idea of making widely known his interest in UFOs.  
For eight years, McDonald, a senior physicist and professor of meteorology at the Institute   of Atmospheric Physics, had been quietly investigating UFO sightings in the Tucson area  and was convinced that the phenomenon was genuine, thought-provoking and often         inexplicable in conventional terms. In 1966 when the Michigan UFO flap drew a series of lame explanations from Air Force spokesmen, McDonald had had enough. He put his      academic and professional reputation on the line and launched into high profile research and lobbying. Thus would begin a remarkable one-man campaign that would reach into America.s most prestigious academic and professional institutions as well into the corridors of Congress before it came to a tragic end in 1971. 
McDonald trained in meteorology at MIT and was a brilliant       researcher. In addition to a busy life as a father of six children he went on to establish an impressive track record in pure research and publication. A bibliography compiled after his death tracked the publication or preparation of 231 articles, papers or published letters.  
A friendly manner enabled the lean, crew-cut McDonald to mix easily with both professional colleagues and ordinary people. This warmth and knack for engagement at the personal level stood him in good stead with witnesses in over 600 UFO cases that he        investigated. The neglected flying saucer phenomenon was a sitter for McDonald – “He had probably the most curious mind of anyone I.ve ever met in my life,” said a fellow professor at Arizona University. “He applied himself…to the UFO thing with an intensity that absolutely left us all exhausted.” 
McDonald marked his “coming out” with a trip to the Air Force.s three-man UFO PR front, Project Blue Book, at Wright-Patterson AFB in June 1966. Even though the most             sensational sightings and UFO incidents had been siphoned off into other secret channels, McDonald was shocked by the impressive reports he found in the Blue Book files and was scandalized by the weak explanations that had invariably been assigned to them. He sought an immediate meeting with the commander of the Foreign Technology Division at the base,  Brig. Gen. Arthur Cruickshank, who looked after Blue Book. “The Air Force is in a bad spot,” he warned Cruickshank, “You.re going to have a lot of difficulty getting out of it!”  
McDonald was not intimidated by military types. He had served in the Navy as a             cryptographer during the war and had worked with the Office of Naval Research for years, doing much of his academic atmospheric research under a funding grant from the ONR. Yet he was unprepared for the runaround he would get: McDonald had just walked smack bang into history.s most comprehensive and prodigious concealment. Being a man of regulation issue openness, and fair-minded in his dealings with other people, McDonald was unable to envisage the cynicism that underlay the cover-up he had unwittingly collided with. He told 

friends and colleagues that the official neglect of the UFO phenomenon was probably not   the result of a cover-up but of a “grand foul-up”, where the authorities had simply           mishandled the situation out of ignorance and sloppiness. 
McDonald flew from Blue Book to the project.s official scientific consultant on astronomy,    Dr J.Allen Hynek, at Northwestern University, in Illinois. A witness to the tense meeting    reported that McDonald pounded on Hynek.s desk. “You.ve betrayed your responsibility to science, Allen, you should have spoken out years ago!”  The calm, bearded Hynek sucked on his ever present pipe, then replied, “You just don.t understand the situation, do you, Jim? Where were you when I tried to get support from the academic community?” 
McDonald visited Blue Book a few weeks later to pore through its files again. He found an  embarrassing oversight –  a report of a 1953 meeting that the CIA had convened, the  Robertson Panel, that recommended that the UFO subject should be demystified and        debunked under an official media programme.  
Over the next few years, McDonald worked hard to offset the negative effects of the     Robertson Panel. Managing to balance academic duties with his one-man crusade,     McDonald pushed the controversial subject on to the agenda at a host of scientific         gatherings – at symposia or specially convened meetings at the American Association for   the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics,   NASA, the National Astronomical Association, the American Meteorological Association, the United Nations Outer Space Affairs Committee, the Institute of Electronic and Electrical   Engineers, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. McDonald was honest but      scientifically cautious about the nature of the more mystifying flying saucer reports he      investigated. Of the possible explanations for them, he said that the “extraterrestrial         hypothesis is, at present to my mind, the least unlikely.” Even couched in this circumspect way, McDonald.s statement was courageous. In 1967 “Time” magazine said he was “farther out on the saucer.s edge than any other U.S. scientist.” It quoted his strong assertion, “I think that UFOs are the No. 1 problem of world science.”  
In mid-1968 ONR cut off the research contract to McDonald that he had used as a broad umbrella to shelter his UFO research under. He battled on regardless. One month later, in July, he appeared before the only Congressional Committee meeting that the United States House of Representatives has ever convened on UFOs. The six-hour session was addressed by a number of scientists including McDonald. This meeting of the Committee on Science and Astronautics had been put together by McDonald and Congressman J. Edward Roush, of Indiana. 
McDonald.s frenetic activity had about it the feel of a man with limited time. He “seemed to be rushing, as though he couldn.t get it all done in his lifetime,” a friend related. The  McDonald juggernaut began butting up against the fragile outer shell of the government  conspiracy. Witnesses from within the Air Force began sharing with him extraordinary      flying saucer sightings. 
McDonald.s luggage started to go missing on his research trips around the country. When his suitcases turned up they were invariably found to have been rifled. One day he stepped off a plane to make a phone call during a 15-minute stopover in Los Angeles. He must have 

had a “tail” on board: his briefcase disappeared from under the seat. When it was returned to his front door in Tucson by a mysterious courier at midnight, McDonald found that his papers and witness tape-recordings were intact but had been sorted through. He was       philosophical about these annoying antics: “I.m just getting used to it,” he told a friend. “That.s the way it is.” After May 1969 he began noting that cars would follow him in Tucson, plain vehicles with no license plates. The normally even-minded professor began to get jumpy with staff poking around his office on innocent visits to retrieve files.  
The Condon Committee report in 1969 dealt McDonald a devastating professional blow, in effect implying that his UFO work was unscientific nonsense. He spent the next few years poking holes in the report.s flaky contents at every opportunity. Edward Condon responded by trying to get UFOs banned from discussion at professional gatherings McDonald           attended. 
In early 1971, shadowy figures high up in the government cover-up opened lines of         communication to McDonald either as a disinformation exercise or in an attempt to pull   him into the conspiracy. “I think I.ve got the answer,” he told a fellow scientist and UFO    researcher. “I found out what.s behind it…You won.t believe it!” He told another friend that “people at the top” had taken him into their confidence but in the meantime he was sworn  to secrecy. “I.ve got to pin it down a little bit more, and then it.ll come out.” 
In March, McDonald appeared before a Congressional committee as one of the scientific   witnesses making a case against proposed supersonic passenger planes (SST) that he and other scientists felt would degrade the upper atmosphere and damage the ozone layer. A  congressman, Rep. Silvio Conte, of Massachusetts, had been primed beforehand about McDonald.s flying saucer interests. He kept mocking him in front of the committee, to       appreciative laughter from the assembled throng. Finally, he delivered his punchline: “A  man who comes here and tells me that the SST flying in the stratosphere is going to cause thousands of skin cancers has to back up his theory that there are little men flying around the sky.”  
In 1971 Jim McDonald slipped quietly into a depressive state. His normally tidy office       became a mess. Papers that he was working on for publication stalled half way through.   Bereaving family circumstances took their toll. His biographer, Ann Druffel, has speculated that a disturbed domestic environment as a child in depression-era Minnesota had failed to equip McDonald with the emotional resources to ride out hard times on the home front. A double whammy of professional and personal set-backs proved too much, even for a man of his magnitude. 
On 12 June 1971 James McDonald died, thus ending one of the most promising phases of public UFO science. No one with his commitment, courage and connections ever stepped  forward again to carry the UFO banner into the heart of a hostile establishment. The          51-year-old left extensive journals of his UFO research, but the small pocket notebooks that had been used to record his most confidential meetings and notes mysteriously disappeared from his files and have never been found.   





If history is any guide – secret  history, that is – some time in the weeks after Barack Obama‘s        inauguration a group of officials, and possibly private citizen appointees, will file into the Oval Office or a nearby meeting room and brief the new President on the deepest secret in the American government. 
They will almost certainly arrive  under conditions of strict             confidentiality, perhaps similar to those that were demanded for a    special, top-secret White House meeting in 1953. .Due to the nature of the Meeting, it is necessary to take special security precautions and to maintain absolute secrecy regarding participation in, as well as the      substance of, the Meeting. President Eisenhower‘s aide Robert Cutler wrote members of the National     Security Council. .It is requested that you enter the White House grounds via the Southeast Entrance not later than 8.45 A.M. and         descend from your car at the South (Diplomatic) Entrance of the      Mansion. Your car should be        discharged and not wait anywhere in the vicinity of the White House.

Unlike 56 years ago when a flip chart presenter was probably the only visual aid available to support the presidential briefing papers this meeting will probably have a laptop, data projector and screen to        highlight the essential points. For an idealistic new president with a much publicised commitment to transparency and open government 
the briefing will almost certainly prove unnerving and distressing. Obama will be told that for over 60 years the American government has had certain knowledge of visits to Earth by aliens. He will be told that his military are in the possession of numerous crashed UFOs of advanced design. Doubtless the room will be taut with a watchful silence as the briefing officer – possibly the chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – moves further into his explosive summation: that major programmes of technical inquiry have been      carried out into how these craft     operate. For the uninitiated the   revelations will come like hammer blows from the twilight zone: that bodies of aliens have been retrieved and preserved, and, almost certainly, that representatives of the President‘s government long ago met and estab-lished contact with some of these extraterrestrial visitors. The profound cultural, technological and strategic implications of these developments will be traversed and discussed. The president will doubtless probe and provoke, his keen mind coaxing the visitors deeper into the detail of their subject. A follow-up meeting will probably be discussed and diaried. And then the White House visitors will depart their perplexed chief leaving him with a peculiar dilemma: to follow in the footsteps of his last 11 predecessors and keep the lid on this momentous secret, or launch a risky new era of openness with all its awesome potential to change    planetary life in ways that can scarcely be imagined. 

Of course, if he takes the bold path in favour of public disclosure    President Obama will not exactly be telling us facts we don‘t already know. Most of what he will have been told in sepulchral tones by his grave advisors is already in the   public domain, at least in broad   outline and sometimes in surprising detail, and has been so for decades. What he will be doing, of course – if he plumbs for openness – is carrying out an act of admission, a confession of seismic implications, rather than an act of revelation. It will be an act of legitimation, of liberation even. It will free up the vast organs of the world‘s news media, academia,    science, religion and the instruments of national and international govern-ment, to explore this sensational  millennial development without the poisonous atmosphere of derision and career threatening disreputability that currently surrounds it.  
Which way will Obama go?  
The safe route, and doubtless the one that will be pressed upon him by his advisors, is to keep his trap shut, play along with this tired charade, and focus on the current economic crisis and the many pressing        strategic challenges that his admini-stration faces. He will be pressured to take this course by the selection  of facts and the line of argument  that his advisors on the UFO       phenomenon present. They will    almost certainly – and probably with good intentions – emphasise the dominance in the alien interaction with Earth of the =grays‘, the short creatures with black, wrap-around eyes and spindly arms and legs whose image has penetrated just about every corner of our popular culture, from tee shirts, to pencil erasers, to fairground balloons, to B-grade movies (make that A-grade, 

Spielberg used the grays as the model for his aliens in =Close       Encounters of the Third Kind‘).   The ubiquitous grays have clearly been the culprits in the abduction         phenomenon that has been            extensively described by numerous investigators since the 1960s. Their craft appear to have been the main ones that have crashed over the years. And, not least, they have been implicated in some of the more    disturbing, even chilling, phenomena that have surrounded a small        proportion of UFO activity. Their intentions, on a balanced judgment, are difficult to describe as either   benign or malign, rather as neutral or even indifferent, exploitive but not, as a rule, hostile. Their wide activi-ties and the diplomatic tightrope that the US administration walks to keep their interaction within militarily and politically tolerable bounds, appear to be the raw nerve that drives the whole government suppression     apparatus.*  
But it would be a mistake, in my opinion, for Obama to base a policy response on the activities of the grays alone and the benefits to public order of =looking the other way‘. A number of other, more encouraging, alien contacts have occurred throughout the world over the last 60 years or so and the more authentic and credible of these =contactee‘ cases give us much more cause for optimism. Instead of the relatively uncommunicative style and          impersonal scientific orientation of the grays, these contacts – often with visitors who look exactly like us – 
promise a more balanced and       inspirational level of cultural contact and exchange. These aliens hold out the promise of the momentous and enriching epiphany that mankind‘s wildest dreams of extraterrestrial contact have long conjured up. These fascinating and wildly varying    contact events are, in their sweep and totality, a powerful counter-weight to the disappointing and   perplexing grays. They portend a diplomacy of great complexity and novelty but they also hold out the prospect of fruitful enlightenment for a lonely planet reeling with problems of ecology, poverty, economics and governance. These are the visitors we have been waiting for. 
How it All Started   
The Roswell UFO crash of 1947 is credited in the popular imagination with having been the first of the =crash/retrieval‘ incidents of the modern era. It has given rise to a TV series, a movie and numerous books. More military veterans have spoken out about their role in the retrieval of wreckage and bodies from this site than for any other crash that whistle-blowers have revealed. Certainly     it is a seminal event in the UFO timeline, not least for having       been the first crash to be reported contemporaneously by newspapers – if quickly covered up – and has given rise over the years to an un-precedented stream of leaked     documents of huge historical        interest. We will return to Roswell shortly to draw insights from the more credible of these archival     papers, but the honour of being the first place to host a piece of  mal-functioning extraterrestrial hardware may lie with another continent, with Europe, where there are interesting reports of a UFO having crashed in 1937 in the western part of modern 

day Poland (then eastern Germany), near the village of Czernica. A multi-coloured ball was seen to fall in a field and was soon surrounded by SS troops from the nearby garrison of Jelenia Gora (then called Hirshberg). The object was transported to Jelenia Gora where it was reportedly kept under strict guard. A year later a top-secret meeting with scientists was reportedly convened there. In a    preview of a later pattern that   would emerge in America, leading figures from the mushrooming new science of nuclear physics were in attendance: Max von Laue, Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg. In 1943 the Czernica UFO was deliv-ered to an underground factory   complex constructed by the Nazis for war production in the nearby Gory Sowie Mountains and there the trail peters out. 
The first modern day UFO crash in the United States appears to have occurred near the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1941: again a crash in the countryside but this time with more detail, a description of pieces of metallic debris of       advanced design, and three bodies of creatures similar to the grays. The report emanated from a minister of religion who was called to the site by local police who initially thought that an aircraft had crashed. The Rev. William Huffman got a good look at the three creatures as he said a prayer over their bodies, which showed no sign of injury. He was sworn to secrecy by military        personnel who were in attendance but confided all the details to his wife and children. A granddaughter gave a detailed report to researchers many years later in 1991. There is tentative confirmation of this event: a leaked, authentic looking UFO- related document from military    archives refers to a crash incident on  

mainland USA from which =artifacts‘ were recovered in 1941. 
The detailed events of the Roswell crash of July 1947 do not bear      repeating. Any number of books and articles can be consulted which pro-vide information on this event and its aftermath, much of it outlined by former military witnesses who were brave enough to go =on the record‘  in their old age when the threat of    official reprisal had lost its potency. What is worth examining about   Roswell is not so much what was found (debris of advanced           technology and gray-type creatures again, one or two of which were still alive) but the apparent extent of the official investigation which          followed, and the historically       important people who were          involved. Investigators from the Army Counter Intelligence Corps IPU unit who were involved in the two-day scene examination reported later that they had recognised a  number of scientists present from the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, most notably J.Robert Oppenheimer, the =father‘ of America‘s atomic bomb. A number of Operation Paperclip scientists were also seen – German rocketry specialists repatriated to the United States after the Second World War to work on the American space and missile programmes. Paperclip scientists present included Wernher von Braun, who had been a leader in the German missile programme, Ernst Steinhoff and space medicine pioneer, Dr Hubertus Strughold. An initial report to the head of the Army Air Force, General Nathan Twining, a few weeks after the crash mentions participation in the deliberations by personnel from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and various branches of the military. Oppenheimer, von 

Braun and Steinhoff were mentioned as was Theodore von Karman, a Jewish Hungarian aerodynamicist and consultant to the Air Force.  
A fuller report of authentic looking appearance and content, seemingly for presidential consideration, is also in the public domain from this time (it was leaked in 1996 with many deletions in black felt tip pen; much of the document is illegible through =carbon copy‘ fading). The report authors had been tasked with a wider brief from the Roswell crash, includ-ing political and national security considerations. The mission      members were mainly an array       of military top brass, including    Major General Leslie Groves,     military controller of the Manhattan Project during the war, and three  administration civil employees, James S.Lay, assistant executive sec-retary to the recently constituted Na-tional Security Council, Thomas J.Lynch, a Department of Justice lawyer and engineer, and Carlisle Humelsine, who had worked at the 

Pentagon for Chief of Staff George C. Marshall during the war and    followed him to the State Depart-ment in 1947. Among the =contributing members‘ to the     mission were Oppenheimer, von Karman and =Professor Albert     Einstein‘. This report refers to      =the recovery case of 1941‘ – and        regretted that no =unified intelligence effort to exploit possible             technological gains‘ had resulted from that earlier recovery =with the exception of the Manhattan Project.‘ The committee seems determined to exploit the captured technology from Roswell in whatever way it can and refers to the possibility of studies on recovered microcircuitry underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) being fed into the =proposed hydrogen bomb           programme.‘ Under the heading =Political Considerations‘ the report reached conclusions that would clearly shape American policy for the next 60 years – that public      disclosure would be damaging to political and social order, and bring in to question the credibility of     national security arrangements,    scientific knowledge, and public trust in institutions and religious structures. It recommended that a policy of =plausible denial‘ be adopted to explain away UFO     phenomena.  
Hundreds of people had clearly been involved in the post-crash investiga-tions. In addition to various military agencies mentioned as participating in crash debris analysis, the report mentioned other organisations  crossing over into the civilian realm who were studying =recovered      exhibits‘ – the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), NEPA (the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project), NACA (the National      Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA), the JRDB (Joint Research and Develop-ment Board), the Rand Corporation and MIT. The apparent wide        dispersal of this top secret material provides an interesting insight into the trusted system of security    clearance operating in the US     military and civil administration, as well as within outside contracting agencies. This report is notable for confirming what many documents leaked over the years have revealed (and many insiders assert was the case) - that the initial intelligence agency set up to oversee secret UFO-related affairs was called Majestic (or MJ) Twelve and that access to its affairs was limited to people with a security clearance level called    MAJIC. 

The document ends with a paragraph memorable for its refreshing         directness, possibly written by Humelsine, who had been coached over the years by Marshall to write clearly and without the use of       official jargon: =In conclusion, for reasons of national security and the public well being, the US must be perceived as being the top of the heap, and every effort must be made to insure that there is [not], and never has been, a threat to the    country.‘  
 The Aztec Recovery 
There are nearly 100 National Monuments on the American mainland but you won‘t find Hart Canyon, near the town of Aztec, New Mexico, on the list. Over the years US Presidents have decreed the protection of old military forts, geological landmarks and native  Indian historical sites. There is an 8.5-mile footpath in Minnesota on the list, an old flint quarry in Texas and a Nebraska homestead that once 

belonged to one =Daniel Freeman.‘ But in this era of surreal historical avoidance and inverted reality it took a grass roots initiative, rather than  an act of Presidential power, to   commemorate what took place in 1948 on a small, dusty plateau, or mesa, that lies just above the dirt road that winds through Hart      Canyon. One day in 1999 a group of Aztec citizens took the law into their own hands and erected a metal plaque on the plateau to explain the mesa‘s historic significance. The plaque, set on the dry, yellow dirt amidst a scattering of sage brush and cedar pines, did not refer – as it could have done – to the fact that the canyon road was the old stage coach route from Aztec to the wild west town of Durango, across the state line in nearby Colorado. Instead its inscription was far more arresting. 
.Recovery at Hart Canyon. the plaque headlines. .On or about this site on March 25 1948 a space craft of origins unknown crash landed on this mesa. The 767 ANW radar base at nearby El Vado, NM, tracked the 

apparent landing to this site. A high secrecy recovery operation took   approximately two weeks, with all the remains being taken to Los    Alamos, NM, for scientific study and evaluation by some of the world‘s leading scientists. The recovery of this craft by the US Government   and military was one of the most  secretive recoveries of spacecraft with origins unknown since the   similar recovery in Roswell, NM, eight months earlier. Sadly, the    occupants, as many as 16, died as the result of this crash, making full disclosure of both purpose and  origination all but impossible.. 
The local townsfolk seem to have got the story pretty straight, judging from details leaked by military and scientific personnel and by a few  local citizens who were the first to the scene*.  

During the recovery operation the federal government carved off the plateau from the local rancher and took ownership. Today the land is under the control of the US Bureau of Land Management, an otherwise inexplicable island of public prop-erty in the midst of private ranches. A barbed wire fence was strung around the plateau after the clean-up operation and this is now rusting and decrepit; it offers no barrier to UFO enthusiasts who are visiting the site in increasing numbers these days. Therein lies the uniqueness of the Aztec site – it is clearly marked and relatively easy to find, unlike the sites of the Roswell recoveries. It is truly one of the most important    national – indeed international – monuments of the 20th century, or any century. 

Visitors park their cars and walk up the dirt track that was bulldozed by the military to get their trucks to the crash site. Journalist and author Frank Scully, who wrote a wry and witty account of UFO secrecy,    government shenanigans, and the Aztec crash in his best seller, .Behind the Flying Saucers. in 1950, said that the 100ft diameter craft had been too large to transport in one piece. The insiders who leaked the story to Scully said that the craft was virtually intact, and it took a lot of investigation to detect that it had been made – and could be dismantled – in segments. Scully‘s story was light on geographical    detail so Hart Canyon lay largely unvisited for decades, after those who had been involved in the       discovery and recovery were sworn, or frightened, into silence. One gutsy 

recovery worker confided the       location to a friend who camped out on the plateau for several days in 1952, digging up tell-tale souvenirs from this remarkable episode – old canteens, web-belts, K-ration cans, and the like. In 1975 another      mystery man stepped off the     Greyhound bus in Aztec and cadged the use of a 4-wheel drive Toyota from local residents. They accompa-nied him as he drove unerringly to the crash site 12 miles away in Hart Canyon. He told his startled       companions that this was where a UFO had crashed in 1948. The man wandered around the plateau for an hour taking photographs, and the next day left Aztec by bus again. One of the curious locals who had accompanied the photographer never forgot the location and was able to guide investigator William Steinman to the site in 1982. Steinman found the apparent epicenter of the crash without too much trouble. There were still old broken trees lying around the edge of a large clearing, as well as charred and scored    rocks. Rusty steel braces that had apparently been used to prop up the saucer still lay in a jumbled pile. A piece of discarded welding equip-ment lay nearby. Not far away a large concrete block lay half buried in the dirt; an old timer who had helped clean up the plateau after the recovery, told investigator Scott Ramsey in 2002 that this had been a footing for the crane that was used in the recovery.          
 Steinman and fellow UFO investi-gator Wendelle Stevens published a book on the crash in 1986, .UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret. and were able to tell the recovery story almost blow by blow, helped by a whistle-blower whose           existence, let alone identity, they 

didn‘t even hint at. Whereas Scully had not mentioned a single one of the notables who had descended on Hart Canyon, Steinman and Stevens displayed no such reserve. Doubtless their frankness was encouraged by the fact that virtually all the main participants had passed away by that date.  
Secretary of State Marshall took   direct control of the recovery        operation, they said, and asked Dr Vannevar Bush, America‘s leading science and technology administra-tor, to lead a scientific team to the site. Bush had headed up the war-time Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had     overseen the development of the atomic bomb, radar and other    break-through technologies. Bush organised a team that included Dr John von Neumann, the celebrated physicist and mathematician from Princeton University; Robert        Oppenheimer; Dr Detlev Bronk, a physiologist of international repute and chairman of the National Re-search Council; Dr Lloyd Berkner, geophysicist and electrical engineer and executive secretary of the peace-time Research and Development Board which was under Bush‘s   control; Dr Carl Heiland, geophysi-cist and magnetic sciences expert from the Colorado School of Mines; Dr Horace Buele Van Valkenburgh, an inorganic chemist associated with the University of Colorado; and Dr Jerome Hunsaker, head of the       Department of Aeronautical         Engineering at MIT. These men gained access to the inside of the craft by smashing out a porthole window in the central turret that had been punctured in the crash. A pole had then been inserted through the window and used to nudge levers in the cabin, one of which had opened an entry ramp on the side of the disc. 

The sequence of the examination, disassembly and transportation of the disc to a secure facility on the Los Alamos atomic testing range 120 miles away is not repeated here. The Aztec crash has been covered in   detail in this report only because      it is one of the few that can be      pinpointed to a specific and publicly accessible site, one that still offers up tantalising clues to its remarkable history. And also because, once 

again, this early crash in the UFO timeline highlights the breadth of involvement of some of the leading scientific figures of the day. Canny journalist that he was, Frank Scully knew better than to invite a firestorm of controversy and retribution in 1950 by ticking off a checklist of America‘s Finest who had poked around one of the first flying saucers to fall to Earth. 




A  summons to attend a meeting with Russian dictator Josef  Stalin struck fear and even terror into the hearts of most of his countrymen. Visitors would pass through         numerous checkpoints and be searched for weapons before being shown into a plain, no-frills waiting room. A small cubbyhole before  Stalin‘s office door contained the last bodyguards. Initial conversation among waiting visitors usually died quickly, followed by a tense silence. One wartime visitor noticed .my neighbour wiped drops of sweat from his brow and dried his hands on a handkerchief….the receptionist called him by name, he went livid, wiped his trembling hands…picked up his file…and went with hesitant steps.. On the threshold  Stalin‘s secretary murmured final instruc-tions: .Don‘t get excited. Don‘t think about disagreeing with        anything. Comrade Stalin knows everything.. 
Whether the atmosphere was still this oppressive a few years later in 1948 when Sergei Korolev was called to a meeting with his        paranoiac leader is not clear. Korolev was making good progress as the leading designer in Russia‘s missile programme and would soon head up the country‘s whole space project. But he knew the unpredictability of the regime he served: years before he had been tortured by Stalin‘s secret police and imprisoned for six years on trumped-up charges. Now he was tentatively .rehabilitated.. As Korolev recounted years later to  fellow rocket scientist, Valeriy        Burdakov, Stalin greeted him then took him to a room where piles of UFO-related documents were spread out on a table. Some of the informa-tion was from Soviet spies in place in New Mexico at the time of the  reported flying saucer crashes. Korolev said, .Okay, I‘ll collect the materials and bring them back in two days.. Stalin, imbued with the     sensitivity of the documents, vetoed that idea. .No, you can‘t take any of these.. Instead Korolev was ordered to work in the room for as long as he needed. Stalin offered to supply translators and any other assistance.  
When he had finished his examina-tion, Korolev told Stalin that the  phenomenon was real and that UFOs did not appear to be manufactured in the United States or any other    country. Stalin thanked him, and told Korolev that his opinion was shared by a number of other specialists. 
This fascinating report only came to light after the fall of communism 

when two American TV journalists interviewed Burdakov in Moscow in 1993. Korolev‘s story dovetailed neatly with the information from leaked American archival documents and other sources, which suggest that the American atomic scientists at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, were intimately involved with the post-crash analysis of the craft that came down at Roswell and Aztec, New Mexico. It is clear from the         fragmentary picture that researchers have put together that leading       scientists were co-opted, if only briefly, from their work on the         H-bomb to give an opinion on the alien technology that had literally fallen into American hands. Korolev would surely not have ventured the bold view to Stalin that the reported UFOs were from outside Earth merely on the basis of aerial sighting reports. The purloined American documents (most likely photographic facsimiles) almost certainly dealt with the New Mexico crashes. And that makes for a juicy new ingredient in the historical debate about the deep and unresolved Soviet penetra-tion of the early American atomic bomb programme. 
History‘s celebrated .fall guy. for leaking the A-bomb design to the Russians (who exploded their first nuclear device in 1949) was British physicist Klaus Fuchs. But he had returned to England by the time of the Roswell recoveries in July, 1947, and Aztec the following March. One key Soviet mole remained active in America at the time, UK diplomat Donald Maclean, First Secretary at the British Embassy, who had wide access to files at the Atomic Energy Commission, in Washington. The AEC controlled the Los Alamos   installation and may have received records on the recovered craft.   

Maclean‘s stellar security clearance arose from his position as co-secretary of the Combined Policy Committee, which handled British, American and Canadian cooperation on the atomic bomb. He visited the AEC registry 12 times between    August 1947 and June 1948, often at night and always on his own.The object of Maclean‘s research was most likely atom bomb and H-bomb information that he could feed to his foreign spymasters, but there is a possibility that he may have come across UFO-related material as well. More likely, however, Stalin‘s most sensitive documents came directly from high-level Los Alamos sources who have never been conclusively identified. The VENONA decrypts of the late 1940s allowed the partial cracking of coded messages between Soviet diplomatic posts in America and the KGB in Moscow during the war years. These code breaks      confirmed retrospectively that there had been dozens of spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project during the war. The Korolev      revelation is a strobe from left field that lights up the murky world of Cold War espionage from a surpris-ing new angle, and suggests that Russian espionage continued at Los Alamos well into the post-war      period. 
The Soviets‘ seeming dependence on American material for the true state of play on flying saucers indicates that in 1948 they did not, at that time, have any crash recoveries of their own to provide nuts and bolts data. Why not? Highly respected American UFO researcher – and a nuclear physicist himself– Dr Stanton Friedman has commented perceptively, and with his usual droll frankness, on why New Mexico and the southern USA appear to have 

been the global magnet for close  approaching UFOs in the early years of the flying saucer era. 
=I make one assumption about all civilisations =out there‘: that they‘re concerned about their own survival and security. he said in an interview in 2003. .That being the case, you have to keep tabs on the primitives in the neighbourhood, but only close tabs – frequent visitations, detailed investigations – when they show signs of being able to bother you. At the end of World War II there were three signs that soon these idiot earthlings, this primitive society whose major activity is tribal war-fare…would be moving out –       assuming in a hundred years, which on a cosmic timescale is nothing.. These three signs, said Friedman, were nuclear weapons, V2 rockets, which America had brought back from war-ravaged Germany for test-ing, and powerful electronics, espe-cially advanced radar systems. .I don‘t think it‘s any coincidence at all that the only place on the planet where you could check out all three of these technologies in 1947 and ‘48 was south-east New Mexico.. New Mexico was the site of the first atomic bomb test; it was where V2 rockets and their upgrades were   being tested, and it was the location of the latest radar systems being used to track the rockets. .I would be flabbergasted if aliens weren‘t checking out the place.. 
We now know from the highly  credible William Hermann contacts in Summerville, South Carolina, in 1978 and 1979 that it appears the grays had been taken unawares by the new =lock-on‘ radar in use in New Mexico in the late 1940s. Hermann‘s pivotal contact of 18 March, 1978, appears to be one of the few times that the grays have 

spoken with an abductee on the basis of equality and a friendly exchange of in-formation. They told him that many years be-fore they had lost some of their craft because of interference with on-board systems from radar emissions. They said that even though the technology was, by their standards, primitive it could still be    disastrous if it locked on to their  machines for more than 90 seconds. That was why they were flying the sharp triangular movements that Hermann had observed and         photographed numerous times near Summerville. 


The Strain Starts to Show.
The years 1946-1948 marked one of the most turbulent periods in   American administrative history. Governmental structures which had been shaped for war-fighting were being disentangled and reconstituted to suit the conditions of peace, albeit under the dark cloud of an            intensifying Cold War. The          bureaucracy that had been hard-baked by the heat of global conflict into a game-winning machine was undergoing transformation. A new world was taking shape, and a busy Congress and plain talking President were squeezing the wet clay of the post-war American democracy into an interesting new architecture to sustain its existence in the years ahead. The branches of the military as well as the players in the          intelligence community were        involved in ferocious in-fighting and manoeuvring to ensure their survival on the best possible arrangements. Atomic energy was reassigned from 
military control to civilian oversight. In July, 1947, President Truman abolished the War Department and replaced it with the Department of Defense (at that time named the   National Military Establishment). The Air Force was to be split off from the army, and all of the services were to have their own civilian boss, a Secretary, sitting in Cabinet, under the coordination of a higher-level Secretary of Defense. A new foreign-focused intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was formed, replacing the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Pressure was building around the circumference of the free world from an implacable adversary bent on ideological conquest. The commu-nist menace posed a new set of     potentially lethal challenges; more unique, however, was an astonishing new threat that had arrived from the skies – aliens from outer space with an unknown agenda and technology that rendered the best defences as useless as a child‘s pop-gun with a flying cork. This was the last straw for men who had fought their way through a grim war and looked for-ward to the relaxation of peacetime.           
For those on the inside of the cover-up, with exposure to the shocking reality of alien cadavers and         incomprehensible space-age       componentry, the effect may well have been profoundly disorienting. John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for many years, talked about the psychological impact of coming face to face with the deeper realities of the UFO phe-nomenon – the inevitable shock to worldviews and the isolation from family and friends, among other symptoms of personal trauma. Key players in the defense establishment, as well as those who had merely helped on the ground at the crash 

recoveries, started cracking up. The Army Counter Intelligence Corps IPU report of the Roswell recovery (which leaked to the public in July, 1995) said that several of the mili-tary police who had been involved in the recovery had suffered nervous breakdowns, and one had committed suicide. At the top of the pyramid, Truman‘s new Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, began a slow      descent into mental fragmentation. Truman had promoted the incisive and personable Forrestal from his position as Secretary of the Navy to top dog as a political compromise to buy the navy‘s agreement to the new defence structure. Forrestal, 55 years old with a background as a highly successful New York investment banker, was catapulted into the heart of the enveloping weirdness. The CIC IPU Roswell report of 22 July, two weeks after the crash recovery, indicated that .with the pending   approval of James Forrestal as new Secretary of Defense, it is certain that he will be briefed on certain  aspects of the recovery..  
Forrestal took office on 17 Septem-ber and within a week had well and truly entered the twilight zone. On the 24th, he and Vannevar Bush met 
with Truman. 

It was to be an historic day in the annals of the hidden     history of the 20th century. At that meeting Truman prevailed upon Bush to rejoin government as the military‘s science and technology research chief, a role that he had filled so successfully during the war. Bush agreed, and the White House announced the appointment the next day.  
At the meeting the top-secret report to Truman of five days earlier was certainly discussed. This 17-page document (which leaked in 1996) was prepared by a panel of 16     military and civilian appointees in the wake of the Roswell recoveries. It recommended an operation called Majestic Twelve as a .fully funded and operational Top Secret Research and Development intelligence    gathering agency. dealing with the UFO issue. This recommendation was approved at the meeting in the Oval Office. The President then authorised Forrestal to begin funding and organizing the new ad hoc group in a clear written directive that same day. A memorandum dated 24 Sep-tember marked top-secret .eyes only. (which leaked in 1983) set the world on a fateful course in two   succinct paragraphs: .As per our  recent conversation on this matter, you are hereby authorized to proceed with all due speed and caution upon your undertaking. Truman wrote guardedly. .Hereafter this matter shall be referred to only as Operation       Majestic Twelve. It continues to be my feeling that any future considera-tions relative to the ultimate         disposition of this matter should rest solely with the Office of the      President following appropriate    discussions with yourself, Dr.Bush and the Director of Central           Intelligence..  

On the same day as this crucial meeting with Truman on 24 Septem-ber the Secretary of Defense        registered a Smith & Wesson       revolver with the Metropolitan     Police Department of Washington. He was entering a dark place of the mind, and a handgun clearly        provided comfort. If there was a gnawing undercurrent eroding     Forrestal‘s composure it may have been crystalized in a letter he wrote to an acquaintance three months later. .The great danger in any  country is for people to believe that there is anything absolute about    security. he wrote. Security ought to be .stricken from the language., he commented darkly, and replaced with the word .risk.. .Air power, atomic bombs, wealth – by itself none of these can give any security.. The new Defense Secretary had good reason to doubt the               invincibility of his country‘s arma-ments against elusive new intruders. It was a pessimism he wisely avoided   sharing with his fellow citizens. 
Forrestal was a Catholic who had to reconcile a secret new cosmology with the formal structure of his     religious beliefs. In this challenge he was not alone among the =in crowd.‘ But he was unusual, if not unique, in the degree of immersion he would undergo in this unsettling and off-beat business, a business that he could not share with friends or    family – he and his wife had lived separate lives for many years – and which was being vehemently de-bunked to the millions of Americans that he nominally served. 

If the most far-fetched of scenarios could be dreamed up to search out a man‘s mental weaknesses this was it: a   farrago of assertions and evasions that in the years ahead, long after Forrestal was gone, would stretch and twist and double back on itself like a creature swallowing its tail. It was the dawn of a dark age in     epistemology, when knowledge and anti-knowledge would cannibalize each other, when disinformation   became information, lies became truth, and legerdemain became     disclosure. In fairness to Forrestal and Bush it must be said, in        mitigation, that they could not     possibly have conceived that the cover-up would persist for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. The interminability of the arrangement that they and Truman put in place would, in time, become as            astonishing as the secret being     hidden. 

The invisible torch would pass from President to President in some private masonic elevation that followed the Oath of Office. It was a perpetual Ground Hog Day at every changing of the guard where those imprisoned on the inside could not back out of history‘s most ridiculous and complicated concealment, and those imprisoned on the outside who had seen through the charade,      battered in vain on the walls of an archaic paradigm.  

Forrestal had other heavy burdens of office to cope with – the Berlin    airlift crisis, fatal flaws in the design of his job, budget disputes, and dis-loyal behaviour from subordinates, most notably his Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington. Symington was almost certainly in on the cover-up as well, especially after the Aztec crash recovery of March, 1948, and another in the south in July. By then the Air Force had been split off from the army, and important field reports would end up on Symington‘s desk as well.  

In the month of the Aztec crash,  Forrestal‘s aides started noticing that their boss was developing a range of 
nervous mannerisms. His mind drifted elsewhere during meetings and he lost the plot. On 7 July his department was mobilised on       another secret salvage operation that was not only out of this world, but out of the United States as well. An alien disc crashed just across the  border from Laredo, Texas, in the wilderness of the Nueva Leon region of Mexico. The American military bluffed the Mexicans that a rocket had gone astray and recovered the badly damaged craft whose external skin had been totally obliterated. A badly burnt alien body was body-bagged back to a growing collection of exotic cadavers in the US.  
During 1948 Forrestal‘s anxieties worsened. Mired in this dream-like ambiguity he began believing that he was being followed and his phone tapped. His butler noticed that when-ever the doorbell rang he would go to the window and peer out secretly. By the time Truman was returned to power in the election of November 1948, Forrestal‘s phobias were top of the agenda in the Washington gossip mill. His breakdown and growing differences with Truman led to the President easing him out of office the following March as part of a clean-out of key figures in the old administration. On 29 March,      Forrestal was honoured at a farewell ceremony at the House of      Representatives, where he made three brief but gracious speeches. He seemed to be in good shape that day. After the reception Stuart           Symington, who had retained his  position as Air Force Secretary, asked if he could ride back to the Pentagon in the same car. .There is something I want to talk to you about. he told his former boss. No one knows what was discussed, but back at the Pentagon a short time later an aide found Forrestal sitting 

at his desk staring at the wall. His mind seemed to be far away. When the aide had roused him from his deep state, Forrestal looked at him and responded, .You are a loyal   fellow.. He repeated that statement several times over the next few hours. By evening Forrestal‘s      condition had worsened and he was talking suicide. That night he was flown to Florida for an enforced rest with friends. After landing at the air-port he greeted Robert Lovett with the statement, .Bob, they‘re after me.. Four days later Forrestal was flown back to Washington and ad-mitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment. Seven weeks later, early in the morning of 22 May he died after falling from a 16th floor window at the hospital. The cause of death was ruled to be suicide, despite some strange circumstances         surrounding his 2 a.m. plunge. 
On Forrestal‘s ill-fated last day at the Pentagon, after his ride with      Symington, he had left the building in the early evening to return home to Georgetown. As he stood in the garage he was bewildered to realize that he no longer had access to a government limousine. An aide    arranged for Vannevar Bush‘s  chauffeur to take him home. Bush was working late that night at the Pentagon in his role as chairman of the Research and Development Board. But despite the hours he was putting in, Bush‘s own mental condi-tion had gone through a difficult  passage as well. 
Early in 1948, around the time of the Aztec UFO crash, he began to get headaches. Bush had not had time to swoop in on the hurriedly executed July, 1947, Roswell recoveries (a largely intact craft and a second   debris field many miles away). The Aztec, New Mexico, retrieval in the last week of March appeared to be 

the first on-site operation of its type that Bush attended. With his usual organ-isational skill the 58-year-old had pulled to-gether a top-class scientific team in record time to attend the crash site. Here, atop a mesa in an isolated  canyon 12 miles from the small town of  Aztec, Bush and his people     inspected the crashed disc and      supervised the disposal of a large number of alien bodies.  
Bush was the son of a Protestant minister but had followed a more practical life path as an engineer, academic and consummate science administrator. Now perhaps, after his return to Washington from this mind-bending experience, life‘s larger questions, which had been bread and butter to the father he worshipped, began to obtrude into his own       rational world. Certainly, the man had numerous frustrations in his new job at the Pentagon, and these weighed upon him heavily. It was also a time when a new generation was taking over. Bush‘s biographer, Gregg Pascal Zachary, has made these points clearly in analyzing his subject‘s weariness and depression. But, as with Forrestal, it is fair to speculate that the pressure of a    double life might have contributed to a deepening mood. He and Forrestal were, after all, two of the architects of arguably the most remarkable      conspiracy that had ever been put in place.  
Deception and the deep inner      solitude of a common phantasm were part of the cryptic curriculum vitae that they shared. It was a    

double life not just in the sense of living with the mother of all secrets but in a far more active sense, where the nature of reality itself was being denied with energy, where         modernity‘s Primary Fact was being withheld from the great unwashed for their own good, and even dumped on. Paternalism and         imperiousness came easily to Bush, judging from his biography, so the wartime strictures of secrecy were routine. But this new policy of hide-and-deny was suppression and PR flimflam on an epochal scale. It was a sign of the hermetic seal placed around the awesome secret – and the deep internalisation that it required of its practitioners – that no sign of its footprints in history were uncov-ered by Zachary in his researches in the early 1990s. Not a single line in official archives or personal records, not a word out of place in any      interview with scores of friends, family and contemporaries indicated that Bush had any connection with the wonderful and wacky world of     flying saucers. The historiography of the 20th century was being subverted by government fiat.  
It was a sign of Bush‘s balanced  personality and chipper home life that the dip in his spirits was not as deep as that plumbed by Forrestal. Did he attend the Mexico crash in July? We don‘t know. What we do know is that Majestic Twelve had only so many fingers to plug the dike. When was the whole thing   going to give way? When was one of these flawed contraptions going to crash at the Super Bowl? But there was no levity to be salvaged from the crisis. Bush suffered sleepless nights. He seemed to live on his 
nerves. In September, 1948, even Forrestal, far gone in his own tragic journey, noticed Bush‘s state. He commented to an acquaintance that Bush was displaying .a certain amount of nervous and  physical in-stability. I mean, not his mind. said Forrestal, .but just he‘s drawn pretty fine, I think.. Bush‘s anxiety reached such levels that he thought he might have Parkinson‘s disease or a brain tumour. He underwent tests and X-rays but nothing untoward showed up. As an act of therapy, he headed off on a fishing trip in the Montana wilderness with a friend, Caryl Haskins, and a professional guide. The three wended their way on horseback along trails and streams, fishing by day and pitching tents at night. Haskins noticed that his companion stayed quiet for long periods. Staring at the flickering campfire under a canopy of stars, Bush seemed to prefer the silence. Perhaps, like his doomed colleague at the Pentagon, he was inhabiting his own zone of ambiguity, but unlike Forrestal he was coming to terms with it.  
Here we have, at the dawn of     modern history‘s most notorious  collusion against freedom of         information and knowledge, two men who appeared to pay the price for their deceitful obscurantism.       Successive generations of the world‘s citizens have paid another price for their long enduring     handiwork – lives of blithe and    unwitting provincialism, parked away in a corner of a far-flung     galaxy, quietly, steadily destroying the planet they stand on for want of  a wider, humbler paradigm.