The modern-day UFO era celebrates the half-century mark this year with the 50th anniversary of the Roswell, New Mexico crash and pilot Ken Arnold's sightings in Washington. At the National UFO and Unexplained Phenomena Conference in October in Minneapolis-St. Paul, UFOlogists pondered the government coverup and secrecy in a variety of fascinating presentations.
Speakers cautioned the audience not to believe everything they see and hear from the government about UFOs as further admissions come out. Just because Bill Clinton says it on television, don't believe it, warned Robyn Quail, abduction researcher.
Author-researcher Kevin Randle finds it odd that the government is now putting more manpower into its UFO public relations efforts. Three or four years ago the government didn't care what we, as a bunch of UFO nuts, believed. Suddenly, they're actively working to convince people Roswell was nothing more than a balloon. We've actually gotten their attention and interest, and they're working to refute what we say, he said, adding If Roswell isn't the event that we think it is, why do they care what we believe?
Randle suggested all the inconsistent testimony surrounding the Roswell crash is challenging for researchers. The government isn't the biggest problem now. It's all these other people coming forward and trying to cash in on the Roswell bandwagon, he said, citing the alien autopsy film fiasco, claims of debris and false witnesses. He said that as the public increasingly accepts the idea of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, eliminating the ridicule curtain that the military and government lowered in the 1940s is the task at hand.
Nuclear physicist and author Stan Friedman doesn't forecast any stunning revelations from the government anytime soon. As for Roswell and its 50th anniversary, Friedman foresees no rejection by governmental agencies of their original weather-balloon statement. They're playing hardball about Roswell, about every other aspect. If they weren't playing hardball, why wouldn't the secretary of the Air Force give a blanket amnesty to anybody who wants to talk about what happened in July 1947, since it was a non-event. They haven't done that, he said.
Friedman doesn't necessarily adhere to the notion of a secret government, but stated, I would say there's a group that's the equivalent of Majestic 12 (MJ-12). It's obviously a different type of group. His personal hope, like many UFO researchers today, is that the floodgates to the cosmic Watergate will open soon.
There appear signs that bit by bit, some cracks of light are appearing.
A case in point might be what NASA has recently stated regarding the possibility of life of Mars and the potential for life on the Moon. In August 1996, NASA confirmed the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago. Meanwhile, the debate over photographing the face on Mars continues to be downplayed by NASA while other researchers make their own interpretations.
In 1974, Stan Friedman speculated in a white paper entitled Flying Saucers and Physics that, given the lack of atmosphere on Mars, an underground civilization or base might be reasonable. Fast forward twenty two years, and NASA concedes the possibility of life on Mars and the Moon. Albeit a probe is scheduled to land this July on the sub-zero-degree surface of Mars, a mission to return samples to Earth isn't scheduled until 2005.
Scores of researchers such as Timothy Good, Richard Hoagland and Stan Friedman are convinced that NASA is engaged in UFO research behind the scenes. Moreover, many UFOlogists believe, with intelligent reasoning, hard, cold facts and declassified documents, that a formal government policy for debunking UFO reports exists as well as a secret, centralized command structure to deal with the UFO situation.
Kevin Randle is one researcher who says the government is reverse engineering any saucer technology it might possess. He drew an analogy to going back in time to Medieval England with a VCR, a power pack and a TV. It's always possible the technology we're confronted with is so far beyond us, we don't understand it yet, he said adding, Last century's magic is this century's science.
Certainly, it seems that the government, through its own agencies and the media, is allowing bits of information it holds about UFO and extraterrestrial life to be disseminated. The national mainstream media is certainly influenced, if not controlled to some degree, by the government and those in political power.
In an on-line conference last summer, Scott Wolfe, author of Extraterrestrial UFOs and World Governments, suggested the government is perhaps entering another phase by allowing more shows which depict the UFO phenomenon. It was not like this over the last 20 years and they (the government) are rapidly trying to design their next scenario for unveiling the cosmic Watergate. So hold on to your seats, urged Wolfe.
Many cyberspace attendees asked Wolfe why the government is covering up its UFO involvement. He said that out of many reasons, one clearly stands out, Having to admit that they (the government) can't control them (aliens), and the government is terrified of having to admit that to the general public.
It's more than coincidence scores of theatrical movie releases and T.V. shows currently depict UFOs, abductions and unexplained phenomena, rife with high-drama portrayals of involvement by government agencies. On the heels of Independence Day, an avalanche of movies depict Hollywood's version of E.T.s and spaceship invasions. The boob tube can't stay away from UFO and related unexplained topics with both fact-inspired and fiction-based shows, a la Sightings, X-Files and Dark Skies.
Friedman noted the pick up in the UFO craze. What drives Hollywood is greed. Nothing more, nothing less, he said. As far as the validity of film treatments, Friedman, like other UFOlogists, implies there's more here than fun and games. Who needs to do research? Friedman flippantly said of the movie business.
Outside of the movies, no saucer has yet landed on the White House lawn but researcher Karl Pflock told conferees of famous radar sightings around Washington, D.C. during the Eisenhower administration in 1952. It was a wild night. A week later, it happened again, said Pflock. The event precipitated one of the largest press conferences held by the military since World War II, Pflock said. Typical, however, following the government's initial public explanations of a sighting such as to weather balloons, little or no follow-up or explanation of its subsequent investigations is offered.
However, on the bright side, the U.S. government is allowing the selective release of old information, namely documents which were previously classified. Friedman suggested the re-election of Clinton goes a long way toward making people aware of what's going on. He cites Clinton's push for a new executive order in his first term which made it tougher to keep documents classified, reversing the trend of the Bush and Reagan years. The new executive order says: if in doubt, declassify after 25 years. The old one said: if in doubt classify, said Friedman.
Friedman lauds the fact that Clinton is the first post-war President. He has already set a precedent by releasing loads of nuclear information, all these illegal experiments on people. It wasn't on his watch. He wasn't taking a risk. People think our rulers should be open and certainly he's from a generation that thinks that very strongly, said Friedman.
Still, the problem of validating old documents and testimony remains. Author, researcher and editor Jerome Clark gave illustrations of the rumors and official-looking, but false documents related to MJ-12 which have freely circulated. Besides wasting everyone's time and throwing UFOlogists into confusion, such disinformation serves to take investigators off the scent of potentially genuine UFO secrets, such as those surrounding the Roswell incident. It also encourages the freelance disinformers, those who spread observed tales of trees with aliens, concentrations camps on Mars and other rubbish, he said.
Researcher Pflock is among many diligent UFO researchers today who are examining decades-old cases. I think there's gold in these old cases. That's been my focus these days, he said.
Nevertheless, UFO researchers hot on the trail of decades-old and current cases find their information quests leading to closed doors within the government. Why? Because it presents the proverbial lose-lose situation. For example, it's no secret that the federal government would have much to lose by coming out now with more Roswell information, as opposed to disinformation, given its celebrity status. The notion of paying for protection, read taxes, is lost when the U.S. Air Force is forced to admit it is ultimately incapable of protecting our skies from a UFO. If a key function of the government is to maintain civil order, then it's easy to understand why the government won't disclose the reality of UFOs as highly advanced technology, wrote a UFO researcher connected with NASA.
Friedman too adheres to the lose-lose theory. A Pandora's box of woes have the potential to unfold: disrupted social institutions, economic uncertainty, national security issues (i.e., giving other countries and governments information), and so on.
Meanwhile, Clark takes a stance that the government or military involvement in UFOs is an extreme, fringe view. Clark raised some interesting questions at the conference in separating UFO fact from fiction, and discussed darkside theories.
In mentioning one source connected to Roswell, he said, If events happened as alleged, no one will be brought to account for it. That's not because there's a lawless secret government, but because counter-intelligence operatives know that they can operate with relative impunity when they are dealing with individuals on society's fringes.
Clark drew analogies between the contactees of the 1960s and 1970s and those that today hang their hats on government conspiracy theories. There's no reason to believe that the major darksiders are government agents, but it is reasonable to deduce that if they didn't exist, the agencies responsible for the cover-up would probably have to invent them. Whatever their differences, the early contactees and today's darksiders do have one major common element: an audience to which it does not occur to ask the harder obvious questions. For example: where's your evidence? he stated. Clark then wryly hinted that when one does ask a lot of questions and express disbelief, that one could be deemed immediately suspect and thus an agent of conspiracy.
In concurrence was Kevin Randle, who said in an interview that indeed the lunatic fringe presents a problem as some of the wild contactee stories harm legitimate UFO research and strain the public's credulity.
Interestingly, at the time of freewheeling contactee and early abduction stories, the government was becoming increasingly unified and tight-lipped in its UFO policy. The (Robertson) panel went on to urge a policy of official debunking of UFO reports, said Clark. That recommendation was followed from then on until the closing the Air Force's public UFO project in 1969. With the contact stories, we see the opposite of traditional Air Force policy, not the debunking, but the act of encouraging of the most outlandish UFO rumors of all, he said.
It's also probably no mere coincidence that following the formation of the Robertson panel and its edict to debunk UFO reports in the media that the Brookings Institution was enlisted by NASA. By the late 1950s, one conclusion of the Brookings Report was that any discovery of alien artifacts on other planets may have a disastrous impact on society. Again, it's a lose-lose situation.
As Clark and other UFOlogists suggest, we owe it to ourselves to keep asking hard questions about evidence to debunkers, charlatans and respected researchers alike.
Marcia Jedd www.marciajedd.com is a journalist and marketing researcher. As a journalist her specialties are earth-bound transportation and travel. She watches the skies from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
