X Files Opened: NSA's UFO Investigations Unearthed

X Files Opened: The National Security Agency's UFO Investigations Unearthed Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
SPACE.com
33 minutes ago

There is one question that persistently circles the community of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) true-believers: If the government has nothing to hide, UFO fans often ask, then why is it keeping so many UFO records under lock and key?

"Well, it turns out that the government does have something to hide, but it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.

A document has surfaced that had been stamped "Top Secret Umbra"--the codeword for the highest, most sensitive category of communications intelligence.

The once-classified affidavit was originally filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in a 1980 lawsuit to justify the withholding of records on UFOs. The document is largely declassified--with certain sections cut out, ostensibly to protect employee names, and keep NSA technologies, skills, and foreign connections out of the limelight.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20051116/sc_space/xfilesopenedthenationalsecurityagencysufoinvestigationsunearthed

The Government couldn't admit they had the same paranoias as the Public, and it couldn't admit that it didn't have a clue as to what the UFOs were. So it kept its mouth shut and acted smug; giving the impression that they knew all about it but were "protecting" the people.

Not only do UFOs get classified, so do the blunders of the powerful.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

--p!

The Cold War was fought with a lot of mind games. What better psychological edge than letting the Russkies think we had extra-terrestrial technology?

The BIG "black op" was played on the millions of people who were entranced by the UFO explanation.

Jacques Vallee, who was J. Allen Hynek's research assistant, wrote several books toward the end of his career as a UFO researcher about a number of things in UFOlogy that disturbed him. He thought the phenomenon was real, but not the explanation that they were alien spacecraft. But that's actually beside the point -- he came to the conclusion that UFOism had become like an old mystery cult, and that a number of unethical groups were using it to simply mess with people.

The potential for political exploitation was what worried Vallee greatly. He was a child of the Second World War who grew up in post-war France. A great deal of Nazi ideology came from "tweaked" versions of previous occult beliefs, which had first been exposed by Pawels and Bergier, who were, ironically, pop occult writers in France (see "Morning of the Magicians"). Hatred didn't sell all that well for the early NSDAP, but the promise of being privy to mysteries did, and that was the route the Nazis used with the self-defined elitists.

The Russians also played mind games with UFOs, "psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain," and the like. Russian peasants had been very superstitious; the mind-gamers in the Kremlin tried to see if the same response could be obtained from the New Soviet Man by giving superstition a scientific veneer. It didn't work all that well (since education was then universal and compulsory, and was heavy on scientific thinking), but at least it didn't have to be covered up. The fake psychics picked up their paychecks and went home. The real psychics, if there were any, were sent to Siberia, where I suppose they were teased about not forseeing their fates. And no one was the wiser.

There always seems to be a grain of truth in a lie, and there are many unstudied phenomena in the universe. That the strong should try to frighten the weak with the very things that frighten them is one of those phenomena that need more study right away, because it's a growth industry.

--p!

He was a nice fellow. I studied Astronomy in a program he ran.

Do you know what made him turn from a Debunker to a "believer", so to speak? I never understood what he discovered or saw that changed him.

Basically, he found cases that could not be explained. UFOs that refused to become identified objects. And he had testimony from far too many honest and unimpeachable people to believe that it was the result of hoaxters.

Basically, he entered Project Bluebook with his scientific integrity intact and left it the same way.

But note that he never believed in little green men; He simply believed that there was something or some things that people observed that needed to be studied.

It's too bad that he's still not around. The scientific community could use someone like him.

By the way, I've been making frequent use of your website for years now. Keep up the good work. :thumbsup:

And I wish he was around still, too... Though I think he'd be about 100 now.

I think he nailed it on the head.

L-