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by Grant Cameron
from
ExopoliticsJournal Website
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Grant Cameron became involved in
extraterrestrial-related phenomena research in May 1975
with a personal sighting near Carman, Manitoba about 25
miles north of the Canada-US border. Over the next 18
months hundreds of sightings were reported,
 and
Grant spent months photographing a series of strange
objects and interviewing hundreds of witnesses who were
involved.
Thus
began a 28 years commitment to the subject. After
composing a manuscript about the 1975-76 sightings, he
moved on to research the work of the legendary
Wilbert B. Smith. Smith headed up the Canadian
government’s flying saucer investigation known as
Project Magnet, which
ran from 1950 to 1954.
During the Smith research Grant learned of the former
Penn State University president Dr. Eric Walker, who was
identified by Dr. Robert Sarbacher as a key person
inside the Cover-up. Cameron teamed up with T. Scott
Crain to research and write UFOs, MJ-12, and the
Government published by MUFON. Cameron then turned his
research interests to the relationship of U.S.
Presidents to the extraterrestrial issue. He made 13
trips to the U.S. National Archives and most of the
Presidential archives looking for relevant documents.
A
major contribution of his work was a FOIA submission to
the White House Office of Science and Technology which
yielded nearly 1,000 pages of disclosure documents from
the Clinton administration. He has lectured in Canada
and the U.S. on the 1975-76 Manitoba sightings, Wilbert
Smith and the president/UFO connection.
He
lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His principal
website is:
www.presidentialufo.com
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Part 1
January 2008
X-Conference 2004
First Annual Exopolitics Expo
April 17-18, 2004
Since the modern age of Ufology began in 1947 there have been a
number of occasions when people representing various segments of the
government have approached people in the media and in the UFO
community.
They have offered up clear glimpses of information that
indicate the UFO phenomenon is and extraterrestrial phenomena and
that the government has known it right from the beginning.
The
importance of these government approaches is that the government was
not required to do it. They simply could have continued to carry on
as if nothing had happened. I am not going to spend my time dwelling
on the possible government motives for these glimpses. My intention
is simply to list the examples and allow interested people to
discuss it later.
The possible reasons for what is going on include:
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Steering investigators away from
the truth
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Undermining the credibility of
subject and researcher
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Controlling the researcher and the flow of leaks on UFOs, or a
controlled way of releasing the truth behind the phenomena while
keeping control.
Finally, before I begin I would like to mention that I think they
are two different methods used by government to get the information
out. The Democrats appeared to make direct efforts to force out the
documents and stories. The republicans, on the other hand, appeared
to use back door cloak and dagger methods to get out the word. Now,
let me move on to brief glimpses of disclosure that began to appear
at the end of the Truman and beginning of the Eisenhower
administration.
The first person to be closely tied into government for glimpses
into what was going on was the famous contactee George Adamski. He
claimed to have had a number of contacts inside government who
helped “cooperate in the collection attempt to get photographs of
the strange craft moving through space.”
Adamski listed a group of
government contacts and special government privileges he had been
granted.
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An association with 4 U.S government scientists from Point Loma
Naval Electronic Laboratory.
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An association with a similar group of scientists in Pasadena.
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Adamski’s key contact outside the United States was a former
intelligence officer with the British Army.
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According to a source of
Jacques Vallee’s - in Australia Adamski
was traveling on a passport bearing special privileges.
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Adamski claimed he had a pass to enter the White House.
Very clearly involved in this early disclosure initiative was movie
producer Walt Disney. The story of the incident was told by one of
his key animators Ward Kimball.
At the 1979 MUFON UFO symposium in San Francisco, Kimball told how
the American government had approached Walt Disney, prior to the
Soviet Sputnik launch, to make a UFO documentary. The reason given
to Disney for the documentary was to help acclimatize the American
people to the reality of extraterrestrials.
 Kimball stated in the
speech that around 1955 or 1956 the USAF contacted Walt Disney. They
asked him to cooperate on a documentary about UFOs. As a part of the
deal, the USAF offered to supply actual UFO footage, which Disney
would be allowed to use in his film.
According to Kimball’s account of events Disney went along with the
USAF plan, which was not that unusual.
The use of Walt Disney
cartoons, after all had been suggested by the 1953 CIA Robertson UFO
panel as part of a public-education program involving the mass media
to "strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminate the
aura of mystery it has acquired."
Once Walt Disney had finished his
meetings with the USAF, he began to work on the requested UFO
documentary for the public.
He asked his animators to think up what
an alien would look like. Meanwhile, he waited for the Air Force to
deliver on the promised film. After some period of time the Air
Force re-contacted Disney and told him the film offer had to be
withdrawn. There would be no UFO footage as promised.
Kimball told researcher Stanton Friedman that once he found out
there would be no delivery of UFO film; he personally spoke with an
Air Force Colonel who told him,
“There indeed was plenty of UFO
footage, but that neither Ward, nor anyone else, was going to get
access to it.”
This caused Disney to end the UFO documentary
project.
Recent information indicates that Disney may actually have gotten
some film and didn’t use it. This story comes from a prominent UK
photographer Mike Maloney. Mike Maloney is the Group Chief
Photographer at Mirror Group Newspapers, a fellow with both the
Royal Photographic Society and the British Institute of Professional
Photographers. Maloney has won many awards, 96 by one count,
including Press Photographer of the Year three times.
In the 1970s, Maloney was dining with the head of Disney, and four
of the original nine Disney animators while on a trip to the Disney
Corporation in Los Angeles. While this was going on Maloney was
introduced to another man, identified in one account a "well-known
Disney employee."
The man offered to show Maloney some unusual film footage at his
house. When Maloney saw it he described it as "old footage of UFOs,"
and "two beings that he was told were aliens."
UFO investigator Georgina Bruni interviewed Mike Maloney about his
early 1970s encounter at Disney. She described what Maloney told her
about the aliens he had been shown on the film:
One, which appeared to be dead, was laid out on a table - or slab,
the other was clearly alive and moving around on the floor. He was
given no information as to the source of the footage, which he was
told was “top secret", but he was in no doubt that it was a genuine
piece of old film.
Mike described it as being similar to the alien
autopsy footage that had been shown on television. At no time did he
say it was the same, just similar. Of the footage he personally
viewed, he said: ‘If the film that I saw was a fake, it was a
brilliant fake.’
At exactly the same time as Disney was being offered his UFO film
for a documentary the USAF was busy helping Clarence Greene and
Russell Rouse to produce a 92-minute documentary titled "UFO" was
released in May 1956.
Three top Air Force USAF officials Albert M. Chop, Major Dewey J. Fournet, Captain
Edward Ruppelt, provided technical assistance to
Greene and Rouse. The three key officials had many meeting with the
producers.
Greene told researcher Robert Barrow:
"Together we went into a lengthy and exhaustive study of reports,
various documents and affidavits of UFO sightings and reports from
radar experts which, with some heretofore top secret motion
pictures, in color, of flying saucers, form the basis of the film."
Most importantly Greene and Rouse obtained two key UFO films. The
two films, both showing daytime UFOs in flight were the Great Falls
(Montana film which showed two objects) and the Tremonton (Utah film
which showed 12 objects). The films had been analyzed and presented
to the CIA Robertson UFO Panel in January 1953 as the best
photographic evidence held by the USAF related to UFOs.
Following
their appearance at the Robertson panel the Air Force chose to keep
the two films classified. Just in time for the documentary the films
were suddenly declassified.
Nixon Administration
Let me set the scene.
In December 1969 the United States government
officially pulled out of UFO investigation, by shutting down
Project
Blue Book.
For the Air Force, who had run the investigation, it was
the end to the worse public relations issue they had to deal with.
Every time the newspaper wrote a UFO story, an
 Air Force spokesman
had been forced to go in front of the media microphones and make up
some bizarre new natural phenomena to explain the reported UFO. It
was something that the Air Force dreaded.
Lt. Colonel Hector Quintanilla Jr., a former Chief of Project Blue
Book, for example wrote a manuscript on his days investigating UFOs
for the Air Force. He called it “UFOs: An Air Force Dilemma.” He had
wanted to call it “UFOs: A $20,000,000 Fiasco.”
The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) had concerned itself
with real technical problems dealing with real technical problems
dealing with our national security. Their engineers and scientists
are top shelf and a very proud group. Little did they know that a
pseudo scientific project was about to be dropped in their laps…on a
long term basis it turned out to be a monumental headache for all
its Commanders…at times it was just pure hell…ATIC Commanders would
cringe on hearing the term “Flying Saucers.”
When the project was shut down, this PR nightmare was over. Never
again would the Air Forced be forced to explain UFOs by putting an
officer in front of media microphones to explain the latest reported
sighting. If they wanted to investigate UFOs, they could now do so
in absolute secrecy without the unwanted publicity.
In Canada, the government officially shut down the military
involvement with UFOs about the same time as in the United States.
There has not been a peep from
 them on the subject since. A UFO
researcher looking for UFO answers inside the Canadian government
files wouldn’t even know where to start.
So it is extremely
important to note that the Pentagon OFFICIALLY contacted producers
Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler in 1973 to do a documentary on
UFOs.
I consider the Emenegger story to be perhaps the most
important case in Ufology. This approach by the Pentagon was
extremely important because they didn’t have to do it. It is
extremely important because by doing so they risked ending up in
front of media microphones again explaining their interest and
involvement into UFOs.
Why after getting out of the UFO nightmare in 1969, did the
government jump back in with both feet in 1973?
The 1973 event began
when Emenegger was working as the creative director for Grey
Advertising in Los Angeles. He and his partner Allen Sandler were
invited to Norton Air Force Base to discuss a series of
documentaries film on advanced research projects. As the
negotiations continued it became apparent that the two military
officials wanted one to be a documentary on UFOs.
We went to Norton Air Force Base to discuss other things, among them
3-D moving holography, laser and cancer all of the R&D advance
research – ARPA kind of projects, and the UFO thing was brought up
to us, which I just couldn’t believe, but said “Oh, we’ll just go
along with it.” And one conversation led to another, a contact with
the Pentagon. Everyone couldn’t have been more open about what we
were doing. Anyone along the line could have questioned, and said –
and I expected them to say, “Like – what the hell are you guys
talking about."
On the 1988 UFO documentary “UFO Cover-up Live” Emenegger said that
Paul Shartle, Security Manager and Chief of Requirements for the
Audio-Visual Program the base was the first to describe a film of a
filmed encounter between aliens and base officials at Holloman Air
Force base.
“While discussing several of the subjects, UFOs came up.
Paul here told us about a film of an alien craft at Holloman Air
Force Base three years earlier.”
Shartle described what was on the film during his appearance on the
documentary,
Shartle: I saw footage of three disc shaped crafts. One of the
crafts landed and two went away.
Question: Why did it land?
Shartle: It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the
way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods. A
sliding door opened. A ramp was extended and out came three aliens.
Question: What did they look like?
Shartle: Well, they were human size, had an odd gray complexion and
a pronounced nose. They wore tight fitting jump suits, thin
headdresses that appeared to be communications devices, and in their
hand they held a translator, I was told. A Holloman base commander
and other Air Force officials went out to greet them.
Emenegger and Sandler were offered the film of the alien base
encounter for the documentary that they had been asked to make for
the Pentagon. Negotiations ensued and involved meetings right in the
Pentagon where Emenegger and Sandler did not even have to sign in.
Emenegger described the situation in a 1994 Texas presentation for
the Electric Viewpoint.
We headed for the Pentagon and we walked into the building – I
remember the two of us, and for some reason we were herded by two
plain clothes men into a little narrow room with fluorescent lights
over it and I just remember, and some man sitting behind a desk and
he pointed at us and he said,
“We’re very concerned about you
bringing up the subject of UFOs. He said it causes when people like
you put these things on the air it causes the phone lines – it ties
up our phone lines. It is not part of our duty, our national
defense”, and on and on.
I was under these fluorescent lights
watching these three plain clothes men. I thought I was going to die
there for a minute.
But again my partner had enough sense to say,
“Heh! We were invited
by Mr. Hatch by Colonel Coleman", and they said “Okay, well just a
warning.”
So we went of to meet Colonel Coleman. Now he’s the one
that looks like Hemmingway with the beard walking through the E-ring
at the Pentagon. The first thing he says to us was,
“You know if you
come across information or technology which is against the interest
of our national defense - you can be fined and imprisoned.”
So it was
like warning #2.
Then we went into his inner office, and a strange thing happened. He
said,
“Come on boys. Sit down. Let me tell you something.”
Everyone in these Pentagon production meetings had a chance to
protest the idea but no one did. Emenegger explained,
Well, they all had a chance. As a matter of fact, you know, one of
our agreements was to go over the script at the Pentagon, and if
there was any question about anything that they had the right to ask
about it. Strangely enough, no one even questioned the whole thing
about the landing at Holloman Air Force Base – like, “Well OK.”
It all unfolded. One would call another. For instance Coleman said,
“Hold on” as we were sitting in his office. He would put a call into
(General) George (Weinbrenner) and say.
“Do you want to talk to
these guys?”
A day later I think we went down into the bunker, and
there confronted George. We couldn’t have – I think I was pretty
straightforward. My first question was,
“What about the landing at
Holloman Air Force Base.”
He kind of said, “Well, I’ll tell you.”
 The two men were told of a film that had been shot at Holloman Air
Force Base we here an alien ship had landed. An alien got out of the
crafts and met with officials at the base. The group then moved down
the tarmac to a base building.
Emenegger was promised 3200 feet of film from this film that could
be placed in his documentary to help make the people aware of that
fact that UFOs did exist and there had been official contact between
the government and the extraterrestrials. Emenegger and Sandler were
offered other UFO film for the documentary. One example was a Top
Secret film involving a missile launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base
that was tracked by UFOs.
We were given a film - Top Secret - it was still Top Secret on it –
Quintanilla’s name was on it, of a launching at Vandenberg of which
three cameras followed the one missile take-off. Behind it you saw
two little white - looked like transparent moons sort of just
trailing and following it their way but from every camera - no
matter what position - so it wasn’t a reflection.
We had Bob Baker
who was the guy who did the 1952 Robertson Panel guy. Anyway Bob
Baker was very well known at that time. So he came in and analyzed
it and said it’s a million to one that it’s anything but - its not
Venus - it’s not a reflection - it’s this - it’s unknown stuff.
The documentary and book went ahead but in a move that would become
a pattern for all future glimpses of disclosure, the Holloman film
was withdrawn at the last minute. Coleman recalled the film, and a
man was forced to drive the film back across the country in his car.
Emenegger and Sandler were forced to use recreations to talk about a
possible encounter between the government and the aliens.
The Carter Administration
Carter as probably everyone in the room knows saw a UFO prior to
becoming Governor of Georgia. In 1976 the National Enquirer
interviewed Carter about the incident, and about what he would do
about UFOs if elected to the White House.
Carter made a promise to
release all the sighting data.
Enquirer: Governor, when you once saw a UFO. If you were President,
would you reopen inquiry into UFOs?
Carter: Well - No what I would make the information we have about
those sightings available to the public, and let them decide. I
never have tried to identify what I saw. It was – you know - a light
in the western sky. It was very unique. I had never seen it before.
There were about 20 of us who saw it. None of us could figure out
what it was. Well, I don’t think it was anything solid. It looked
just like a light. It was a very peculiar aberration. I don’t make
fun of people who say they have seen unidentified objects in the
sky.
Enquirer: The United States used to have a body that investigated
UFOs. That was discontinued. Would you reopen that?
Carter: I don’t know yet.
Disclosure seemed only moments away. A President was in the White
House who had experienced the phenomena, and who believed a
well-informed public had
 the right to know. What many don’t realize
is that Carter did place some conditions on his UFO promise.
I don’t see any reason to keep information like that secret but
there may be some aspect of the UFO information with which I am not
familiar that might be related to some secret experiments that we
doing that might involve our national security – our new weapons
systems. I certainly wouldn’t release that. But if it was something
removed from our national security, in my opinion as President I
would go ahead and release that. I see nothing wrong with that.
Many of the UFO accounts I have heard concerning the Carter
administration state that Carter backed away from his promise to
disclose and did nothing about UFOs while in the White House. This
is not true at all. Carter did push hard on disclosure and did
achieve a great deal.
Jimmy Carter started to push for the UFO answer even before he was
president. During his president elect briefing given by President
Ford’s Director of Central Intelligence George Bush, Carter demanded
the files on UFOs.
Bush told Carter that he could not provide the requested documents.
He stated Carter did not have a “need-to-know” and that
curiosity on the part of the President was not sufficient reason to
be told about UFOs. Now Ronald Pandolfi, who is rumored to run the
weird desk at the CIA, has expressed his doubts that George Bush
even denied UFO information to the president-elect because it would
have gotten him fired. The fact of the matter is, however, that
Carter removed Bush. In fact Bush never served a single day as DCI
under President Carter.
Once in office Carter continued to push for UFO disclosure. Those
who elected him did not forget the UFO promise because the White
House received 9,000 UFO letters. Carter’s promise to release was
stalled by more than just the pledge Carter had made not to release
information tied into the national security. It was limited by who
Carter was.
Carter had run as a Washington insider. He had
campaigned in short sleeves to put across the idea that he was a
common man running for the nation’s highest office. Carter was a
Washington outsider running against the Washington insiders who
controlled the UFO secret. He should not have been surprised that
they didn’t run to support his UFO disclosure initiative.
He came in
at the time of the CIA scandal revelations was exposed by the Church
Committee in 1976. The CIA was in a bad way, and when Carter came in
he fired hundreds of CIA agents. Now they didn’t trust him, and any
chance he had to get them to reveal their closest guarded secret was
gone.
 Carter also got into trouble with the military industrial complex,
often rumored to be a controlling factor in the UFO cover-up, by
cutting $5 billion from the defense budget. He also cancelled the
B-1 bomber, shelved the neutron bomb, vetoed a nuclear aircraft
carrier, and disassembled the draft machinery.
In the end he was run
over.
Carter made a number of efforts to shake the federal agencies
for any information they might have on UFOs, or for any secret
system that existed for coordinating information on UFOs. His
trusted Press Secretary Jody Powell took on this task. Powell
contacted agencies such as the FBI and NASA.
The FBI said they “had no authorization or reason for conducting any
inquiries on this subject” and that they turned everything over to
the Air Force “without taking any action on it.”
NASA knew that the
UFO issue was a no-win situation, and would be a severe strain on
their budget, which Carter had just cut. They agreed to answer UFO
mail sent to the White House and investigate any “bona fide physical
evidence from credible sources”.
The Carter administration did much more towards UFO disclosure than
it has been given credit for. A good number of the declassified
government UFO documents we have today were released under the
Carter administration. During the four Carter years approximately
3,000 pages were released including big collections from the CIA,
FBI, and NSA. Carter met openly with UFO personalities such as
Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gary. They met in the Oval Office, and
according to NRC notes UFOs were discussed in the meeting.
Stories told by attorney Daniel Sheehan clearly showed that Jimmy
Carter did call for a collection of UFO information once he became
president. Sheehan, a prominent civil rights attorney had been
called as a consultant to two studies being done for the president.
One of the studies was on UFOs, and one was on extraterrestrial
intelligence. Sheehan described how he was contacted to obtain the
Vatican library UFO files for the reports.
I was contacted by Marcia Smith, the head of the Science and
Technology Division of the Congressional Research Service, to see if
I as chief counsel for the United States Jesuit Headquarters in
Washington D.C. International Social Ministry Office could obtain
access to the Vatican Library section that had the information about
extraterrestrial intelligence and the UFOs in the Vatican Library in
Rome. I agreed to do that as a special consultant to the
Congressional Research Service.
As part of his work, Sheehan asked Marcia Smith to see the
classified sections of Project Blue Book. Someone up high aided
Marcia Smith, the author of the reports from the Library of
Congress, and Sheehan was asked to go to the Madison Building to
view the records. Sheehan described what happened,
Back in 1977, when I was asked to participate as a special
consultant to the Library of Congress research group analysis for
President Carter, I was given access to the Project Blue Book files
– the classified sections of them during the preparation for a
seminar which I was asked to present to the top 50 scientists at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in the SETI program.
In that
context I was allowed to review the classified sections of the
Blue
Book Project. In that section I came across absolutely clear
pictures - photographs -of a UFO that was on the ground. It had
apparently crashed. It was stuck in the side of an
embankment. There was snow all around in the photographs, and there
were United States Air Force personnel in the photograph measuring
this particular craft - taking photographs of it.
You could see them in a number of these photographs. Then there were
actual close up photos from different perspectives of the vehicle,
and they actually had insignia on the side of the vehicle that they
had taken close up pictures of. So when I saw this, in the context,
where I had been allowed into this room downstairs in the new
building of the Library of Congress that had not even been opened
yet.
This was a brand new building. They had a big special room
downstairs. There were Air Force guards at the doors. When I
actually saw these photographs in the files I said,
“Well, Now that I
have seen this, and I know that the United States Air Force has
these photographs – that they’ve got this vehicle. They’ve obviously
got it. Here are these photographs."
Sheehan further reported that Carter did get the two reports and
that they had stunning information in them.
She went forward and supervised two of the final studies. The first
study reached the conclusion – this was an official United States
government Congressional Research Service report that was prepared
by the Congressional Research Service Science and Technology
Division and sent to the Science and Technology Committee of the
House of Representatives, who in turn sent it to the President.
In
this report they concluded that there were from two to six - at
least - from two to six highly technological intelligent
civilizations other than on our planet here in our galaxy.
And secondly, they prepared a full report on the UFO phenomena. It
actually had diagrams of all the different shaped UFO craft that
were there, and in fact projected that it appeared to be that in a
certain number of cases, and they indicated that from 5% to 6% of
these cases – of these sightings – that there was absolutely no
other rational explanation for these phenomena, given the caliber of
the witnesses, the caliber of the collaboration of the sightings, to
lead to any other conclusion than the fact that they appeared to be
coming from one or more of these two to six extraterrestrial
civilizations in our galaxy.
 Another indication that Carter did gain knowledge about the true
nature of the UFO phenomena and tried to disclose it came from a
story told by actress Shirley MacLean. MacLaine was responding to a
question put to her by UFO researcher Art Greenfield on the
Larry
King Show.
The question was based on what actor Nicholas Cage had
stated a couple weeks earlier during an appearance on the David
Letterman show.
Question: Hello, Good evening Larry and Shirley, About two weeks
ago, Nicholas Cage was on the Letterman Show and said Shirley had
told him that President Carter had told her he had seen recovered
alien spacecraft and aliens in a hanger. Can you tell me exactly
what President Carter said?
Shirley: "He didn't tell me that, but he told me many times that
when I first wrote "Out On A Limb" that he would support me, that it
was true, that there were occupants. Why should we be the only
people in the universe? He wanted to shine the sunshine laws on
intelligence, to expose it, to see how the people would react, but
he didn't and wouldn't and couldn't, as he explained to me."
Part 2
July 2008
Reagan Administration
The first disclosure initiative within the Reagan administration
came only days after Ronald Reagan came into office. The offer to
provide pieces of the UFO mystery was made to researcher Bill Moore.
Moore had made a name for himself in the UFO community with
co-authorships in two best selling books “The Philadelphia
Experience” and “The Roswell Incident.”
During a book tour for “The
Roswell Incident” Moore was contacted twice with an offer “to help.”
It was a story that went on for ten years. Greg Bishop, a researcher
and close friend of Moore, described how the story began,.
As a result of these books, and him going on some kind of publicity
tour for them, he was called at a couple places on his trip by
somebody at a nearby Air Force Base. Once in Omaha Nebraska, and
once when he was in Albuquerque.
And it turns out that the person
who called him when he was in Albuquerque and said,
“You know we
think you really know what you are talking about and we would like
to talk to you.”
That person was Richard Doty it turns out to be.
He set up a meeting with Bill Moore. What a lot of people don’t know
is that the first time they met. He met in an Albuquerque restaurant
with this guy that
became known as the Falcon, and he will still not
divulge this person’s real name. Neither will Richard Doty or anyone
else.
This guy (Falcon) who turns out to have worked for the DIA (Defense
Intelligence Agency) which is like the military CIA.
He presented
Moore with a deal. He said,
“If you will cooperate with us,” (and he
didn’t tell him what that cooperation was- the nature of it) “then
we will give you what you are looking for which is UFO information
from the government – as much as we can release to you, and we will
do that over a period of years if you cooperate with us.”
And he (Moore) said “well OK, I guess so - it sounds good – sure.”
For the next 10 years Moore ran around meeting intelligence and
military people. They offered him information that sometimes, in the
end, appeared to be a mixture of good and bad information. It became
almost impossible to distinguish what was the truth. Moore left the
field figuring he had gotten as far towards solving the mystery as
anyone would get.
Some researchers rejected Moore and everything he
said after he admitted in a July 1989 speech that he had helped the
Air Force Office of Special Investigation provide disinformation to
Dr.
Paul Bennewitz, a physicist who lived just outside of Kirkland
Air Force Base. Bennewitz believed that he had made contact with
aliens and had detected an underground base they were using at
Dulce,
New Mexico.
Moore introduced a number of new concepts into the UFO community,
such as the idea that a live alien had been recovered in a crash and
held by the American government, that there had been an
interaction
between the government and the aliens, that the Air Force was only a
pawn in the UFO game and that the real players were in the NSA and
DIA.
The most important concept that was introduced by Moore was the
concept of a group known as
MJ-12 that controlled everything to do
with UFOs. This Moore did by releasing the MJ-12 document that had
been mailed to his partner Jamie Shandera in December 1984. In the
end the document was generally rejected within the UFO community as
flawed, but the concept of MJ-12 and almost everything else in the
document became a part of the ufological interpretations of
historical events.
It is my interpretation that this is what was supposed to happen.
Liberals within the control group in 1973 decided that they wanted
material released in order to acclimatize the UFO community and the
public to an alien presence. They however, realized that the
information could quickly get out of hand, and therefore chose the
method of mixing chaff with the wheat so it would not be taken
seriously by media or congressional sources who could force the
entire story out into the open.
The MJ-12 document was a major piece of the disclosure puzzle, and
its release was done perfectly. Many UFO researchers have come
forward with evidence supporting the existence of the group, but
none have found the piece to start the avalanche of knowledge
demanded by the UFO community. The MJ-12 concept got out, and the
cover-up remained intact.
That was the plan, and it worked.
 In 1985, during the same time as Moore was receiving information
from Falcon about the inner working of the UFO cover-up, Robert Emenegger was again being contacted by
Bill Coleman, now retired,
about doing another UFO documentary for the government.
Two key
officials at the Defense Audiovisual Agency (DAVA) unit at Norton
Air Force Base fronted for the project this time. They were quite
eager to get some classified UFO film into the public. Strangely,
according to Emenegger, the UFO films being offered did not include
the Holloman film that was being pushed during the Nixon
administration.
Emenegger recounted the encounter,
You do now – I don’t know if it was in the book maybe not – that
during the Reagan administration I met with Bob Scott and Miller. At
Norton, and they wanted another program like we had done, and we
spent a lot of time discussing it. Bob Scott was a Reagan appointee.
He was the head of USIA when I first met him – Bruce Hershenson – I
don’t know if you know who Bruce was in Washington. That’s how I
knew him.
Then he popped up as the head of DAVA – that film
repository. He had a Glen E. Millar retired General as his aide, or
second in command. We spent a lot of discussion. There was a lot of
stuff in the vault that he wanted to get out.
I even had General
Miller come to our house to meet Hynek and his group to take them
out to Norton so they could look around. Miller was, interestingly
enough, was head of one of the first studios in Hollywood – one of
the old ones, and got Reagan his first contract.
Anyway, after Hynek came here, and he wanted to see UFO footage, and
I think they started pulling it out, and Shartle came in stepped in
– now I hope you have the characters correct.
Miller said to him,
“I
want you to show Hynek all the UFO footage.”
Shartle told me that he said,
“I’m sorry, Sir, you know – you will
have to give me a written request for that."
The answer came back,
“Listen, I’ll have your ass. You’re going to
do it.”
I was not there to know all the craziness that went on, but I do
know that three months later Casper Weinberger sent a telegram
relieving both Scott and Miller of their posts.
Why I don’t know. I
don’t even know if it was related.
Just after Emenegger,
Jacques Vallee, and Hynek were contacted, a
source inside the NSA was leaking another UFO story to a key
investigative reporter at the New York Times. Howard Blum, who was
working on a book about the Walker spy case, related how his NSA
contact was very concerned that he look into UFOs.
While on the Larry King show Blum described the NSA leak.
I stumbled on to this really by accident. I am a reporter as you
said by training, and by personality I am a skeptic and a cynic.
I
was working on the Walker spy case – a book on that - and I was
meeting with a man from the National Security Agency and I was
trying to interview him and he was trying not to talk too much,
trying to distract me and say,
“What you really should look into is
this hot shot group of experts who are looking into UFOs. The
government is back in the UFO business.”
Blum did investigate the UFO lead and produced a book called “Out
There.” In the book Blum said told about a group known as the UFO
Working Group, who had been brought in to try and get to the bottom
of the UFO mystery.
Actually the group was known as the Advanced Theoretical Physics
Conference.
It was held at the EDM McLean Secure Facility in May
1985. It was classified Top Secret. A number of prominent scientists
and intelligence people were involved.
 The story created a great stir when it came out. However, like every
other glimpse of disclosure, it lacked the concrete proof that was
needed for an open disclosure. Like all efforts that preceded it,
the story died when some inconsistencies where discovered in Blum’s
facts. As had happened with other UFO glimpses of the past, new
facts about the cover-up were released, and the cover-up remained
intact.
In April, 1983, Linda Moulton Howe, who had just produced an
excellent documentary about cattle mutilations called Strange
Harvest, was contacted. At the time she was working on a new script
for Home Box Office on UFOs.
The night before the contact she met
with researcher and attorney Peter Gersten.
Gersten, who had played a prominent role
as an attorney forcing out UFO documents using the Freedom of
Information Act, told Howe that he had met with the same person that
she would meet with..., Richard C. Doty, an AFOSI agent at
Kirtland AFB.
When Howe got to Kirtland, Doty took her to a small office where he
handed her a brown envelope and said, "My superiors have asked me to
show you this."
He withdrew several sheets of white paper from an
envelope, and handed them to her. She could not keep them or take
notes, but she could read the pages and ask questions.
The document was titled Briefing Paper for the President of the
United States of America. It described UFO crashes, alien bodies,
and an alien who survived one of the crashes. The paper listed
several government UFO projects.
Linda described being given the
document to read,
He (Doty) said my superiors have asked me to show you a document
that you can read. You cannot take notes, and I want you to move
from the chair you are sitting in – I want you to move to the chair
in the center of the room… but as I look at that page which was
dramatically all caps, typing where the type is in the paper.
It
said - each line was centered on the page - “BRIEFING FOR THE
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON THE SUBJECT OF
UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL VEHICLES.”
In addition to showing her the document, Doty said he and his
superiors were willing to release several thousand feet of
government held UFO footage for the HBO UFO documentary she was
working on.
Included with the footage was the Holloman Air Force
Base film where the aliens had landed and met with base officials.
In the late 1980s Linda told me,
The government intended to release to me several thousand feet of
color and black and white film taken between 1947 and 1964 showing
crashed UFO discs and extraterrestrial bodies in historic footage to
be included in the HBO documentary supported with official
government confirmation.
Linda, like Bill Moore had made a name for herself in Ufology with a
documentary called “A Strange Harvest.” It had won a local Emmy in
Denver, and dealt with the large rash of cattle mutilations that had
been occurring for years in Colorado and other western states. It
was partly for this reason that I believe the government chose to
talk to Linda.
Like all the other glimpses of disclosure Linda never did get the
UFO footage from Richard Doty and the others she dealt with. There
were many excuses for the delays and in the end no film was turned
over. The HBO documentary she was working on shut down. As soon as
the HBO documentary was put on hold, Doty and his superiors made a
new offer to Linda. They stated that they wanted a documentary
through PBS rather than HBO because they had more control over PBS.
Linda described part of what was involved in this offer.
They don’t want me to go forward with HBO. They want me to go
forward with PBS. Well in this process he is saying how much would
you take, and would you be willing to work exclusively on a military
base?
And I remember saying,
“Look, if you guys want to hire me to edit
film and be part of a production that says this is a production of
the United States government, I’m happy to do that. But I’m not
going to put my name on a film that I have done if everything about
it is 100% controlled by the United States government. I can’t do
that."
Not only was Linda Howe offered movie footage for public
documentaries, she was even offered an interview with Jerome Hunsacker, the last living member of the
MJ-12 committee, a group
rumored to be in control of the UFO situation.
Well I think he was an original MJ-12er, and I believe he would have
been the last on the list of the original twelve. That is my
understanding of who somebody was trying to get me to meet with. I
am saying I was supposed to have had a dialogue with one of the
original MJ-12.
In addition to this historic invitation, Linda was offered a chance
to interview a U.S.A.F. Captain who had lived with a captured live
alien. The alien had supposedly been captured in a 1949 crash, and
the Captain lived with the alien, known as an extraterrestrial
biological entity (EBE), until 1952 when the alien died.
Linda
recalled the event,
It was in all these discussions about my being able to go to where
this man was in a hospital in Texas with prostrate cancer to talk
with him directly, because I said even if I could tape record him,
this is too valuable. Those were real discussions.
In that process
this man was identified as one of people so valuable because he was
able to get these telepathic thoughts.
Q: This was an offer made to you. Is Richard Doty making you this
offer?
No it came in a completely different way. It came in a Fedex
proposal to me – where I would go – who would meet me – How I would
be able to interview a man who was dying and who had stayed with the
Eben at Los Alamos.
I got an airline ticket! I had an airline ticket!
Q: You bought it, or they bought it?
I bought it. He was dying of prostrate cancer in a hospital in
Texas, and I was so serious from this communication that I got an
airline ticket – paid for it to go. It was I think the night before
the morning I was to leave I got a call that said “We’re sorry – he
says it’s off.”
And I said “Why?”
And he says “He just says it’s off.”
Another prominent UFO researcher who was approached and given a
glimpse of disclosure was Whitley Strieber, a prominent novelist, who
had entered the UFO
 field after having abduction types experiences
which led him to write the book
Communion in 1988.
He like Howe,
Moore, Emenegger, Vallee, and Hynek was offered a whole rage of UFO
disclosure offers.
I was approached by a retired officer from the Air Force Office of
Secret Intelligence with all kinds of stories, about how the
government had taken 16mm film of an alien that they had done an
operation on in 1952 which enabled it to talk through otherwise
atrophied vocal cords. A story that struck me as... I wouldn’t
have written it as fiction because it was too ridiculous.
They tried
to make me believe that aliens had claimed that they had something
to do with creation of Jesus Christ and all sorts of ridiculous
things which if I had gone out into the public with would have make
me look like a fool.
Strieber’s story paralleled the offer that Linda Howe had described
about getting an interview with the captured alien’s keeper. It also
paralleled an offer that had been made to him by Paul Shartle who
had been the keeper of the Holloman and other UFO films at Norton
Air Force Base.
In a phone interview Emenegger told me about the
offer made to him by Shartle to actually meet the alien himself.
That’s not right. You’re right. Someone did say you can meet an
alien down in New Mexico.
Paul Shartle once asked me if I would be interested in going down to
like New Mexico, to meet with you know some alien. This sounds like
what you are talking about, although it never came about.
Bill Moore was also talking about the alien, and a videotape was
being sold purporting to be an interview with the alien. Just before
Reagan left office a leak surfaced stating Reagan was going to make
the big disclosure in a live TV broadcast. The rumor went on to say
that the live alien would appear with him.
It was a wild time in the
UFO community.
The Alien Invasion
Some have interpreted President Reagan’s constant statements about
the alien invasion as an attempt to disclose by Reagan. I feel that
these statements were simply statements made by a president who was
fascinated with the paranormal, and who loved to tell stories. They
are interesting and numerous so I will quickly review them.
The Reagan presidential records show many times when the Reagan
talked about UFOs and other paranormal items. For example, Steven
Spielberg gave a White House screening of “E.T. – The
Extraterrestrial” in late June 1982.
Near the end of the movie
Reagan leaned over to Steven Spielberg and shocked him by saying,
“I
bet there aren’t six people in this whole room who know how true
this whole thing is.”
A few months Reagan appeared at the old Roswell Army Air Base, and
there outside the famous west hanger, where it is rumored the 1947
alien bodies were stored prior to the flight out, gave a speech in
which he made a joking reference to E.T. As well as talking about
aliens Reagan often talked about the White House ghost and
Armageddon.
Judi Buckalew, a White House aid actually stated that
there were people whose job it was to keep the president away from
school kids who would ask the president all manner of questions
following speeches to schools.
The staff was very afraid of what the president would say in answers
to questions directed his way.
As Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan’s Press
Secretary stated,
“The goddamndest things would come out of his
mouth.”
Lt. Gen. Colin Powell was Reagan’s last National Security
advisor. He told presidential biographer Lou Cannon that it was his
job to keep the alien invasion remarks out of Reagan’s speech.
Despite this many alien remarks got into speeches, starting with a
toast in Geneva during the November 1985 Summit.
Reagan raised his
glass and said:
“If the people of the world were to find out that
there was some alien life form that was going to attack the Earth
approaching on Halley’s Comet, then that knowledge would unite all
the peoples of the world.”
Reagan adlibbed the same remark at the
end of a speech to Fallston High School in Fallston, Maryland just
after returning home from Geneva.
In 1987, Reagan added the alien invasion remark to a speech that was
being made to the United Nations General Assembly. Possibly
embarrassed by aliens at the U.N. Reagan speech writers took it out
of the speech, only to have Reagan request that it be put back in.
The writers complied. The line was put back in with only a couple
changes.
click above image
The stage was set for the President of the United States to
stand up in front of the United Nations and say:
“I occasionally
think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were
facing an alien threat from outside of this world. And yet I ask -
is not an alien force already among us?"
Lastly in 1988, Reagan took a question at a speech in Chicago and
again adlibbed the alien invasion remark. It was a concept that
Reagan believed in strongly, and was not afraid to talk about.
The
Chicago alien invasion remark, for example, was made the day after
the story broke in the Washington Post about the Reagan White House
using astrology to set up the president’s schedule.
Clinton Administration Effort
Like Jimmy Carter before him Bill Clinton ran for president as a
Washington outsider. His campaign was established him as running
against the Washington insiders who had caused all the evils within
government. Bill and Hillary did not even hide the fact that they
were standing up against the insiders. If you read “Inventing Al
Gore” you will see that Clinton referred to them as the “Fucking
Washington Crowd”. It may have been the same crowd that Hillary
referred to as the right wing conspiracy.
Like Jimmy Carter both
Bill and Hillary were interested in UFOs. The word inside the CIA
was that they “were looking."
The Clinton administration role in disclosure was not one of leaking
elements of the UFO story into the UFO community as had been done in
the Nixon and Reagan administration. This was because the Clinton
administration was cut off just like the UFO community. A prime
example of this came when White House reporter Sarah McClendon asked
Bill Clinton why he didn’t do something about the UFO phenomena.
Steven Greer gave Clinton’s reply in a conversation with radio host
Art Bell.
You know Bill Clinton leaned over and told Sarah McClendon, who
hosted up at the National Press Club on May 9th – this is a story I
haven’t told, and I’m going to tell you now. She told me this.
Bill
Clinton leaned over to her and said, because she brought up this
issue to Bill Clinton saying,
“Why don’t you do something about what
Dr. Greer and this group are trying to do?”
He bent over and he
said,
“Sarah, there’s a secret government within the government, and
I don’t control it."
The way the Clinton administration approached UFO disclosure was to
open up all government files to disclosure.
His chief of staff John Podesta, known while he was in the White House as the X-files man,
led the fight. The effort was extremely successful for document
disclosure and not so successful for UFO disclosure. Over the five
years the Clinton Executive Order was in place, 800 million pages of
classified documents were released. This was compared to 150 million
pages of documents declassified in the 15 years previous.
No
significant UFO documents however were part of the 800 million pages
of declassified files.
There were examples where Clinton officials did attempt to
specifically shake loose UFOs documents. According to 1,000 pages of
documents that were released by the Office of Science and Technology
Policy inside the Clinton White House Melvin Laird, former Secretary
of Defense under President Nixon, was called in to brief Clinton’s
first Secretary of Defense Les Aspin on UFOs.
One of these was an
effort by his first CIA director James Woolsey to get some answers
on UFOs. Woolsey and his wife Suzanne (at the time a ranking
official at the National Academy of Sciences) had in the late 1960s
reportedly had a daylight UFO sighting in New Hampshire. If true,
they were naturally interested.
In December 1993, only months after Clinton took office, Dr. Steven
Greer sat with the CIA director, his wife, and another couple and
discussed UFO and disclosure. According to Greer John Petersen, a
close friend of Woolsey’s had followed Greer for four lectures
listening to his presentation. This, according to Greer, had been
done at Woolsey’s request.
Finally, at a presentation in Fort
Collins, Colorado, Petersen approached Greer and said,
“I know a few
folks in Washington who I think you need to meet with.”
When Greer
asked whom in particular, Petersen mentioned Woolsey. Greer was
asked to provide information to Woolsey that would help Woolsey on a
search through the CIA files looking for UFO documents. He also got
the opportunity to talk to Woolsey on December 13th for three hours.
Most people know the story of how Woolsey and Petersen denied
Greer’s version of events.
This denial, however, didn’t come until
almost 5 years after the event when Greer published a book which
referred to the event.
Rather than rehashing the story and reviewing the definition of
briefing let me mention a couple
points that clearly show that an attempt was being made from within
to get UFO information out.
-
Greer did meet with James Woolsey and John Petersen, and it
probably was for three
hours as no one has denied the length of the meeting. Meeting
privately with the Director of
all of the United States Intelligence agencies is no small feat.
Most people, no matter how
powerful, would be lucky to get the DCI to answer a letter. If the
CIA Director meets with a
member of the public it is at the bequest of the director and not
the member of the public.
The tail does not wag the dog when it comes to the CIA Director.
-
Woolsey did order a study of all UFO files. This supports Greer’s
story that he was asked
to provide information to aid in a search. I have unquestionable
evidence that both the classified
and unclassified records were checked. Once Woolsey left the CIA did
put out a new report on
their involvement in the UFO mystery.
-
Greer was not the only member of the public who was contacted by
Petersen and Woolsey
in connection with an attempt to get information moved into the
public forum. C. Austin Fitts, a
former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the
Bush administration has
also come forward claiming that she had contacts with Petersen and
Woolsey. She was to aid
with a project set up “to help the Navy adjust their operations for
a world in which it was
commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.”
Petersen denied the Fitts story when he learned that I might put it
on my website. Months later I sent the denial to Fitts for her
comment and she replied in length that she stood behind her story on
every point. It appeared to be one of those Holloman stories that
seemed to disappear when you tried to grab it.
The first of the attempts to disclose UFO documents came when
Laurance Rockefeller approached the Clinton White House to get all
UFO documents declassified.
click above image
Laurance, who had graduated with a
philosophy degree from Princeton became very interested in UFOs
after seeing a documentary on the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell
New Mexico.
Rockefeller’s attempt to bring the issue to the
President was handled by Clinton’s Science Advisor and by Hillary
Clinton. Gibbons told Rockefeller that the request to declassify all
UFO files would be impossible if the cover-up was as widespread as
Rockefeller was claiming. Gibbons proposed taking one case and
trying to get it declassified. They would then have a pattern to
follow.
Rockefeller thought about it and said that this idea would be fine.
He told Gibbons that he was choosing
the Roswell case as the test
case. Thus began a move to get the facts on Roswell. Gibbons passed
on the request and the USAF began their study on what really
happened in 1947.
When the Air Force was done
 they were unable to
come up with anything new except to discover that a bunch of the
original Roswell documents were missing.
They filed their report
“The Roswell Report - Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert”
with the White House stating that there was nothing to the alien
spaceship theory.
President Clinton was not amused.
In a speech on November 30, 1995
he answered back to the USAF. It was a speech given in Belfast
Northern Ireland in front of 80,000 people, and I can assure you
after a couple weeks at the Reagan Library studying how presidential
speeches are put together, the reference to Roswell was intentional.
Nothing gets in a presidential speech that is not there for a
specific reason.
There had been a letter writing competition in
Northern Ireland. School children wrote letters to the visiting U.S.
president and the two winning letter writers were on the stage with
Clinton during his speech. Neither of their letters, however, was
read. Instead, Clinton answered a letter from Ryan who was asking
about Roswell.
This is what Clinton stated:
I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if
you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question.
No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell,
New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did
recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I
want to know.
With his public rebuke, Clinton effectively forced the USAF to go
back and reinvestigate the question of the bodies.
It didn’t help
much because in 1997 the USAF decided the screw the President with
yet another Roswell report, this one called “The Roswell Report - Case Closed.”
Answering the President’s order that he wanted to know about the
bodies, the Air Force spend much of the report dreaming up the
bizarre notion that dummies dropped in 1953 clearly explained why
people in 1947 were reporting bodies in connection with the Roswell
crash.
Conclusion
These are the key glimpses of disclosure that have occurred over the
past fifty-seven years. There are dozens of other examples that I
could have used but left out for the sake of time.
Once Clinton left
office there were some strong indications that
George W. Bush might
make further UFO disclosures.
These hopes faded shortly after he
entered office, and after
9-11 it appeared that the complex issue of
disclosure may have been put on the back burner while other issues
dealing with terrorism were dealt with. At the present time, the
only effort I see to provide glimpses of disclosure is the material
being provided to Bob and Ryan Wood through the many documents they
are still receiving.
This is a complex story that I will allow them
to tell in their own way.
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