For close to eight decades, the Air Force has acted in ways that are hard to understand in response to UFO/UAP. Its public facing position has been that every single sighting is the result of (1) mistaken identity, (2) deliberate deception, or (3) the product of a delusional mind. Given enough evidence, every sighting will fall into one of these three categories. Yet, its actions tell another story. Activities surrounding the phenomenon are highly classified and research into UAP has largely been shielded from congressional scrutiny. Today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence continues to seek access to these programs with limited success. What little information can be gleaned about Air Force UFO/UAP activities from the declassified record indicate some disturbing actions, meant to keep evidence about the phenomenon out of the public eye and away from Congress.
These declassified records show efforts to destroy key evidence; adopt regulations to suppress trained witnesses from speaking in public; and altering records to hide their interest in the matter. An example of the impact of this secret policy can be seen in the response to a UFO sighting by the late Senator Richard Russell (D-GA.). In 1955, he was part of an American delegation on a train traveling through the Soviet Union on the way to Prague, Czechoslovakia. According to staffers traveling with him, they saw two saucer-shaped objects pass over the countryside. Immediately thereafter, a Soviet official burst into the American delegation’s coach car and shut the curtains. Later, a reporter quoted Senator Russell responding to the incident:
“I have discussed this matter with the affected agencies, and they are of the opinion that it is not wise to publicize this matter at this time.” [1]
The question becomes: when is the “time” to discuss this phenomenon? It has been over 68 years since Senator Russell made this statement. The UFO/UAP phenomenon has not gone away, yet the policy remains the same. The public government policy is that all UFO/UAP reports are made by people who are mistaken, fabricating, or delusional. UFO/UAPs have nothing to add to our scientific knowledge and are unworthy of serious study. Yet, the same subject is classified at the highest levels and FOIA requests for information about 75-year-old events are still heavily redacted. It is a striking contradiction. The phenomenon is not real, but congressional access to information about it is highly-classified. Congressional inquiries have been consistently rejected since World War II.
These same contradictions are part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s long, clandestine interest in the subject. In 1952, the CIA took an active role in the UFO mystery at the behest of President Truman. Working closely with the Air Force, the spy agency developed policies intended to depress interest in the subject and to keep Congress away from serious discussion of the mystery.[2] These policies, in large part, continue to this day. One needs to look no further than the CIA Archives to see that the policy of denigrating people with a serious interest in the phenomenon is ongoing. The first document listed in the UFOs: Fact or Fiction section of the CIA Archives is a “history” of its interest in UFOs.[3] This purported history conveys false information about the Agency’s involvement and denigrates people with a public policy interest in the subject. Recently declassified records contradict its findings. While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has informed Congress that the “stigma” around the phenomenon has made it difficult to learn about UAP, the CIA’s most prominent document about the subject is a misleading “UFO History” that denigrates those with an interest in the subject.
In two of the three recent reports to Congress about UAP, the CIA refused to cooperate. In other words, the best source of human intelligence about the origins of UAP has ignored congressional requests for information. This conduct raises questions about the intelligence community’s overall commitment to provide our elected leaders with information required via three years of legislation.
As Congress continues its efforts to understand UAP, much of the mystery is about what elements of our government already know about the subject. Any rollout of the conclusions of congressional oversight into the subject must include information about the reasons for the historic conduct of the military and intelligence community. It is not just an academic exercise. It involves violations to the constitutional structure of our government. Activities that were not subject to congressional oversight. This means that funding for those programs did not have proper congressional authorization. Under our Constitution, even classified programs cannot escape congressional oversight and funding approval.
There have been several provisions of UAP legislation that reaffirms constitutional mandates. All UAP programs must be known to appropriately cleared congressional committees, or they should not be funded. The UAP legislation also mandates a historical review of UAP programs with a report of these programs due to Congress in June 2024. Hopefully, the report will answer these questions, but, given the history of UFO/UAP cooperation, immediate answers are unlikely to be forthcoming. This puts any conclusions that Congress wishes to inform the public about its UAP oversight review in jeopardy. A hidden history will undermine any findings and probably cause the disclosure process to get bogged down in a discussion about the past instead of preparation for the future. Any disclosure process must work around these impediments and not let them prevent Congress from revealing conclusions about the phenomenon itself.
Because of the length of time this issue has been addressed, much information may be lost or destroyed. In the 1970s, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities Within the United States (Church Committee) found that a common element for many illegal programs was the inability to establish upper level accountability.[4] These illegal programs had little or no paperwork documenting their actions. In fact, many of the most revealing documents that demonstrate illegal conduct by one agency or service branch are often found in another organization’s declassified documents.[5] The most revealing documents, however, are likely still classified or no longer in existence.
In one case, two Air Force officers claimed that documents were destroyed that made recommendations the Air Force did not want made public. According to Air Technical Intelligence Command (ATIC) personnel, Captain Ruppelt and Major Dewey J. Fournet, Jr., a 1948 Estimate of the Situation was prepared by ATIC, including discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation. The Estimate was sent up the chain of command. When it reached Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg, he rejected its conclusions and ordered all copies destroyed.[6] The rejection of this memorandum indicated to ATIC that senior brass discouraged any discussion of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It was considered a turning point. While there were many high-quality unexplained sightings at the time, the official Air Force policy no longer considered extraterrestrial visitation as a possible option. The DoD has not changed that assessment to this day. Documents such as the Estimate demonstrate what the Church Committee found in many programs. Eliminating paperwork can be used to cover up information.
This type of behavior may never surface. Even if it does remain available today, there are serious questions as to whether it will come forward. AARO is required to produce evidence about the extent that the military and intelligence community has had programs to study UAP. This legislative requirement includes “any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.” (50 U.S.C. §3373(j)(1)(B)(ii)(III).) Until Fiscal Year 2024, AARO has been an underfunded program without the ability to carry out its legislative mandates. It has delegated authority to gather data for the historical report to the Air Force. This puts the agency that has the most to hide in charge of the investigation. This will hardly inspire public confidence in the ongoing investigation. Congress must assume that it will only receive a partial picture of what has been going on for at least 80 years.
Once the point is reached that congressional conclusions about UAP should be introduced to the public, revelations about past interactions with UAP may still show a spotty, inconsistent record. After the June 2024 release of the AARO historical report, Congress will have a better understanding of the degree of cooperation it is receiving from the Pentagon and intelligence community. There will be three general areas of concern. First is the scope of interactions between our forces and the sources of UAP. Have there been direct contacts? Have we experienced threatening actions? From whistleblowers such as Captain (ret.) Robert Salas, we know there have been nuclear weapon shutdowns. Salas has revealed what he knows about these incidents to AARO in 2023. What has AARO done to follow up on this lead? Does past history show that UAP pressed these advantages with follow up aggressive actions? Or are these displays intended to be defensive in nature? To the extent Congress has enough evidence to draw conclusions, these conclusions should be made public as part of any public hearing process. Of course, current vulnerabilities of our armed forces should not be discussed.
A second area of concern should be about any exotic materials recovered from UAP. Are there programs attempting to reverse engineer or understand UAP technology, now or in the past? The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence believes, by a 17-0 vote, that there is substantial evidence of these secretive programs by seeking legislation to punish contractors hiding the evidence. This committee has been interviewing witnesses who have knowledge of these programs at least since 2022. The disclosure of programs that possess non-terrestrial materials from UAP would bypass AARO and help determine that UAP are non-terrestrial in origin. General knowledge of these programs should be disclosed to the public as part of an overall disclosure process.
A third area of inquiry would be about knowledge of any past or present programs to “debunk” UFO/UAP, thereby lowering public and congressional interest. Both the declassified and the public record provide evidence that appear to demonstrate “debunking” programs were formed. “(E)fforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomenon” are found in many declassified records. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and the former CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence (CIA-OSI) were both intimately involved in the UFO/UAP debunking effort. However, the extent of their involvement may be difficult to ascertain since recordkeeping was kept at a minimum. Both have instances of forcing federal personnel to sign nondisclosure agreements. Agreements where the signatory was not given a copy.
Each of these three areas will need their own investigation and, once conclusions are reached, need to be disclosed to the public. Disclosure of these policies, while they may lead to UAP evidence not available from any other source, are more important than just determining the sources of UAP. Much like the Church Committee disclosures of the 1970s, these issues get to the heart of the democratic process.
Overall, it is likely that the historical review will lag behind other areas of inquiry. Conclusions about the source(s) of UAP will be determined even though firm conclusions are not yet reached on our historical involvement. The lack of records, coupled with the unwillingness of involved organizations, public and private, to cooperate, will cause a gap between the two areas of inquiry. If so, Congress must still let the public know where we are in its review of the past when conclusions are reached about the overall phenomenon. Waiting until all loose ends are tied up on all aspects of the congressional inquiry will give those elements who wish to block progress an addition incentive to continue their intransigence.
Of the three areas of past inquiry, all should have a common thread. The original grant of authority that started each element of the overall policy should be sought out and explained to the public. Given the trajectory of the mystery, the early history will probably show that 1953 is the year that the beginnings of an overall plan came into being. With the 1947 start of the flying saucer era, the President and the executive were unlikely to have established a permanent policy. That year, the sudden influx of worldwide sightings and the probable discovery of crash wreckage near Roswell, New Mexico would have put the Truman Administration on its heels, struggling to cope with the new phenomenon. Even with disturbing activity extending to World War II and possibly before, it would be difficult to set long term policies in the middle of this initial period, especially considering other more pressing foreign policy and domestic concerns. The rise quick of the nuclear communist threat and the aftermath of the most devastating war in human history would have been front and center. This would also be true since the post-1947 period saw a decline in sightings overall. After the initial 1947 damage control responses, the respite of a lower number of intrusions until 1952 would give the government the hope that the worst was behind them.
With the 1952 flying saucer wave, including intrusions over Washinton D.C., it became clear that the phenomenon was here to stay. Many declassified documents show that there was a worry that the summer 1952 wave would repeat itself in the summer of 1953 and were planning how to control it. The conclusions of the January 1953 CIA Robertson Panel gave the Eisenhower Administration a starting point to set long term policy. Since there were no legislative proposals considered, administrative policies would become a guide for a permanent direction. While many areas of historic inquiry may not yet bear fruit, the tracing back to the original long term policy foundations should be obtainable. Of the three different areas of inquiry (study of UAP, reverse engineering programs, and the debunking policy), an initial authorization to address how to react would have to been approved and used as later justifications for UAP-related actions. Sometime in 1953, there was probably a national security directive, or other similar document, that gave license to public and private actors (defense contractors) to carry out a UFO/UAP policy mission. To the extent this administrative policy document conflicts with today’s UAP legislation, its provisions will no longer have any legal foundation.
For each of the three possible avenues of inquiry, this document would have to be preserved. It would provide guidance to how the mission of studying and counteracting the UFO presence would take place. It would also provide quasi-legal cover for defense contractors working on reverse engineering UFOs. Finally, the directive would give license to national security agencies, in the words of the Robertson Panel, to “take immediate steps to strip the UFOs of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”
While the past history of hidden UAP policies may not give answers, especially under AARO’s watch, about our past history, bringing forward what is known would complement the revelations about what Congress has learned today about the phenomenon. Finding the actual policy that undergirds more than 70 years of effort would help the public understand why it took so long to acknowledge. In any revelation to the public, there will be things that cannot be revealed to protect our current national security interests. Current vulnerabilities to real threats, the specifics of reverse engineering progress, and ongoing diplomatic efforts could remain classified. However, there should be information that can generally give the public assurances about what we are doing about the issues raised. You don’t have to tell the public how to build a nuclear weapon to discuss the potential implications that these weapons have for us. The same will be true about how Congress informs the public about UAP.
As much candor as is necessary to convey to Americans what we are dealing with is needed for past policies as it is for our present UAP efforts going forward. While we may not learn as much from the past as we should, this lack of knowledge should not stop Congress from explaining to the American people where we are today and how we plan to go forward. It is 68 years after Senator Richard Russell said that the time was not right to discuss UAP. Having a hidden set of policies this long cannot be justified in a democracy. How we move forward will tell us as much about who we are as about who controls UAP.
The next blog in the Revelatory Disclosure At Its Best series will be on February 29th. Until then…
[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/578055/Senior-US-senator-s-report-TWO-UFOs-covered-up-secret-documents
[2] In Threat to the Body Politic: Foo Fighters to UAP, I discuss the specifics of how the Air Force and CIA put in place policies, many violating constitutional protections, to limit the number of trained witnesses and quality evidence in public discourse about the origins of UFOs. Much of this evidence is already in the declassified record.
[3] See, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/studies-in-intelligence-1997/cias-role-in-the-study-of-ufos-1947-1990/).
[4] U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities Within the United States, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans: 1976 U.S. Senate Report on Illegal Wiretaps and Domestic Spying by the FBI, CIA and NSA, Red and Black Publishers (2007), p. 17–18. During their 1952-1953 collaboration, the Air Force and CIA staffs agreed that their goal would be to minimize the amount of paperwork in this endeavor. “Flying Saucers Problem,” October 14, 1952, CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020010-9.pdf.
[5] During research for the UFO Briefing Book: A Congressional Guide to the UAP Phenomenon and Threat to the Body Politic: Foo Fighters to UAP, Air Force destruction of high quality UAP photographs were found in CIA and FBI files. Improper CIA activities in the UK were the cause for release by the UK Ministry of Defense of a contemporaneous recording during the Rendlesham Forrest UFO incident. CIA files contained documents raising questions about FBI actions. It seems that Freedom of Information Act officers are more diligent declassifying documents pointing out improper actions taken by other organizations.
[6] Clark, Jerome, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial, Visible Ink Press (1998), pp. 177-79.