Second, the American government, in conjunction with several other nations, seemed to have succeeded in discrediting UFOs. Edwards lost his job in mid-1954, effectively silencing the last national voice in the media that opposed UFO secrecy. In the aftermath of such an intense global wave of UFO sightings, the public dimension of the problem still remained under control. Now, throughout the country, belief in UFOs became truly a marginal affair, something only crackpots took seriously. This was a great success for policymakers who, since 1952, had deemed it essential to end public speculation on this matter once and for all.
Throughout 1955, 1956, and most of 1957, UFOs faded from public view. Some excellent-quality reports came out during this period, but they punctuated long periods of apparent inactivity and general media silence.
INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT? NAH
Two commissions studied the American intelligence community in 1955. The first of these was the (Second) Hoover Commission, charged with recommending ways “to promote economy, efficiency, and improved service” in the executive branch of the federal government. Headed by former President Herbert Hoover, it gave its final report to Congress on June 29, 1955. Gen. Mark Clark headed the commission’s task force on intelligence—he noted the CIA’s lack of accountability and recommended establishing an intelligence oversight committee.131
Not surprisingly, this flopped at Langley and the White House. Eisenhower immediately commissioned another study headed by Gen. James Doolittle, which focused on clandestine and covert operations. Doolittle submitted his report on September 30, 1955. Declassified in 1976, it laid out America’s prevailing cold war consensus:
There are no rules in such a game.... We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.132
Doolittle’s report negated the Hoover Commission recommendations on intelligence oversight. Instead, the National Security Council established a new committee, known as the 5412 Committee, to approve important covert operations. Eisenhower’s first representative on it was Gordon Gray, who changed its working name to the Special Group. Henceforth, all proposals passed through the Special Group on their way to the desk of Richard Helms, the CIA’s Director of Plans, and the man responsible for clandestine and covert operations.133
Protected from oversight, CIA and army behavioral experiments accelerated. During 1955, an MK-Ultra experiment took place in which an army “volunteer” was sealed in a sensory deprivation box for forty consecutive hours. In panic and terror, he kicked his way out, and wept uncontrollably for a day. This resulted in a change of policy: the box was strengthened. Around this time, Dr. Maitland Baldwin told Morris Allen of MK-Ultra that he could do
In March 1955, the CIA obtained quantities of
In 1955, the air force began promoting its influential myth about a bomber gap. The Soviet Union, intent on world domination at any cost, was supposed to have five hundred bombers with which to blow the U.S. into the next millennium. Three years later, after Sputnik, the air force invented a missile gap. These were sheer fabrications, created, in the words of one historian, as “scare tactics to distort information to further its weapons buildup.” By 1961, CIA photo interpretation experts, using data derived from U-2 overflights, learned that the Russians had in fact only
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