Ancillary Mercy полностью

For other branches of the national security state, it was business as usual. In August 1956, the FBI began running Cointelpro (counter-intelligence program). These various programs were deployed against American dissidents and their organizations; the first one targeted the American Communist Party. Typical Cointelpro methods were anonymous or fictitious letters, false defamatory or threatening information, forged signatures, and other methods of disinformation to disrupt an organization. The FBI blackmailed insiders to spread false rumors or promote factionalism. It created bogus organizations to attack or disrupt a bona fide group, and instigated hostile actions through third parties such as employers, elected officials, and the media. It enabled the FBI to investigate any political organization on the pretext of checking for Communists, including the NAACP, women’s rights groups, and gay rights groups. Cointelpro and related programs prompted nearly 330,000 FBI investigations and created a Security Index of over 200,000 dangerous Americans to be detained in the event of war.

The FBI programs were also noteworthy in that documents relating to them were marked “Do Not File.” This meant they were withheld from the FBI filing system, offering no clues that they even existed. (The cover was blown after activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971.) The relevance for UFO-related information is obvious, but to spell it out: regarding matters connected with “national security,” there appears to be a wealth of information that does not exist officially. Thus, a request to find such documents through a Freedom of Information Act request would be in vain. Add to this the likelihood that perhaps the most sensitive information regarding UFOs may not even exist in document form (“the first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper,” Richard Helms), and one can appreciate the difficulty that an honest UFO researcher has in ferreting out the truth.¹⁶⁹

SILENCING POLICIES OF 1956

Throughout 1956, UFOs all but disappeared from the news. The air force kept matters low-key, answering queries with a fact sheet referring people to Special Report 14. Unknowns for the year were officially listed at 0.4 percent. According to the air force, the much higher percentages of prior years were simply “from inadequate data and poor reporting.” Ironically, from this point onward, no one within ATIC seriously questioned the air force’s investigative or analytical methods. This included J. Allen Hynek. It must be remembered that the air force still denied the existence of Twining’s 1947 letter, the 1948 Estimate of the Situation, Dewey Fournet’s 1952 study of UFO maneuverability, and the existence of the Robertson Panel.¹⁷⁰

One sharp note of discord against the harmony of Blue Book’s efforts to debunk UFOs came from Capt. Edward Ruppelt. In January 1956, his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects was published. It possessed an alarming candor for its day and contradicted much of the current air force position. The Estimate of the Situation did exist, wrote Ruppelt, because he had personally seen it. He also confirmed the existence of Fournet’s study and provided the basic contours of the Robertson Panel. What truly characterized the book was its clarity and detail, a potent combination. Ruppelt, Chop, and Fournet also assisted in the production of Clarence Greene’s semidocumentary motion picture, UFOs, released in May 1956. The group was able to obtain copies of the Montana and Utah films. The air force carefully monitored the film’s reception and readied itself to counter the film’s impact. It seemed that Ruppelt could become a formidable obstacle against the official position on UFOs. In the end, he did not. By 1959, he printed a second edition of his book that essentially debunked his first, and was dead a year later.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Leonard of the New York Times sought to discredit Ruppelt’s book. In the same article that reviewed Keyhoe’s Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Leonard described Ruppelt’s work as “cultist,” and “the longest and dullest of the current crop of saucer books.” This was not merely grossly unfair, it was exactly the opposite of the truth.¹⁷¹