The involvement of the National Security Agency in the tracking and analysis of UFOs has long been the subject of speculation. Indeed, several documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests have proven, despite NSA denials, strong interest in UFO reports. One document from the caverns of NSA that surfaced in 1984 as a result of a FOIA request is, while not an official NSA document per se, nevertheless a remarkable piece.83
In this brief essay, the author methodically considered the various “human survival implications” suggested by the major competing hypotheses that explained UFOs. He then analyzed each hypothesis.
The first hypothesis, that UFOs were hoaxes, seemed highly unlikely, the author wrote. Historically speaking, hoaxes have been characterized by infrequency of occurrence and a restricted geographic nature. If UFOs were hoaxes of a worldwide dimension, “then a human mental aberration of alarming proportions would have appeared to be developing,” an alarming conclusion in itself.
The next hypothesis, that UFOs were hallucinations, also seemed unlikely. While people do hallucinate, group hallucinations are rare. Machines, too, can “hallucinate,” in that radar can at times mistakenly “see” a temperature inversion. However, “a considerable number of instances exists in which there are groups of people and a radar or radars seeing the same thing at the same time....” If, in spite of the evidence, UFOs did turn out to be hallucinations, then “such a growing impairment of the human capacity for rational judgment [should] be subjected to immediate and thorough scientific study.”
The third hypothesis, that UFOs were natural phenomena, seemed unlikely due to the many instances of trained military observers seeing UFOs behaving like high-speed and high-performance aircraft, with an apparent solidity and craft-like shape. If the hypothesis turned out to be correct, we must question the ability of air warning systems to diagnose an attack situation. It was disturbing, the author noted, that “many responsible military officers have developed a mental ‘blind spot’ to objects which appear to have the characteristics of UFOs.” The implication is that many officers see, but do not report, UFOs.
Are UFOs secret Earth projects? The mysterious author failed to speculate much on this fourth hypothesis, but agreed that it had some validity. All UFOs, he argued, should be scrutinized to ferret out such enemy or friendly projects. Otherwise, we risk the possibility of intimidation by a new secret weapon.
The fifth hypothesis, UFOs as extraterrestrial intelligence, was the one that most intrigued the author, and the one to which he gave his strongest endorsement. He cited such scientists as McDonald, Hynek, Vallee, and Seymore Hess, and argued that the 1952 Washington, D.C., sightings “strongly support this view.” If the ET hypothesis is true, he wrote, the human survival questions are far-reaching. “If ‘they’ discover you, it is an old but hardly invalid rule of thumb, ‘they’ are your technological superiors.” Human history surely demonstrates the dangers to weaker cultures when confronted by a technologically superior civilization: a loss of identity and absorption by the others. Citing the example of Japan, he noted that it is at least theoretically possible for a “weaker” society to survive such a confrontation, but he criticized the leisurely approach scientists had hitherto taken to the possibility that UFOs represented alien intelligence. “If you are walking along a forest path,” he continued, “and someone yells ‘rattler,”’
your action would be immediate and defensive. You would not take time to speculate before you act. You would have to treat the alarm as if it were a real and immediate threat to your survival. Investigation would become an intensive emergency action to isolate the threat and to determine its precise nature. It would be geared to developing adequate defensive measures in a minimum amount of time.
It would seem, he concluded, that a little more of this survival attitude is called for in dealing with the UFO problem. Chimpanzees in captivity, for example, become confused, disoriented, and pattern their behavior after humans. Such a behavior, wrote the author, offers no survival value in the wild. “Do the captivity characteristics of modern civilization,” he wondered, “cause a similar lessening of man’s adaptive capability, of his health, of his ability to recognize reality, of his ability to survive?”
The NSA maintained that, while the document in question does exist, “it was never published, issued, acted upon, or responded to by NSA or any other government agency. Its author wrote it for personal reasons. As explained above, NSA has not been tasked to monitor or assess allegations of UFO activity worldwide.”84
