On January 11, 1969, attempting to mitigate the disaster, Keyhoe, Saunders, and McDonald held a press conference and harshly criticized the report. Hynek also quickly denounced the report, speaking of its “trivial and irrelevant discussions, practically padding.” But McDonald was the most forceful. He circulated critiques, communicated with other scholars, and sought to reinvestigate several of the project cases. He even battled to get access to the photocopied Blue Book material used by the project; Condon saw to it that these were destroyed. The tide had turned; in the public realm, UFOs were debunked.95
It also appeared that Blue Book’s days were numbered. In early March 1969, SAFOI representative, Maj. David J. Shea, attended a meeting at the Pentagon in which “there was no doubt that Project Blue Book was finished.” 96 Condon spoke publicly about the report for the first time in April. At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, he seemed to state in seriousness that
publishers who publish or teachers who teach any of the pseudosciences as established truth should, on being found guilty, be publicly horsewhipped and forever banned from further activity in these usually honorable professions.97
FROM JOHNSON TO NIXON
The most noteworthy feature of the American national security state during the late 1960s was its covert pervasiveness throughout American society. First, Hoover’s FBI. In 1968, the bureau initiated a Cointel program against the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). From 1969 to 1971, the Chicago police department routinely, and illegally, funneled intelligence to the FBI. Still, Hoover was falling behind. Both the NSA and CIA were increasingly unhappy with the FBI, which they wanted to be more aggressive. Hoover in his old age had not so much mellowed as become nervous and, with good cause, concerned about exposure.98 The FBI also had made a fine shambles of the investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. (Ten years later, a congressional inquiry concluded there was a conspiracy to kill King. James Earl Ray, the man convicted for King’s murder, claimed that the FBI pressured him to confess. The RFK investigation was similarly mishandled.)
Next to the bureau, the military intelligence services became the most important component of the domestic intelligence scene. Army intelligence had nearly unlimited funds, extensive manpower, specialized personnel, deep planning and training resources, and the most sophisticated communications and data processing capability. This ensured a unique versatility. The army’s intelligence surveillance did not focus on tactical and reconnaissance data, but on political and ideological intelligence within the United States. These were wholly illegal.99
Then there was the CIA. By the late 1960s, there were more spies than diplomats in the State Department, or employees in the Department of Labor. The CIA was using the NRO’s spy satellite apparatus to gather intelligence on domestic demonstrations. One of its domestic intelligence operations, known as Chaos, expanded steadily through 1968 and 1969, pacing the antiwar movement itself. When the Weather Underground, a radical splinter of the SDS, had an “acid test” to detect
The agency continued its work on mind control. Following the work of Dr. Jose Delgado, a Yale psychologist, Dr. Robert Keefe, a neurosurgeon at Tulane University, conducted work in Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). This involves implanting electrodes into the brain and body, with the result that the subject’s memory, impulses, and feelings could all be controlled. Moreover, ESB could evoke hallucinations, as well as fear and pleasure. “It could literally manipulate the human will, at will,” said Keefe. In 1968, George Estabrooks, another spook scientist, spoke indiscreetly to a reporter for the
