Ancillary Mercy полностью

A new leadership took over at NICAP following Keyhoe’s ouster. John L. Acuff, an outsider to NICAP and not a UFO researcher, was suddenly elected to serve on NICAP’s board. In May 1970, he became the new director. For some time, Acuff had been executive director of the Washington-based Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers (SPSE). SPSE had already cooperated with NICAP informally in the area of photographic analysis. It was later discovered that SPSE had significant intelligence connections: many members were photo analysts within the various intelligence components of the Department of Defense and CIA. The group had also been the target of KGB espionage.

Judged by Acuff’s management of NICAP, he was either wholly inept or else he deliberately sought to sabotage the organization. Assisted by G. Stuart Nixon, he implemented a wholesale reorganization that ended the long-standing existence of NICAP affiliates throughout the country, groups that had vigorously promoted NICAP for years. He ended the UFO subcommittee system organized by Keyhoe, Hall, and Gordon Lore that existed at the state level. Regional members were told to operate independently from one another and were discouraged from communication and cooperation. Acuff declared all regional UFO data to be NICAP proprietary knowledge, which could not be disseminated without the approval of NICAP headquarters. Criticism of the government’s UFO policy was no longer permitted, and NICAP turned into a mere “sighting collection center.” The UFO Investigator became a four-page newsletter.

G. Stuart Nixon was also in regular communication with CIA agents. Zechel mentioned an undated CIA document, probably from 1970, written by an unnamed person within the agency, which indicated a familiarity with G. Stuart Nixon. NICAP daily activity logs from the late 1960s and early 1970s reflected that Nixon frequently met with CIA personnel such as Art Lundahl, director of NPIC; Fred Durant, author of the Robertson Panel report and a former CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence missile expert; and Dr. Charles Sheldon, a consultant to the agency later with the Library of Congress. Another person Nixon was meeting with frequently in 1968 was John L. Acuff. Oddly, none of the NICAP logs reflected any conversations between Nixon and Colonel Bryan, either by phone or in person, although almost every other daily occurrence was denoted in the logs. When questioned about this, Nixon refused comment.

Keyhoe supporters, meanwhile, were pressured to quit. Raymond Fowler, chairman of the NICAP Massachusetts Investigating Subcommittee, found his position eliminated soon after Acuff’s appointment, and he became a regional investigator. Other subcommittee investigators lost their investigator status altogether. In 1971, Fowler’s Massachusetts crew resigned en masse from NICAP, most joining MUFON which, as Fowler put it, “oddly enough, first appeared in the fortuitous year of 1969.” The organization, formed as the Midwest (later Mutual) UFO Network, was founded by Walter Andrus, a Motorola executive and former APRO member. The Lorenzens were furious, but MUFON quickly became a successful organization, bringing in members from APRO as well as NICAP

Acuff served as director until 1978. His successors, too, all had CIA connections, some tenuous, some strong. By then, serious management problems already caused the demise of NICAP. Even by 1973, its files were taken over by the newly formed Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois. CUFOS was formed by J. Allen Hynek, late of the defunct Blue Book program. It is reasonable to assume that copies of anything of interest also found their way to Langley.¹⁰⁹

THE END OF UFOs

The “definitive” explanation of UFOs coincided with a downturn of UFO reports. For the next two or three years, very little activity was reported worldwide. A bit in Australia and Brazil during 1969, some in Malaysia in 1970, and little anywhere in 1971.¹¹⁰

One of the better-known UFO sightings of 1969 was the Jimmy Carter sighting of January 6. Carter, along with ten residents of Leary, Georgia, was waiting for a Lions Club meeting to start when all noticed an unusually bright light at about thirty degrees elevation in the western sky between 7:15 and 7:30 PM. Carter recalled later that it appeared slightly smaller than the apparent size of the moon. In his words, it “came close, moved away, came close, then moved away.” He estimated its distance to be between three hundred and one thousand yards. The only analysis of the incident was offered by debunker Robert Sheaffer, who established the presence of Venus in that part of the sky. To which one answers: so? Carter himself later attributed the sighting to an “electrical occurrence of some sort.”¹¹¹