Ancillary Mercy полностью

The UFO problem reached its climax and resolution between 1966 and 1969. What had begun as a situation where anything seemed possible, in which flying saucer reports deluged the globe, ended with the sound of a door slamming shut. The air force, at the nadir of its credibility on the UFO issue in 1966, rode tall with the sanction of official science in 1969. The University of Colorado study on UFOs was riddled with dissension and saddled with bad publicity; it produced a report that, for all its bulk, was remarkably skimpy where it mattered. Its conclusion did not coincide, even remotely, with its own data. But none of that mattered—a telling statement on the state of mainstream science, and a lesson in how to ride that capricious horse known as the public. It also surely helped that UFO reports dropped, as if off a table.

The air force and the CIA had finally gotten what they had wanted for so long. Whatever UFOs represented to them, they could work on the situation henceforth in relative isolation from the prying eyes of the public. For, contrary to what Bolender claimed, UFOs were much more than an administrative burden. They continued to represent, and be, a real burden. The mere publication of a weakly supported scientific refutation could hardly be expected to change the judgments of those within the intelligence community, whether they be anonymous authors within the NSA, the strike team members at Minot AFB who saw a hovering UFO over their launch facility, or famous scientists such as Paul Santorini. The explanations passed off to the public were not congruent with the situation the classified world continued to deal with.

Winners need losers, and by 1969 NICAP had lost in a big way. For all of Donald Keyhoe’s faults, he had been NICAP’s driving force, the major who led the charge. His ouster loosened the organization from its mooring, and it soon crashed into the rocks. It may be that there was little Keyhoe could have done to save NICAP had he continued at its helm. The future looked bleak from any vantage point. But, old man that he was, Keyhoe remained its best hope. Without him, instead of going down fighting, NICAP committed suicide—perhaps, with the CIA in mind, we should say, committed assisted suicide.

Did the public lose, as well? The answer depends on whether one believes truth to be of greater value than social stability. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president on a platform of law and order, amid a society with a disintegrating social consensus. Not everyone cared about truth at all cost; many just wanted to keep the machinery moving. At the front of the line, as it is in all places and all eras, was the national security apparatus, which saw the maintenance of stability and the status quo as its preeminent goal. Viewed from this perspective, at once paternalistic and self-serving, one might say the public interest was served. With the issue of UFOs at rest, the country, and perhaps the world, could move on to other pressing items.

There remains the small matter of truth, however. The problem with truth is that it ever remains the uninvited guest who crashes the party. Even in disgrace, truth is hard to get rid of. With the wrong conclusion coming from the Colorado University project—and it was the wrong conclusion—a new era of deception about UFOs had begun, one with the sanction of science. Inevitably, truth would pop up again—never without a challenge, of course, but there all the same. Within such a context, in the face of official denials about UFOs, truth could only erode the public’s confidence in its leaders. It may be hard for later generations to appreciate the faith placed by those of an earlier time in their government, in their country. The death, long ago, of this faith testifies to the dangerous power of truth, not simply in relation to UFOs, of course, but to all activities of the national security state, including UFOs.

Chapter 9

The Problem Renewed: 1970 to 1973

To condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible, is to assume the distinction of knowing the bounds and limits of God’s will and of the power of our mother Nature.... It is dangerous and presumptuous, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend.

—Michel de Montaigne, “Measuring the True and False”

NATIONAL SECURITY STATE TRIUMPHANT