Nor, it appears, the classified world. JANAP-146 and CIRVIS remained in effect, for example, indicating that UFO reports were still being routed through those channels. Moreover, journalist Howard Blum noted that since 1972, the NSA had been “secretly monitoring and often assessing worldwide allegations of UFO activity.” It was mandatory, Blum wrote, to “Flash-report” Fort Meade on all intercepted flying objects; “and these installations are required to track and Flash-report on any signals or electronics intelligence that might have an extraterrestrial origin.” In February 1974, the French Defense Minister, Robert Galley, confirmed in a radio interview that his department was very interested in UFO reports and “that it had been interested since the great wave of 1954....” His department’s records contained “some baffling radar/visual incidents.” The UFO phenomenon was global, Galley said, and he expressed his conviction that “we must regard these phenomena with an attitude of completely open mind.... It is undeniable that there are facts that are unexplained or badly explained.”29
The great advantage to UFO secrecy henceforth was the official deniability that the military now possessed. Previously, those who disbelieved air force denials about UFOs always replied with the unanswerable question: then why investigate UFO reports through Project Blue Book? Now, however, the air force no longer officially investigated UFOs. With Blue Book gone, the last link to official sanction was removed from the UFO problem, and it was taken in toto to where the national security elite had always wanted it to be: deep within the classified world.
Conclusion
Our acceptance of any new concept always seems to pass through three phases: At first, it is declared impossible. Then, as supporting facts accumulate, their interpretation is said to be erroneous. But finally, everybody says blandly, “We knew it all the time.”
From the 1940s to the 1970s, military personnel from the United States and many other nations encountered unidentified flying objects, visually and on radar, sometimes at close range. These instances happened not scores of times, but hundreds of times, perhaps even thousands. Sometimes the encounter was nothing more than a solid radar return of an object moving at an incomprehensible speed, performing impossible maneuvers. Sometimes it included the violation of sensitive airspace. Often it involved the dispatch of one or more jets to intercept the object. At times, crew members claimed to see a metallic, disc-like object, sometimes with portholes, sometimes with lights, frequently engaged in what appeared to be intelligent, evasive maneuvers. In a very few cases, it involved the crash and military retrieval of a UFO. In a few others, it involved injury and even death to military personnel. In the large majority of instances recorded in this book, military personnel who encountered UFOs were adamant that they did not see a natural phenomenon.
This is clearly a serious development, and it was treated as such by those groups we may call the national security state. The CIA, NSA, and all branches of military intelligence received UFO reports and discussed the matter as something of serious concern. There is also evidence, provided by former Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt, of an “Above Top Secret” group with access to all UFO data, a group that straddled the worlds of government, military, and industry.
At the same time, the military created the fiction, for public consumption only, that the UFO problem was nothing to be concerned about—certainly not the result of little green men. Aided by a heavy-handed official media and culture, it tried to convince the public that the air force’s Project Blue Book was the appropriate tool for looking into this purely academic concern. Blue Book was fundamentally a public relations tool, not an investigative body. Throughout its existence, it was under orders to debunk. After 1953, the public had no idea that the best UFO cases usually went elsewhere.
I have tried to show that the cover-up of UFO information is nothing unique. A state capable of conducting terminal mind-control experiments, biological spraying of American cities, illegal mail and cable interceptions, nationwide domestic surveillance by its military, human plutonium and syphilis injections, sundry coups and assassinations, ongoing media manipulation and flat-out public lying on a continual basis, would surely be capable of lying about UFOs, too. Indeed, it was the very institutions involved in such unsavory and subterranean activities that were most interested in maintaining UFO secrecy.
