As a longtime student of the phenomenon, I can testify to the complexity of the data Richard Dolan had to decipher. The U.S. Air Force itself, overtly the main contender in this drama, never attempted to compile a comprehensive history of its own files on the matter. When I reviewed the 11,000 cases in the air force files between 1963 and 1967, the military had no index of that data. The most cogent participants, such as Capt. Edward Ruppelt and professor J. Allen Hynek, did write about what they had done but they left many undocumented areas. Interested outsiders picked up the pieces of the various projects, and presented personal interpretations of what had happened. Understandably, the result was a vibrant mélange of facts, fiction, and subjective interpretations, which has led to the wildly conflicting theories the media love to exploit.
Even the White House was unable to reconstruct the full picture when President Jimmy Carter instructed NASA to undertake a review of UFO information in the late seventies. A Washington wag described the space agency’s reaction to this presidential order as “a flurry of alarmed paralysis.” At the height of the Carter effort a small group of us from various research institutes and universities volunteered to help. I vividly recall a meeting I had with a high-level official at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, across the street from the White House in September 1977. 1 tried to convey to him that we had experts all across the U.S. who were ready, willing, and able to get involved in NASA’s review of the phenomenon if they were given a green light. He listened to me sympathetically but expressed discouragement about what he saw as “an impossible political situation.” Discussion turned to the fact that the CIA and the air force, as well as several other agencies, must have entire file cabinets filled with reports from their own people, if only because the phenomenon is known to trigger the kinds of sensors that have been deployed to detect enemy threats during the Cold War. I was told there was plenty of data all right, collected by the military and intelligence community, but it “never saw the light of day.” The White House might force some of it to be released, he told me, but that might not advance the problem: “Those guys twist everything to suit their own political schemes. It’s like pulling teeth to get data, and you never know if they tell you the truth.”
Into this murky world of deception and confusion Richard Dolan has now cast a welcome light. But it will take a sustained effort along the lines he has pioneered if we hope to validate the facts, uncover the motives, and reconstruct the patterns. In order to conduct this analysis it is very important to take notice of what is
I had a vivid example of this fact, on a much smaller scale, when I unearthed a secret letter from a Battelle scientist named Cross, who had written to the CIA at the time of the Robertson panel in 1953. (I have referred to this document in my previous books as the “Pentacle Memorandum.”) To this day there are ufologists who claim the letter was unimportant. Yet there are indications it may represent the point of major bifurcation when the most serious part of the official study plunged underground while Blue Book continued as a public relations exercise, the visible effort by the military to gather UFO reports from American citizens.
The experience of tracking down that single document makes me appreciate the delicate nature and the sheer difficulty of the task undertaken by Richard Dolan in compiling the present book.
The Cross letter was significant because it implied that a group of specialists working in the shadows on the most massive UFO study to date had the power to keep critical information from a prestigious national security panel. Furthermore, they had another plan, a brilliant project of far-reaching implication which they proposed to implement as a way of getting to the heart of the phenomenon. I had a copy of that letter. It was stamped “Secret.” I knew its exact origin. Yet all the efforts I made to unearth an official copy from the air force or the National Archives through the Freedom of Information Act failed to yield results. It is finally through Congress that I obtained clearance to release the text. The process has given me a sobering view of the ability of the bureaucracy to hide the truth for decades, occasionally using the colorful community of UFO believers itself as an unwitting tool as it covered its tracks. To this day, I am convinced that historians of the phenomenon have remained blind to some of the implications. It is my hope that books like the present one can stimulate a renewed effort to get at the truth.
