Society for Scientific Exploration Annual Meeting 2013, post six.

We're at the end of the road as far as any chance of good science, or even occasional honesty, is concerned regarding the intelligence community's handling of UFO affairs. The conclusion of the CIA panel was crystal clear: Open discussion of UFOs in ANY honest public way was directly counter to the concerns of national security. On the other hand, deliberate manipulation of UFO "news" so as to deflate the reality of the subject in the public's mind was PRECISELY what was needed. The USAF eased into this as far as the policies WITHIN the military were concerned, as they needed to continue to receive the reports of potentially serious airspace violations. But for persons outside the military the public policy arose quickly, founded upon a simple principle or two:

1). no one should comment publicly upon any UFO case which was not already solved;
2). in case of public insistence, if a case is unsolved, the public relations officer must say something to the effect that "we are looking into it and there is no reason for concern";
3). preferably, any requests for information by the public should be sent to the Pentagon.

To stiffen the policy, it was widely disseminated by a JANAP that any military personnel who talked openly about a UFO case was potentially subject to an extremely big fine, and possible imprisonment.
Incentives for engaging in loose-lipped discussion of UFOs was low.

In many ways the reality of the times was even more brutal than the policy. As the Ruppelt crew left Project Blue Book, and after some brief station-keepers [the non-serious Bob Olsson and the careful mouse, Charles Hardin] in came the most vicious anti-UFO project head ever {Captain George Gregory}. He had the exact intelligence commander needed, as back had come the vitriolic Harold Watson. The atmosphere at Blue Book was as hostile as it could get and still have a project at all.

This era could have spelt doom for UFOlogy entirely if it were not for one dogged man: Don Keyhoe. Keyhoe had his teeth into a bone and would not let go. He was the most tenacious man in UFO history {by far} and the person most feared by the Air Force [by far]. To pursue their strict policy of thwarting any momentum the public might get as to UFO interest, Wright-Pat and the Pentagon set up a five man team dedicated almost entirely to stopping Keyhoe. Not shooting him, of course, but shooting down all his ploys to get the subject before congress. This team consisted of Captain Gregory, scientific aerotechnology consultant A. Francis Arcier, Pentagon public relations spokesperson Major Lawrence Tacker [the most blunt and crude anti-UFO spokesperson ever at the Pentagon], and two other Colonels in liaison positions with congress.

Keyhoe and his NICAP organization would make some publicity noise; this group would plot strategy to foil it. A lollapaloosa case would occur; this group would meet in emergency to plan how to head Keyhoe off before he could get traction with the case in congress. Keyhoe would have a national television appearance scheduled; this group would try to ambush him on the air, or force the television people to severely circumscribe what he would be allowed to say. Astoundingly ALL of the things just mentioned, and more, actually happened. Yes, Virginia, this is the USA, the Land of the Free, but when National Security was felt to be involved, not quite so free as you'd suspect.

Attempting to gag and embarrass Keyhoe was not the only noble occupation of the unholy five. At Project Blue Book, the activity of George Gregory involved not only debunking new cases but going back into the files and re-writing the "solutions" to old ones. "Unidentifieds" were changed to "the star Arcturus" or some other preposterous atrocity. When James McDonald was, much later, allowed to read the microfilms, he was livid with rage. He tended to accuse Allen Hynek, but through most of this period Allen was, naively as always, chasing down Sputnik et al for the Project Moonwatch headquarters, and had little to do with analysis of new cases. Often accused by many people on specific cases later, Allen would look at the record card and say: that was not My analysis.

One particularly concrete example of information management was how the Pentagon handled the famous Battelle study of Blue Book case files. Battelle had been commissioned to make a study of the project files back in Ruppelt's day. By the time of the CIA panel, that study wasn't done. The naive "gee, this must be about finding the truth" guys wanted to postpone the Panel until Battelle could finish. Forget it, and on the Panel went.

When Battelle did finally finish, the Panel was long over and the manipulate-the-public policy was in place. Gregory, Tacker et al wondered how to use this study to forward their ignoble cause. Battelle had done, for reasons entirely mysterious to me, an array of cases labeled unidentified, as drawn in the illustration just above. It would seem that these cases were chosen to show how different every so-called "UFO" was. Whether this was purposeful or not, I do not know, but would like to. Certainly a much fuller array of drawings could have been made showing the eery similarity of most UFOs rather than these differences, and such an array would have been more honest. But that's not the way it happened, and this array was employed by Tacker et al to debunk UFOs as errors of observation by well-meaning but wrong witnesses.

By focussing on these drawings rather than the text, the gang-of-five successfully distracted the readers from what you can see on the graphs above. Battelle had divided all cases by potential quality of observer --- things like experienced pilots>>>everyday citizen. Then they took the cases within each observer category and divided them up by the quality and strangeness of the incident. What Battelle found was that statistically the higher quality observers saw, described, reported a higher percentage of unidentifieds. In plain language, better observers were more likely to have reported UFOs, not the reverse that the Pentagon was implying. Note the astounding one third unknowns by the best observers.

But what did Gregory, Tacker et al care? They were just doing their jobs... albeit gleefully.

This horror show persisted through Gregory's reign but onward through Bob Friend's and into Hector Quintanilla's. Hynek slowly came out of his stupor and figured it out that he was a dupe. But he made one last memorable bonehead by calling the Michigan 1966 sightings Swamp Gas, whereupon all Hell broke loose and he and the USAF got a public shellacking that they deserved.

At that stage of intel community dishonesty though, it was the best thing that could have happened, as it gave the UFO community one final chance to get out the proper word. That Great Hope became the Colorado Project.

I've written a lot about Colorado, even in several places on this blog. I'll not repeat all that here. What SHOULD have been Science's best shot at this subject {finally} became, for sociological and personality issues, a horrifying fiasco. It's an intricate story that you'll have to read elsewhere. On the "did they do science?" question, sufficient hints are in the listing just above to [probably] tell you what you need to know. The effort was pathetic and some of the individual behaviors worse.

Makes me indescribably angry that the so-called scientists didn't put on a better show.

I'm going to end my description of what I would have said at SSE if there had been time at this point in the historical narrative. At an absolute minimum we should accept that there were two major messages that the intelligence community was telling us throughout. One is General Samford's above.

The other is below.

Whether you "like" these two statements or not, they are facts of the historical narrative.

Till next time, folks.

Watch the Skies.

Society for Scientific Exploration 2013 Annual Meeting, post five.

Still cruising across the military intelligence handling of UFOs problem.... here is a thumbnail on where we are in mid-1952:

1). The Air Force, despite public comment to the contrary,was quite concerned about these violations of American airspace about which we apparently can't even detect in a timely manner let alone do anything about;

2). The Pentagon was now full of highly placed officers who were taking this issue very seriously; this included the Assistant Director of Intelligence, who had seen a UFO himself, and the spooky Stefan Possony, the psychological warfare expert with an office desk right in General Samford's own DI spaces;

3). Hypotheses for the nature of these objects in the reports were: a]. they don't exist; everyone is making mistake after mistake; b]. these things are ours, but someone isn't bothering to tell The Pentagon about them, despite being directly asked; c]. these things are Soviet very high-tech devices of a completely unsuspected development, the breakthroughs required being very difficult to conceive; d]. these things are Soviet, but of technical capabilities less than what some of the reports might envision; they are tricky but more conventional than we think, and are likely some vast Soviet psychological warfare scheme; e). these things are exactly what they are reported to be and therefore beyond the current capability of Earth technology.

4). In 1952, despite some Pentagon analysts wanting to believe "a", the two prominent guesses were "d" and "e";

5). Top Pentagon operatives like Colonels Smith and Adams, Major Fournet, and several others [according to Ed Ruppelt] favored "e". General Garland favored "d", while fearing the small chance of "c". Stefan Possony rejected "c" completely, but worried about "d", while thinking "e" a real possibility. Over at Blue Book, the boys were keeping a low profile on hypothesizing. Members of the old dispersed SIGN group still thought "e", while Grudge persons still thought "a". Ruppelt was one of the most intriguing and misunderstood of the experts. He was certain that there were genuine UFO reports [that is genuinely mysterious and unidentifiable things in the sky] but absolutely refused to endorse that those things were "flying disks", whether some of the witnesses described them that way or not. Ed Ruppelt believed that if these things were truly disk-shaped flying objects with no technological accoutrements like wings, tails, rocketry-out-the-back etc, the they were extraterrestrial. But he would not cross that line in any conclusion, no matter how strong the case. His underlings [with one exception, Anderson Flues] were more like a bunch of goof-off college boys than analysts. They took nothing seriously except the next pretty girl they'd run into.

6). The general restrictive atmosphere within the military about spending essentially nothing on anything not related to nuclear warfare remained the firm "economic" background for all decisions.

It was into this exciting mush of mystery and concern that several important, linked things occurred. The consequences of these happenings changed UFO investigation and information manipulation forever, and not for the good. This sequence was, all too briefly, as follows:

A). The UFO phenomenon unleashed a tremendous flap which grew into such numbers that Edward Ruppelt fell a month behind in his logging/filing by mid-summer.

B). That flap culminated in a pair of "show-off" performances over the nation's capital almost as if thumbing its nose at us and the Air Force.

C). This uncontrollable airspace violation of the most sensitive airspace in the country had everybody alarmed right up to President Truman. Truman had been keeping tabs on the phenomenon for months through his main military advisor, General Landry. Landry gave Truman a briefing on UFOs each month. Without us knowing the exact orders, Truman gave Landry an urgent order to get CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith on the problem. What are these things and what can be done about them?

D). The CIA was interested in that very problem for several months, but now it had urgency. Wheels rolled the following day. The focus of the CIA activity was Dr. Marshall Chadwick, chief of the CIA's Office of Scientific Investigations. He, plus General Philip Strong, and rocket expert Frederick Durant became the three musketeers of this investigation, though other elements of the agency were involved.

E). On a separate track, MIT was getting extremely interested. Several heavyweight engineers, including people like Al Hill and George Valley, were trying to initiate a vast program of upgrading the radar detection technology and the national security network for detecting airspace violations. This project was to be part of the program of the Lincoln Labs. The unsolved UFO problem was looked upon as a widely obvious case of the complete failure of our current systems. Lincoln wanted to initiate or at least intimately support a new UFO research program entirely separate from the Air Force.

F). The none-higher-in-prestige Julius Stratton of MIT made direct contact with Chadwell to explore getting this done. Chadwell had begun his probe into UFOs believing that it was all smoke, but the more he learned, the more he became convinced that the phenomenon was not only real but potentially dangerous. Stratton and Chadwell reached common ground, and wheels were set in motion to get a preliminary meeting done which would establish this project under CIA auspices.

G). This plan got out to the rest of the services prior to an uber-important meeting meant to sanction the establishing meeting that Chadwell/Stratton had hoped for. Somewhere very high up in the Pentagon, great powers were exercised to apparently blast CIA director Smith about this seeming takeover of military turf. Heads didn't exactly roll, but plans did. Chadwell was reduced to accepting the idea that instead of a project-establishing meeting, we would have a panel of scientists reviewing the UFO potential threat to national security instead.

H). Thus arose, almost out of nowhere, the infamous Robertson Panel of January 1953.

Much has been written about this panel of scientists who were tasked to [deliberately] do no science. I'll only set the most germane [to my current topic] facts before you here.

1). The panelists were a Who's Who of physicists. None was any expert on the subject to be "studied". Only Robertson and Page had even read anything on the subject, and they only an article from the New Yorker magazine. This alone reveals that this was a farce.

2). But even though it was not known either to the people who would present to the panel, nor most of the panel themselves, the true reason and outcome of these "deliberations" was already set. This was not to be a panel of science about the nature of UFOs, but a fancy shadowshow aimed at stating why the phenomenon was dangerous whatever it was, and where exactly that danger lay, and what should the policy be to address this.

3). People like Ruppelt and Hynek, naive to the bone, thought that they were being invited to present data, scientific evidence. Both left the proceedings trying to rationalize what just happened with their naive suppositions. Ruppelt never figured it out, and it took Hynek 15 years to do so. Their information was just politely waved aside with almost no comment. Dewey Fournet brought his motions study to the panel and got the same treatment.

4). The only things to elicit even a modicum of interest were the two motion picture films [Tremonton, UT and Great Falls, MT] and the panel reacted to them like childish kids going to the Saturday Afternoon Matinee. Displaying them on some ad hoc surface the boys gathered about making instant conclusions and wisecracker remarks. And then dismissed them. The NPIC film analysts [the finest in the nation] were there to present their data. Complete stonewalled ignorance of their ideas issued from the panel. These NPIC analysts had spent hundreds of hours showing to their satisfaction that the imagery was not birds [Tremonton] nor jet exhausts [Great Falls]. Nothing from the panel. Just birds; just exhausts. The top analyst at NPIC, the legendary Art Lundahl, was at NPIC when those films were analyzed, and saw the results. He agreed with Neasham and Woo the technicians. Both films were of unknowns. The panel ho-hummed. Lundahl and many others have boggled at this arrogance.

5). But it wasn't arrogance. This was merely the result of the shadowshow. The real purpose of the panel was the national security threat. Indicating to the servant-level staff [Hynek, Ruppelt, Fournet et al] that there was nothing much to UFOs was part of what had to be done to get to the real result. That result was the need to convince EVERYONE that there wasn't much to UFOs. Why? Because THE MERE IDEA OF UFOS WAS THE DANGER.

UFOs themselves, whatever they might be [even Soviet], seemed incapable of inflicting any real damage on anything, and apparently hadn't even tried to do so. It was the idea of unknown things in the sky which was addling the American public. During the mid-summer flap, the public was alarmed enough that their calls to airbases clogged communication channels up to 45 minute delays --- plenty of time to begin a good real onslaught by the Soviets.

Americans were judged panicky, just like with the 1939 Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds. Sadly the CIA and military were correct in this, as Americans proved many times in later instances to panic and immediately go for their guns. The UFOs could also be used to create phony invasion probes, which when proved wrong would make persons who SHOULD be reporting such things less likely to expose themselves to ridicule while a real flight of the enemy came the next time.

So, in the end, this became a psychological warfare national security issue afterall. As you read the Robertson panel materials you enter a mystery. All these guys are scientists or engineers... none of them seem to have psychological warfare in their portfolios.

.... except one. Sitting to the side as a "guest", his name added in very light ink so that it cannot even be read in most versions of the released panel report, was .... wait for it ....

Stefan Possony.

There is no mention that Possony addressed the panel in the records. The "conclusions" of the panel though are the thoughts of a man just like him.

Thus began the concerted efforts over the next 15 years to remove the feeling of reality surrounding the UFOs. Serious concerns about airspace invasions were gradually successfully replaced by an all pervading unconcern involving stupidity invasions. Now UFOs= popculture stupidity is everywhere; real attempts to extricate anything resembling truth are swamped in swamp gas laughter.

We'll follow this transition into the late 1950s and 1960s next time.

Peace.

Society for Scientific Exploration, post four.

Onward with the personal talk --- actually, my time limits forced me to only give a piece of this. You are being put through the whole deal... what a privilege, eh? {don't answer that}.

A lot of people know that 1952 was a major flap year and that we had by great good luck one of our favorite guys, Captain Edward Ruppelt, as chief of the newly re-named Project Blue Book. A few others know that there was a new Director of Intelligence, General John Samford, and a new officer assigned to the Pentagon's analysis of UFOs, Major Dewey Fournet. What almost no one knew was that almost the whole command structure which would have direct interface with this problem changed.

Some of the shifts are pictured at the top. Most significant were that Assistant Director of Intelligence Garland had himself seen a UFO, that the laughing jackanapes Colonel Edward Porter had been removed from thwarting sympathetic officers in the levels just below him [Colonels Weldon Smith and William Adams, who were directly over Dewey Fournet]. Watson was out at Wright-Pat, as were the two goons who had been ruining Grudge and the whole crew who had been lying to General Cabell, now also gone.

The real Mr. X in this new story was Stefan Possony. Possony was a violent hawk who had fled Europe in the face of Hitler and viewed the Soviets as at least as bad. He was, allegedly, a political science professor at Georgetown [translation: high level government spook]. Possony had trained himself into being an expert on the organizational elements of Air Power, and had a big reputation. But he also had become a major force in the psychological warfare intelligence community. Possony suspected that UFOs could readily be Soviet mischief, and probably, if so, part of a vast Soviet psychological warfare scheme. And in the new USAF intel regime of John Samford, Possony had a desk RIGHT IN SAMFORD'S OFFICE AREAS. Can you say "Direct access and strong influence?"

Possony was the brains behind something labeled "The Special Studies Group". We know very little about it, but some of what we know you can read on the next illustration below. Possony also had influence out of the office as well, with the officers just below him in the intelligence stack. There seems to have been a group very interested in UFOs who talked a great deal about this problem. Low man on that totem pole was Dewey Fournet, who did a study which is referred to by the single page handout above [more about that later].

These are parts of the six pages that I have which somewhat describe Possony's Special Study Group, as he was trying to get permission to go to Europe to glean intel on what the Russkis might be up to, particularly about UFOs. For anyone who is paranoid, what I did here for the SSE talk handout was to cut off a piece of one page and the top of another, so as to include the most UFO relevant parts of this short document for the handout. If this "secret manipulation" on my part causes deep angst in anyone, I'll be happy to scan in the whole thing [5&1/2 pages I think]. Of course if I'm CIA or NSA you still won't know if I'm holding back on you.... but if you're THAT paranoid, then I'll just have to quote the movie that "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!"

On a more productive tack, read that note carefully. See, fascinatingly, how it progresses from simple remarks about Soviets or whatever, but gradually expands into open speculations/ plans re: the ET possibilities. Using The Special Study Group as a base, Possony seems to have wanted to push all sorts of studies of UFOs, including even the possibility of communication with them.

As far as Fournet's study is concerned: Dewey has said [to me, actually] that his "Motions" study was his own idea. Others think that it was his superiors, Adams and Smith's idea. Others think that Possony may have been the original hinter. The point is: regardless who was encouraging Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon had, in 1952, a veritable "nest" of high-ranking officers thinking all manner of adventurous thoughts about UFOs and studying them.

Dewey's study by the way was based upon a simple clear thought, and one natural to a pilot: Technology flies in hard geometric precision; nature's denizens, even the best geese, do not. If I can find many cases of hard geometric precision, I prove both technology and intelligence. Then, all I have to show is that some of that flying is beyond our own ken. Dewey felt that his study [all of cases occurring on his own watch at the Pentagon UFO desk from circa June-September 1952], demonstrated all of this.

So, the Pentagon was in Rock & Roll mode. The same could generally be said of Project Blue Book.

There Captain Ruppelt labored to repair the files and to plot the incidents therein. His first discovery was what we've emphasized earlier --- a disturbing concentration of sightings at the New Mexico nuclear lab and testing sites, and at Oak Ridge. In fact, his very first briefing to Generals Samford and Garland found him carrying this information to them on maps. This couldn't have made anyone feel too relaxed about UFOs.

Ruppelt applied for and got a standing science consultant [a near miracle in the current USAF "economic" environment] and we've heard of this guy : Dr. Allen Hynek. He was quite the naive goof to begin with... but he learned. Ruppelt also pursued photos and films, usually unsuccessfully [economics again] and took trips to major witness sites, and had other tests done on the rare opportunities to do so. In short "St. Edward" was trying to do his job, and using science when he could.

In one of the only times that he could apply bench science, he took soil samples from the alleged Desverges landing site and had his labs work on them. What they found haunted Ruppelt till the day he died. Despite the awful character of the primary witness, the straight science on the effects on the plants in the area said: something EXTREMELY strange happened here. The roots of the plants beneath the "landing area" looked like they had been microwaved inches beneath the soil. No one could figure it out. Because Sonny Desverges was such a poor citizen morals-wise, they wrote the case off.... but Ruppelt knew that the trace effects said "unidentified".

So... the Pentagon was moving. Blue Book was moving. Heck, even the Phenomenon decided to Flap just then. Paradise? Nope. Something happened.

 What happened was the CIA Robertson Panel --- but it wasn't the simple story that you've already heard {unless you've already read the book}. I'll go through that strange story next time.

Society For Scientific Exploration 2013 Annual Meeting, post three.

Yes, folks, we return to this riveting publication of my own talk at the SSE. {Yeh, I know... all of our worst nightmares; but it's something to do while I wait for Roger Nelson's and Larry Dossey's DVDs}.

We were here in our story. Project SIGN had been blasted out of existence and "replaced" by a lone lieutenant, Howard Smith, now "chief" of the newly named Project Grudge. No one believed that the change of names was accidental. The noble Howard McCoy had been replaced by the man who most vocally hated UFOs of anyone in the USAF, Colonel Harold Watson. His future comments would occasionally get so out-of-line that he had to be sanctioned, even by a generally UFO-unfriendly Pentagon. With Watson overtop, Lt. Smith had little incentive to spend much time on Grudge, often just mishandling and losing case files ( Ed Ruppelt later had to go to Pentagon and other base records trying to reconstitute the gaping holes in the 1949-1951 era.}

So here in DC was chief of intelligence Charles Cabell, knowing that they hadn't solved their airspace invasion problem, but with a violently hostile Wright-Patterson chief of intelligence, and a complete dud project staffer. The huge ultrabright Scientific Advisory Board available to the Pentagon was not only unused but got the impression that the subject was irrelevant.

This situation was pathetic, but just might have lulled its way into the obscure past if the UFO phenomenon had just faded away.

It did not.

During the "Grudge Era" {1949-1951~}, the UFOs seemed markedly unconcerned about the Pentagon's desire for unconcern. Sitting over on the East Asian side of the Pacific, the Commander of the Far-Eastern Air Force [FEAF] was getting unidentified airspace intrusions in the Japanese and Korean flyzones. As we were just about to go to war in Korea, this was not taken lightly. FEAF sent those reports as required by JANAP to the Pentagon and Wright-Pat... and got nothing back. Finally FEAF began saying things like "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" Here in the North American continent, Continental Air Command [CONAC] was having the same problems. General Cabell was feeling some heat.

Then the US scientists began to chime in. At VERY strategic scientific locations like Los Alamos, Sandia, White Sands, Fort Bliss, and Oak Ridge, there began to be observed an uncomfortable amount of odd things in the sky. At Los Alamos, at least on three occasions, lab scientists noticed increased radiation "excursions" on laboratory equipment, which were coincident with UFO sightings nearby. Were they observing "fall-out" from the flying objects' powerplants? Were they nuclear? This became such an interest that several heavyweight scientists like Harold Agnew [key figure in the Manhatten Project and later to be the actual Director of LANL] banded together to form a UFO observation team and data collector group. They nick-named themselves "The Los Alamos Bird Watchers Association". As time went on, the number of cases was large enough that they developed their own internal UFO report forms to fill out.

Yes, USAF: What the hell is going on?

As Project Grudge continued to snooze [Smith got replaced without angering Watson and moved successfully on, ultimately making General and no waves; his replacements were more in the "get a case, read it, laugh about it a while, and make some explanation up" mode], and Watson continued making irritating public remarks, Cabell at the Pentagon had to slap Watson down a bit to try to at least get Grudge looking at the USAFs own internal cases. This slapping didn't work, and Cabell was lied to about Grudge doing its job.

Out in the real world, more sky invasions. This included the to-this-day mystery of the Green Fireballs. These things were like meteor fireballs but the wrong color [a sort of light lime green] and looking, even to VERY experienced meteor observers, as if they were often "flying horizontally". The really bad part of this was that they were doing whatever they were doing over the Atomic Energy Commission's secret labs at Los Alamos, Sandia, and, shortly, Oak Ridge. The potential significance of that was not lost by the people working there, nor the military in charge.

Right at the top of these power structures the alarms were going off, and the complaints began moving towards the Pentagon. General Cabell was once again reaping a stinking mess from the policy that the Pentagon had sown.

It appears as if it was the Atomic Energy Commission who had enough weight to get the Air Force to move at all. But the Pentagon apparently didn't trust Wright-Patterson to do this job, and with reluctance spent a little money to form Project Twinkle out of their Cambridge [MA] Research Labs.

Twinkle with woefully little real money and support accomplished little. It did track a few objects. Previously a local commander had sanctioned a plane to fly a "dustcatcher" along the route of a green fireball, and the analysis showed unusual copper content in that dust. These were the sorts of things [plus radiation detector arrays and regular watch groups with the sorts of scopes used to track missile launches, etc] that the local commanders and scientists wanted done. Almost none of it was.

Pathetic it seems and pathetic it was. But the overwhelming fear of the Soviet nuclear threat and the need to pursue what was not yet realized as the policy of "mutually-assured-destruction {MAD}" tossed all else aside. Nevertheless, a near-impossible tidal shift in Pentagon atmosphere [as far as UFOs were concerned] was about to take place in late 1951. It would usher in the last "golden" moments for investigating the problem by our military.

Next time....

2013 SSE Meeting, part two.

So, back again, for what it's worth.

As said yesterday, as sort of a delay ploy, I'm going to "present" my own SSE presentation until I receive the DVDs from a couple of the talks that you'd probably rather hear about.

My talk was titled as above. The title was suggested by Patrick Huyghe, who among many other talents was the publisher of the UFOs and Government book. Because the SSE has "scientific" in its title, Patrick thought that a look at the intelligence community's handling of their UFO problem would be interesting taken from that angle.

The talk was tougher to compose than one would think. Anything allegedly focussing on "science" can have the Devil's own time trying to define what "science" is --- this as you know has been the subject of whole shelves full of books ... AND it's usually pretty boring. I decided to put neither the audience nor myself through that torture and rather just tell them what the intel communities actually did. They then could decide for themselves whether the military acted "scientifically" or not --- plus it would be a heck of a lot more interesting.

To give the audience something practical to chew on, I "created" the Man-in-the-Street's attitude to doing Science. You can read it above; it's in good "street-talk" language, but, weirdly, isn't that bad at getting across what anyone would do in trying to solve a problem with good objectivity --- that is, acting like a "scientist". The Man-in-the-Street approach in fact follows much of what the USAF actually did, though they did it with more urgency and intensity at the beginning.

The USAF Pentagon's Intelligence function is somewhat like a split-brain. There is the Collection function, and there is the Analysis function. This is in theory ideal for "science" as collection precedes analysis in a fairly robotic manner, NOT involving jumping to conclusions, by definition. Also, almost as a social silliness, these two groups of guys don't talk much with one another, so the analysis guys don't mess up the collecting very much.

Another difference is that the Collections group actually talks to real people like UFO witnesses, while the analytical boys mostly only talk to themselves in splendid isolation from the real world of actual human experience. This helped, I believe, create the striking gap between how the early Collections people and the early Analysis people felt about the flying disks.

When the disk wave hit the US in the summer of 1947, this was viewed as a potentially VERY serious issue. Anyone scoffing at that assessment is, well, there's no way to politely say it, a naive fool. This is because an apparent unidentified object of ANY kind flying over the country is exactly one thing to the intelligence community: a Violation of American Airspace --- that is, a potential National Security issue.

And the 1947 Wave was handled precisely like that. The top man, the Chief of USAF collections [Colonel Robert Taylor] was rightfully alarmed and placed his top assistant [Lt. Colonel George Garrett] on the job AS HIS SOLE RESPONSIBILITY. The FBI's permanent liaison to the Air Force [S L Reynolds] joined Garrett to attack this. As cases came in, Garrett selected the best 14 [later 16] and did what a scientist would do: looked for a preliminary pattern.

He found one.

The above is one of four USAF documents that we have from between August of 1947 and the end of the year describing this same pattern of the flying disks. George Garrett wrote this one and Taylor signed it. This was being sent to USAF Research and Development office. It was part of a whole flurry of inquiries sent out by Taylor and Assistant Director of Intelligence General George Shulgen to all military and military-industrial research programs trying to solve the problem of the disks by linking them to a current top secret US research project.

All of these inquiries, within and without the Air Force came back empty: we have nothing that looks or flies like that. Note that the Air Force was still behaving pretty scientifically here: They had a problem of interest; they tried to get a pattern; they didn't jump to a solution. In fact, three hypotheses naturally arose: Something's wrong and these things aren't real; they're ours; and they're a product of the Soviets getting some Nazi aerotech genius and an unexpected breakthrough. As a last ditch attempt, the Pentagon sent these same characteristics to their top technical boys at Wright-Patterson AFBs Intelligence and Engineering Divisions. Chief of Intelligence Colonel Howard "Mack" McCoy convened a heavyweight board composed of many of the Engineering lab directors plus several of his own intel guys to study the thing. Their best answer: you guys are right --- there's something flying around. But it's not ours.

The Pentagon was now getting seriously worried. FBI agents were now, by the way, transiting the country looking into certain types of reports to see if there could be Soviet mischief behind them. The USAF did the next proper "scientific" thing: they established a more focussed and more empowered way to collect information and analyze it. And they did it at the location where they have the most technological expertise. They establish Project SIGN at Wright-Pat. The new USAF Director of Intelligence, General Charles Cabell [lower right above], took a special interest, and the top Air Force expert on "low-aspect", i.e, thin-disk, aerial design, Alfred Loedding [above lower left with his patented disk plane] was assigned as technical major project consultant.

The potential for SIGN was huge. SIGN had three top engineers directly involved [Loedding, Albert Deyarmond, a personal close friend of Mack McCoy, and Lawrence Truettner, a missile expert]. Never after was the USAF UFO project so potent with expertise. SIGN also had complete freedom to call on any of the other facilities at Wright-Pat, including things like their own photo analysis lab and the many
engineering geniuses and labs on the air research side. One might also remember that more ex-German "paperclip" technologists were at Wright-Pat post-WWII than anywhere else, and McCoy knew where ALL of them were anywhere in the country. Finally, if SIGN wanted to tap consultants, resources like the Air Force's RAND Institute were available as well.

So they got to work.

SIGN was aided in this by the JANAPs. These were Joint Army Navy Air Force Publications. Coming with the power of the Chiefs of Staff, they demanded certain information transfers and other cooperations between the services. One JANAP ruled the transfer of information to the Air Force ASAP on any unusual or security issue involving happenings in the air, among a few other categories. Flying Disks fell into this purview and so the USAF became the destination for many reports from bases worldwide. These reports were [usually] sent promptly along to SIGN.

As reports came in, the SIGN engineers began sensing a problem and an unthinkable solution. The credentials of the witnesses [mainly military personnel early on] appeared to eliminate the "there's no such thing" type of hypothesis --- although many of the reports were mistakes by the witnesses a large number were not. And the things also began looking markedly beyond our own aerotech capability. Because the SIGN engineers couldn't believe that the Soviets had somehow gotten this lucky with breakthroughs, they were stymied. No one on Earth seemed to be capable of this. This astounding idea was becoming entrenched in their thinking as early as the spring of 1948.

Another thing already in their thinking was a principle of theoretical flight taught to all aerotech engineers of that era: the Prandtl Theory of Lift. This was the mathematical idea of Ludwig Prandtl, a German technical genius prior to the WWII era. It stated that an apparently non-flightworthy design [say a disk or a fat cigar] might fly afterall. The main thing that it needed was a very forceful powerplant/engine.

Then, in mid-summer 1948, came the Chiles-Whitted encounter. The witnesses were judged impeccable, Clarence Chiles particularly being cited as one of the sharpest pilots around. The details that they gave to SIGN seemed to indicate a certain size and maneuverability which placed it in the "impossible" category. BUT could an engine like a nuclear powerplant be strong enough?

SIGN calculated that something like that could allow it. We had established a Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft [NEPA] project at Oak Ridge, but although it looked promising, we were years away from powering actual planes. The Soviets were getting good at making bombs, but far behind us [to our knowledge] at controlling that power. SIGN's conclusion, their "Estimate of the Situation", was that the disks and cigar-shaped fuselages were physically real, but the products of extraterrestrial technology. {{The part of this which applies known information [The Prandtl Theory of Lift] to an unknown situation to make a conclusion is called "scientific deduction" and is another step in the classic method, just to give our boys a little more credit.}}

 Some people have doubted that such an Estimate was ever written. But it was and both Captain Edward Ruppelt and Major Dewey Fournet saw a copy of it at the Pentagon in 1952. I've just posted the later USAF admission of this above.

In order to make their mindboggling estimate seem more rational, SIGN asked USAF Scientific Advisory Board member, George Valley of Princeton, and RAND's ace engineer, James Lipp, for essay reviews on the questions of whether science felt that it was likely that intelligent life existed elsewhere than on Earth, and whether it was a feasible idea that constructing an interplanetary spacecraft was possible. Neither Valley nor Lipp wrote that they believed that UFOs were manned by ETI, but both reviews spoke optimistically about the questions they were asked.

With this added empowerment, SIGN went to the Pentagon with its ideas.

At the Pentagon, Director of Intelligence Cabell was completely flummoxed. Some of his top underlings, such as Colonel Edward Porter and Brig General Mickey Moore, thought that the idea was laughable. Chief of Staff Vandenberg, however, was not at all amused. Cabell, Porter et al ordered Major Jere Boggs of the Defensive Air branch of the Analysis division to construct a counter-Estimate to SIGN's.

SIGN was ordered to DC to defend itself. My guess is that "everyone" was there in a secret room at the National Bureau of Standards where the shootout occurred. We know only the two names of the combatant-presenters: Boggs and Project director of SIGN, Captain Robert Sneider. It is almost inconceivable that people like McCoy, Loedding, Deyarmond, Truettner, Porter, Moore, Cabell, Naval Intelligence, Taylor, Garrett, the FBI, and perhaps even Vandenberg himself were not in attendance.

The bloodletting was severe. SIGN was blasted by the Pentagon higher-ups. SIGN was even required to send reports to George Valley and ONI as well as Boggs from then on --- it was a woodshedding probably unimaginable in their worst dreams. The Pentagon was saying the equivalent of: you boys need adult supervision.

The SIGN group did not last long after that. Within a few months it was entirely broken up and dissipated from Colonel McCoy right down to Robert Sneider. Al Loedding said that his reputation in DC had never been lower. This "moment" forever destroyed the only real "energy" and intensity that the Air Force ever allowed its UFO project to have.

One is tempted to say that it served them right, but the abolishment of SIGN left General Cabell with a big problem. The Pentagon may not have been able to swallow extraterrestrials but that didn't stop the UFOs from continuing to appear. In the letter above, General Cabell, writing immediately after the bloodbath meeting, acknowledges that we still have a problem and a duty to try to collect information and solve this invasion of airspace concern. Cabell wasn't as close-minded as Porter or Moore, but he was simply flummoxed by the whole issue [this is, in my mind, a completely understandable and appropriate position to have at the time].

So, he is suggesting that we stay vigilant an on the ball. The victorious counter-Estimate written by Major Boggs, afterall, said that the devices were real and could well be Soviet technology.

Too bad no one else was behaving that way either at the Pentagon or at the "new" situation at Wright-Pat.

Cabell felt, and so did several others, that there was still a reasonable concern that the UFOs were the products of a combination of Nazi aerotech genius [see the Horten Brothers design top left] and Soviet ambitions. Others were beginning to think that some lesser aerotech development by the Soviets might be employed towards psychological warfare ends, scaring the hell out of the American public, making them and other countries doubt US superiority, and creating false reports by our own bases, resulting in reporting hesitation in the future of a real strike. Cabell was concerned but couldn't figure out how to hit the right tone.

There probably wasn't one. Just at that time, a physicist from Illinois, Louis Ridenour, writing for RAND in a Top Secret capacity, essentially "proved" that the pursuit of a lifting technology for an orbiting satellite was the same thing as developing an ICBM, and, with supergenius John von Neumann mathematically demonstrating that even the Hydrogen Bomb would be miniaturize-able so as to fit into one of those missiles, that this meant that essentially indefensible nuclear-tipped ICBMs were on the horizon. This "insight" terrorized basically everybody in the military. SuperHawks like Curtis LeMay and Bernard Schriever disagreed about what to do about this, but both believed that producing a nuclear arsenal which could devastate the entirety of the Soviet Union was the way to go. The corollary to this was simple: ANY DOLLAR OR PERSONNEL SPENT ON ANYTHING BUT THIS WAS TANTAMOUNT TO SUICIDE AND TREASON.

That was not stated as "official policy", but with the Hawks raging, it was the atmosphere in which everything else was judged. The thought that somehow looking into UFO mysteries would get serious empowerment was viewed at best as a bad joke.

Thus entered in the period of widespread mockery of UFOs to the public, and raw hostility in many areas within the service. {This is the end of the first half of my presentation, and I'll get to the rest of it in another couple of days}.

.... hope you're not too bored.

Blessings for the next days on the path.

The 2013 Annual Meeting of The Society for Scientific Exploration: post one.

Hello fellow travelers on the path. I'm just back from the meeting noticed above, and though all these things {especially the travel and the change of physical environment [i.e. allergies]} are a bit of a strain, this was a particularly nice meeting for me.

Some of my favorite people in all the anomalies world were there and I got a chance for some quality time with almost all of them. In the picture above, my friend Henry Bauer [of Loch Ness research fame] holds the mike during a session comparing and contrasting the different anomaly subjects. Hidden behind him is Patrick Huyghe, the publisher of UFOs and Government. Next to Patrick is famous sociologist Ron Westrum, and last but not least is Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project.

Here's the Grand Old Man of the SSE, plasma physicist Peter Sturrock. A very old friend --- I guess in both senses of that word "old". Peter is still EXTREMELY sharp, and I hope we have him with us for a while more.

I neglected to take an in-house photo of my buddy Larry Dossey, so this picture of him and his recent stunner of a book will have to do. Larry and I got in one good one-on-one session before I had to shoot off to the Amtrak station early. I'll tell you about that later.

Here's Roger, wowing the audience, as usual, about the recent results from the GCP --- the array of random number generator "EGGS" [as they are affectionately nicknamed} spread across the world. And yes, the EGGs are still "misbehaving" when some of the emotional{?} situations on our old planet occur.

Here's Eddie Bullard waging a pre-talk battle with the communications equipment {he lost} much to the amusement of Mark Rodeghier, who was giving the second UFO talk behind Eddie's.

I'm going to attempt to give you some of the content and flavor of these guys' talks, and of my private get-togethers with them in time. BUT, I'm going to delay on that a bit [yeh, I'm disappointed in that too] because I've ordered DVDs of their talks, and I'd like to factcheck a lot of what I was just absorbing casually.

In lieu of plowing right into these "Works of the Masters" then, I'm going to "present to you my own presentation" since I think that I might just be able to accurately remember that.

So, tomorrow [I'm sorry folks but I'm still pretty tired --- I sometimes feel older than Peter looks] I will begin to put " MILITARY and INTELLIGENCE-SPONSORED UFO RESEARCH: Was Science on the Agenda?" on the blog. It's "long" and so will take a few entries. Maybe by the end of that, I'll have the DVDs of Roger and Larry's talks particularly and be able to shut my own mouth and tell you what some really smart people are thinking.

So, with a map of the locations of Roger's EGGs to inspire us, I'll say "till next time" and may the "Force" that those EGGs sense be with you.