Government Involvement

Details

Written by Keith Rowell

Last Updated: 30 April 2023

The second important key to understanding UFOs is the secret part of our government. (Here's the first important key.) That's right, your own U.S. government is deeply involved at a covert level in UFOs. Yes, your tax dollars are contributing massively to help your government keep you from knowing as a society the fact of genuine UFO reality. Sad, we know, but this is what ufologists have been forced to conclude in their 70 plus years of UFO study.

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 What Governments Routinely Do

It has been said that the second oldest profession is spying. If not true, it is close to true. Spying is a very old occupation. Spying has been around since the heyday of kings and priests, and, of course, continues on into today with presidents and corporate officers — anyone who is or was (going back to the ancient Sumerians undoubtedly) responsible for keeping and maintaining power and riches. The powerful and rich must know what is going on around them. If you don't know what is happening around you and you've got power and riches, someone, somewhere just might be itching to take your power and riches.

Spying is generally done in secret and likes to maintain the secrets it finds out. You must not let the other guy find out what you know because that might give the other guy an advantage over you, and then, oops, there go your power and riches. All this secrecy does not mix well with democracy since sovereignty is held in the people in a democracy and democracy is hollow if the people don't know enough about what is actually going on to vote with judgment based on facts. Secrecy tends to hide important facts such as "genuine UFOs are real."

Governments of today all have extensive and well-developed operations for spying. The United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, etc. — they all do it, and they all devote millions of dollars a year to spying. Governments consider spying absolutely essential. The annual spying budget of the U.S. (probably the biggest by far) is an estimated $40 billion or so (and that was back in 1990). Note that the first five in the list of countries above have long maintained close ties under the UK-USA Security Agreement of 1947 and its extensions. This provided close cooperation between the U.S. and UK on spying matters, especially in the area of "signals intelligence." The U.S. also has intelligence operations agreements with Israel, Japan, China, Norway, Italy, Finland, and South Korea.

Intelligence Infrastructure and the National Security State

Here are the main departments and agencies of the U.S. concerned in whole or in part with spying: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Mapping Agency, the Army Intelligence Agency with its many subdivisions, the Office of Naval Intelligence with its many subdivisions, the Air Force Office of Intelligence with its many subdivisions, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research under the State Department, intelligence divisions at the DOE, the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department, and the Justice Department. And let's not forget the Secret Service. That is quite a list. And there are probably a number of others. Intelligence is big business.

When Richard Dolan titled his book UFOs and the National Security State, he was not kidding. We live in a country that devotes massive amounts of time, money, and expertise to national security in the form of spying and data collection. And this really got started in a huge way after World War II when the U.S. faced two potential rival superpowers in Russia and China.

Something to Think About

So, what have we got? We've got a powerful nation (U.S.) with some elected elites running it surrounded by a bunch of hand-picked appointees and a whole lot of bureaucrats, all working to keep the nation powerful and rich. The elected elites (and the powerful financial and corporate elites who hold much of the real power and riches in America) naturally want to keep it that way. They have command of the nation's extensive intelligence apparatus and use it as a regular part of the functioning of the government.

Every day the president of the U.S. meets with the National Security Council and they discuss the various threats to the national security of the U.S. Examples of some threats are the growing financial might of Russia, or the earthquake and tidal wave damage in Indonesia, or the rhetoric and deeds of the new socialist president of Venezuela, or the latest attack in Nigeria on Western oil industry interests, or the latest anti-globalization activities within U.S. borders, etc. You get the idea. Every day and every week, the powerful elites inside and outside the federal government assess the national security risks to the U.S.

The government uses the vast spying resources of its huge intelligence establishment (and shares this at times through back door channels with the elites outside of government) to protect its interests, which boils down to protecting the power and money of the rich elites. We ordinary citizens get to come along for the national security ride, but sometimes some of us are sacrificed in various ways to protect the national security — that is, the power and money of the rich elites who run America. We mostly go off to war, but sometimes they experiment on us (citizens involuntarily submitted to radiation experiments) or sometimes they sterilize some of us (eugenics practices in California in the 1950s). Things like that. Just remember that the business of America is protecting and extending the power and money of the elites who have it, and you won't go far wrong when you assess the big picture. Every nation is like this so don't get too hot and bothered. (However, we need to be vigilant so that the rich elites don't veer too far from a democratic republican form of government — something the U.S. is doing today, actually, with the Bush administration. So, I take that back! You actually should be somewhat hot and bothered. And more recently, we just escaped the nightmare of America turning into a fascist state under Trump. It can happen here, so we must be vigilant.)

Immediate Threats, Distant Threats

These national security threats are all evaluated as to how serious they are. Measures are then proposed about how to deal with them and plans are drawn up and executed as best they can be. Most of these threats to national security are well-known and discussed openly in the TV, newspaper, and magazine media. Sometimes books are written about them. Most of the national security threats to the U.S. and other countries around the world are related directly to the economy. For example, a severe earthquake in Taiwan might disrupt the flow of electronics to the U.S., or the Venezuelan president's tough talk might lead him to stop sending oil to U.S. refineries, or a bird flu pandemic in Asia might seriously affect the food production capacities in the West if it gets out of hand in Asia.  Or, more recently, of course, a severe human pandemic like the 2020/2021 COVID-19 pandemic around the world.

Other threats to national security are less directly related to everyday economics, and are more long term cultural threats to the prevailing capitalist consumer culture we are immersed in. In the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. experienced massive rioting in the streets because citizens were at odds with their government over cultural/economic conditions. The government does not like rioting in the streets. Commerce tends to be disrupted, and since two thirds of the American economy is consumer spending driven, serious economic effects could ensue if there is too much rioting in the streets.

Both civil rights conditions and the Vietnam War precipitated rioting that gravely concerned the powerful elites in America. In order to stem the growing interest in the black power movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the U.S. government instigated spying and counterespionage activities against these movements. To some extent, both movements were disrupted by the many covert activities perpetrated against them. The famous COINTELPRO spying operations were among these activities.

The New Age/hippy movement and the Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity movements are of some national security concern, too, because they propose serious potential challenges to the capitalist consumer culture of America — the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals less so, however, than New Agers and "hippies." America needs to stay focused on the material world if the status quo is to be maintained. American capitalist consumer culture is thoroughly oriented to the moment and to the material world. New Agers and "hippies" are noted for their ambivalence to materialist culture.

UFOs Down Through History: A National Security Threat

With this brief introduction to national security, let's look now at how the UFO fits into this picture. Looking at the history of UFOs is the best way to do this.

Most people think UFOs began with the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947, with the nine UFOs flying between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in Washington state. It is true that the nation and the world did get focused on this event because the story was picked up world-wide, and a UFO wave did continue for about another three weeks after Arnold's sighting, but the modern era of UFOs didn't start then. It started in the middle of World Word II with the foo fighters.

WWII Foo Fighters

Foo fighters were anomalous balls of light that flew along side of and around bombers and other airplanes during World War II. These balls of light were not the familiar ball lightning that pilots occasionally run into today, but something more maneuverable and of longer duration than ball lightning. The European theater of operations seems to be where a lot of foo fighter sighters were because the word "foo" is an American language corruption of the French word "feu," which means fire. The anomalous, glowing objects reminded pilots of fiery balls. There were occasional foo fighter articles in the newspapers during World War II.

Swedish Ghost Rockets

The next wave of UFO events happened in Europe over Sweden. It wasn't balls of light this time so much as it was longish, dark missile-like objects coming mostly from the north of Sweden down to and over the Baltic Sea and into Germany and Poland. Other countries were involved some, too. These were called the "Swedish ghost rockets." A famous former WWII U.S. general, James Doolittle, was actually sent over to Sweden to check up on this phenomenon, the U.S. was so concerned. It is not known publicly today what Doolittle may have told his government about his assessment of the situation.

Early UFO Engagements and Crashes?

So, we have the Army and Navy intelligence offices and the beginnings of the CIA (Office of Strategic Services) and undoubtedly other intelligence organizations dutifully doing their jobs and they are ignoring the UFO situation? No. That's not convincing. They were not ignoring UFOs. They were busy trying to figure out what in the heck was going on. They were doing their duty just like good government and military employees do. And let's not forget the incident over downtown Los Angeles when the national guard defenses actually fired an artillery barrage at a UFO hovering over Los Angeles in early 1942. A couple of people were killed, one of a heart attack.

At a bare minimum, the U.S. government was in possession of plenty of gun cannon film footage of foo fighters and hundreds of eyewitness accounts of UFOs and "Swedish ghost rockets" and military intelligence surveillance descriptions of the Los Angeles event. Additionally, there is some second hand testimony of a Cape Girardeau, Missouri, UFO crash in 1941. All this adds up to the virtually certain fact that the U.S. intelligence agencies of the time were well on their way to figuring out and dealing with the UFO. What seemed to seal the deal that the UFO was a national security problem was the Roswell UFO crash of early July 1947.

Roswell Incident

If the military and civilian intelligence organizations did not know before the Roswell crash — and we think they almost certainly did — then they absolutely knew that UFOs were "not of this world" after the Roswell incident. At least, they were not of the world that the best government, military, and scientific thinkers of the 1940s knew of and understood. Outer space? Probably. But no guarantees. Just the best working hypothesis in the 1940s and 1950s.

Today, everyone and his little brother knows about the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. The diligent work of ufologists and investigators over nearly 40 years now have painstakingly built up a solid case that the cause of the Roswell incident was alien/UFO-related. The media, bless their hearts, were more or less telling the truth about the case the ufologists were gradually building. But then the ufologists crossed the line and got Congress involved. And when Congress gets involved, the intelligence establishment goes into high gear to preserve the status quo about UFOs: that they are just a whole lot of piffle and nothing more at the core. Congress asked some serious questions about Roswell and those questions came back unanswered. Indeed, during the official investigation of the Roswell Incident, it was proved beyond a reasonable doubt that someone in the Army broke official rules about handling documents (in the 1950s), and that is why the questions weren't answered. Someone in the military lost official archival documents from the Roswell Army Air Force records of the summer of 1947. The U.S. Congress's own GAO investigative organization said so in its investigation in the early and mid-1990s..

Air Force Failure to Explain Roswell Incident

The intelligence establishment in the form of Air Force Col. Richard Weaver and his band of disinformation specialists jumped all over the Roswell incident that the ufologists were inconveniently proving was alien/UFO related. Weaver and the Air Force dived into damage control mode and produced not one response, but, over four years, three different responses to the "allegations" of the ufologists. The three different publications do not prove that the Roswell incident was beyond a shadow of a doubt related to what they said it was (a top secret at the time project — Project Mogul — to listen for sonic signatures from detonated Soviet atom bombs from high altitude balloons).

It's interesting that the more than 1500 page response of the Air Force to ufologists and Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) did not make it crystal clear what the Roswell incident was about if it was not about aliens/UFOs. Of course, it was about aliens/UFOs, otherwise they would have easily proved their case with a concise 50 page report backed up by references to relevant documents from the National Archives and various military archives. When the purpose is obfuscation and disinformation, then you hit the audience with a massive 1500 pages of semi-plausible nonsense.

Gullible Mainstream Press Big Part of the Problem

The mainstream press is so eager to dismiss UFOs as a topic of serious discussion that their normal skepticism turns to abject gullibility. And who in the media has the stomach for 1500 pages of Roswell Incident explanation? And so it goes . . . The U.S. government's intelligence establishment wins again. You can get an idea of how hard ufologists have to work to get the truth out when you compare their situation to this: imagine a football game pitting a good high school team against the Super Bowl champs. Now you've got the idea. The high school team has a chance, but who would you bet on? It is all about time, money, and expertise in the end. Those who have virtually all the time, money, and expertise win 99% of the time.

For an excellent explanation of the evolution and extent of mainstream journalism's avoidance of the UFO problem, read Terry Hansen's The Missing Times on the Books page. For the mainstream media, some truths are just too big and too complex to cover in the increasingly small time slots and column inches that the media devote to information, as corporations constantly push to increase advertising. Another part of the problem for coverage of the big truths is the increasing disappearance of media ownership into private hands. More and more big corporations (and fewer and fewer of them) own more and more media outlets. Uncomfortable and inconvenient truths are gradually squeezed out of the informational and opinion "slots" in the media.

Other Crash/Retrievals

Ufologists have always been aware of rumors of many other UFO crash/retrieval situations. In the 1950s, one of the very first books about flying saucers (Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers) featured prominently the story that the U.S. government had recovered flying discs in the southwestern U.S. Scully's elaborate story was debunked in the 1950s by writer J. P. Cahn. Today, after much more extensive examination of Scully's information, most ufologists believe that there is no truth to Scully's claims. This early episode of public information that is widespread (Scully's book) and then later debunked (J. P. Cahn's writings), leaving people not knowing what to think is a classic case of typical government-originated disinformation. Definite links to government disinformation have not been established in the Scully case today, but this is not surprising because of the extremely tight grip that the U.S. government has on incontrovertible flying saucer evidence in the form of alien technology and "bodies."

A very interesting link between another early classic UFO "crash" incident and U.S. covert agent activity has been established by Kenn Thomas in his Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy. Thomas makes plausible the involvement of Fred Crisman, a CIA covert operator, in the Maury Island UFO incident and in the John F. Kennedy assassination among other covert escapades. Why this connection? Because the covert part of our government has been deeply involved in UFOs since the very beginning, at least since the beginnings of World War II.

Despite the smokescreen of government disinformation, today many ufologists believe increasingly that there may have been quite a number of crashes and retrievals of alien UFO-related technology and possible "bodies." Ryan Wood's MAJIC Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology provides a nice compilation of possible and probable UFO crash information.

Robertson Panel

In 1953, the CIA secretly convened a brief, five-day panel of some innocent scientists and some not-so-innocent scientists to study UFO reports and evaluate the UFO situation in America. The certainly or probably innocent scientists were J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer with Northwestern University, Nobel prize-winning physicist Louis Alvarez, physicist Samuel Goudsmit with Brookhaven National Laboratories, and astrophysicist Thornton V. Page. The not-so-innocent scientists were H. P. Robertson, a government scientist and CIA employee and geophysicist Lloyd V. Berkner. Robertson headed up the panel. Other participants were three CIA employees and Air Force officers including Captain Edwin Ruppelt, who was head of the Air Force's public relations-oriented UFO "investigative" unit called Project Blue Book. The innocent scientists were unaware at the time that the CIA was involved and orchestrating the whole affair.

The Robertson Panel report concluded (of course) that UFOs did not constitute any serious threat to the national security of the U.S. but that the continued reporting of UFOs "could result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic." The panel recommended that efforts be undertaking to debunk the UFO situation in the eyes of the public. They even recommended that the Walt Disney Company be used to "educate" the public on the proper way to think about UFOs. A fully declassified, and apparently completely uncensored, version of the Robertson Panel report was finally issued in 1974. A "sanitized" version was released to the public in 1958. The "sanitized" version served the standard public disinformation purpose: the debunking of UFO activity in the eyes of innocent scientists, scholars, newspaper reporters and editors, and the public.

Official Activities Leading to the Condon Report

The Air Force was still not through with that annoying UFO problem into the 1960s because of an upsurge in UFO sightings, so they tried — with great success this time — to rid themselves of UFOs. They did this as they usually do with an appeal to the recognized authorities in our society: the scientific and scholarly establishment. After trying unsuccessfully to interest a couple of more prominent universities, the Air Force convinced the University of Colorado to take on the onerous task of scientific evaluation of the UFO problem.

The UFO situation was getting precarious for the Air Force and intelligence establishment because UFO activity and the consequent public interest was rising to dangerous levels throughout the 1960s. The U.S. Congress got into the situation with a UFO hearing convened by Michigan representative Gerald Ford (later president after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace). Ford's constituents were pretty upset by some close sightings which were officially explained away by suggesting that UFO witnesses merely saw glowing "swamp gas." This ridiculous explanation was picked up by newspapers. The news media, for once, ridiculed the Air Force instead of UFO witnesses.

Congress convened the House Armed Services Committee Hearings on April 5, 1966, with only three invited speakers: Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown (a debunker/disinformer), Project Blue Book director Hector Quintanilla (a debunker/disinformer, though possibly innocent), and Air Force UFO consultant J. Allen Hynek (a voice for further scientific study). Brown assured Congress that UFOs were no threat to the national security and, furthermore, they certainly didn't originate in outer space. Hynek, who was on the Air Force payroll at the time, did express the idea that scientists independent of the Air Force should look into the situation. He suggested the appointment of a panel of civilian scientists. This eventually led to the Condon Committee.

Keeping the Secret

There is much more to the public story of our government and UFOs, but you can read a lot more about it for yourself in the list of recommended reading on this site.

Let's cut to the chase and do some more or less plausible speculation now.

You are a government spy working for the CIA, NSA, DIA, AFOSI, whatever, and your need-to-know, compartmented activities involve keeping tabs on the UFO abduction phenomenon. You know everything that is in the public domain and a lot more. You know a lot more because you have all the time, money, and expertise on your side, on the inside, and have for the last 60 or more years. You know that within a small town in America at this moment a number of UFO abductions have just taken place. You know this because of all the signals intelligence research in the past in deep black, special access programs that has succeeded in developing various signals signatures for many of the aliens' craft. You know that instrumentation was developed in the 1970s and 1980s to track many of the UFOs and this instrumentation is deployed in satellites and various listening stations around the world.

You also know from long years of reading the reports produced by deep black research communities of scientists and scholars that the world of the UFO is bizarre in the extreme. Some of the research has established far beyond a reasonable doubt that many of the activities carried out by the UFO phenomenon produce persistent, perfectly physically real artifacts like alien bodies and UFO craft. You also know from these reports that the phenomenon also produces many transient seemingly physically real effects that yet are not truly consistent with all the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry. These effects are sort of here, but not here. They just don't jibe with current human ideas of what is physically real and what is not.

Furthermore, you know from these reports that the phenomenon definitely has psychological and even "spiritual" aspects. The phenomenon seems to be able at times to know and even control the psychological realities of people. People close to the phenomenon seem to lose some of their normal functioning. They do things they normally wouldn't. Also, to make matters worse, the phenomenon has a "spiritual" dimension, too. People in close contact sometimes alter their previous ideas about spiritual things. People become more "spiritual" and less "religious."

To make matters profoundly unsettling, you know that the phenomenon seems to be able to alter and even control all aspects of human realities. Is there something the phenomenon is not capable of affecting — at least in principle? The various reports you've read over the years seem to lead in this direction. Nothing more profoundly affects human existence potentially than the UFO phenomenon.

Yet, you yourself, as a covert player in the UFO drama on Earth believe that you are not particularly immediately affected by your years of dealing with the alien presence. You believe you can still make independent judgments about how far and how long to "play the alien game." But you've read in the reports from the deep black scientists and scholars that you are probably just another "pawn" in this grand alien game where humanity is seen to be merely that "humanity project on planet Earth." You realize that you and all of humanity were most probably created by the alien presence long ago. Zecharia Sitchin and other public speculators on the ultimate meaning of UFOs you know are largely correct in many of their speculative writings.

You know all this because you happen to be a covert player, but you wonder if it was just happenstance. Did the alien presence somehow influence your path into covert government activity? You try to dismiss such thoughts. Anyway, at points along the way you wondered if the people should be told just how bad it really is. Just how deeply the alien presence is intertwined in human affairs. Should the people ever be told? What good would it do? National security means maintaining the status quo, whatever it is. You are part of that. You help maintain the secret. Should you talk? The sanctions are heavy against it. It could mean death to you and your loved ones. And perhaps it might even mean damage to your "immortal soul." You don't know how far it really goes because of the strictly enforced compartmentation and need-to-know in your world of secret intelligence activities and organizations.

Will the public ever be told? No. Too much is at stake. You as a covert player in the great UFO drama know that you and your government will never tell the people . . . ever.

 A Small Step Toward the Truth

Or maybe the government will eventually tell the people.  On December 17, 2017, the New York Times published an above-of-the-fold, front page story about the U.S. Navy encountering UFOs in 2004 while the USS Nimitz was on war practice maneuvers off the coast of California.  Previous to this story, the Times had always taken the stance of the U.S. government:  UFOs and aliens were poppycock.  Has the government changed its tune?!  Not exactly.  

What did happen is that primarily two government-connected insiders decided to try to force the government's hand. Because they had connections, they obtained good evidence of the USS Nimitz and other recent U.S. Navy UFO encounters, and they turned this over to Times affiliated journalists. They pitched the story and the editorial board of the Times decided to run with it. The U.S. Congress has now gotten involved after many members were briefed in closed door sessions on the UFO situation. As this is written, the U.S. Defense Department has been mandated by Congressional action with producing a public report on the USS Nimitz UFO encounters and others sometime in the summer of 2021. All this is just one small facet of the whole UFO subject and its ramifications, but at least it is a start after 70 plus years of denial, obfuscation, lying, etc.