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"THEY CAME TO BURY UFOS, NOT TO PRAISE THEM" by W. Todd Zechel
Although the United States Air Force (USAF) has been a great deal less than candid and forthright about UFOs
over the years, especially in view of the fact the Air Force is charged with defending the country's air space, it
appears that it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which orchestrated a policy of deception in order to
prevent the American people from learning the truth about UFOs.
A formerly SECRET report released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) shows that CIA officials and
consultants thought people seeing and reporting UFOs was more
dangerous than UFOs themselves, stating, "the continued
emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena [UFOs]
does, in these perilous times, result in a threat to the orderly
functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.
" Another 'danger' cited by the CIA panel was that acknowledging
UFOs could results in "...the cultivation of a morbid national
psychology in which hostile propaganda could induce hysterical
behavior and a harmful distrust of duly constituted authority."
To counter these supposed dangers, the CIA panel
recommended a policy of "debunking" and education designed
to persuade people that what they were seeing really wasn't there.
In explaining how this psychological warfare against the American people should be carried out, the report stated:
"The debunking aim would result in reduction of public interest in 'flying saucers' which today evokes a strong
psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures
and popular articles"
The panel had further ideas on how what was essentially a disinformation program should be mounted, stating: "It
was felt strongly that psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the
program." The report went on to name certain psychologists who might be recruited to join the debunking project.
The formation of the CIA panel came about as a sort of compromise worked out by the National Security Council
(NSC) after events in the summer of 1952. A major UFO flap had taken place across the country, highlighted by
puzzling incidents in July 1952, when UFO intruders were simultaneously tracked on ground radar and observed by
jet interceptor pilots over the nation's capital, Washington, DC. The public, the press, and even President Harry
Truman demanded to know what was going on. As a result, the US Air Force held a major press conference on July
29, 1952, the largest press conference since WW II, at which it was suggested the UFOs were temperature
inversions--layers of warm air trapped under cold air that, by some giant stretch of the Air Force's imagination, were
tracked on radar and seen as maneuvering flying craft by pilots sent aloft on scramble alert.
In August 1952, as documents released as the result of the FOIA suit filed by the author confirm, the CIA began
reviewing the Air Force's handling of UFOs. Ransom Eng, an official with the CIA's office of Scientific Intelligence,
wrote a report in which he characterized the Air Force's efforts as "scientifically invalid."
Armed with these criticisms, the CIA wanted to take charge of UFO intelligence [the collection and analysis of UFO
evidence], and proposed, through CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, that UFOs were much too serious of a matter to
be left in the hands of the USAF. The National Security Council, however, would only approve a compromise
whereby a CIA-appointed panel would review UFO reports provided by the Air Force to determine if UFOs were a
"direct, hostile threat to national security."
The struggle for power and funding between the U.S. Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency had been
on-going since 1947, the year the CIA was officially created and the Air Force became a separate service branch
[after being part of the Army previously]. It would continue for decades thereafter throughout the Cold War with the
Soviet Union, and include highly exaggerated Air Force Intelligence claims of Soviet bomber and missile superiority
and 'first-strike' civil defense preparations, even though in 1955 the CIA gained somewhat of an upper hand with
the development and covert deployment of the U-2 high altitude spy plane--at least in the sense of getting the
President's ear.
In January 1953 the CIA's Robertson Panel, mostly consulting scientists of the CIA's chosen to review the UFO
evidence selected by the USAF, rejected the conclusions of the U.S. government's top photo analysts from the
Naval Photographic Interpretation Center (NAVPIC), Anacostia, MD, Capt. Arthur Lundahl and Lt. Robert Neasham,
who had concluded the objects in two 8mm UFO films submitted to the Air Force and examined by the CIA Panel
were extraterrestrial spacecraft. Both men were reportedly emotionally shattered by the Panel's rejection of their
studied conclusions.
But within a matter of days Lundahl and Neasham were invited by the CIA to resign their Navy officers' commissions
and come over to the CIA as civilians and establish the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) at
5th & K Streets in Washington,DC, with Lundahl serving as the founding Director for the next twenty years and
Neasham as his top assistant. In 1954 Lundahl was informed the CIA would begin flying high altitude
reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Untion and Soviet Bloc [and China] the following year. Lundahl therefore
went out an acquired the world's best computer, a large Swiss-built machine, and set out developing
computer-enhanced photo analysis in order to extract intelligence from photos taken from 100,000 feet up.
The mastermind of what was to become the U.S. government's UFO policy and author of the CIA's Robertson Panel
Report, which found that UFOs did not pose "a direct, hostile threat to National Security," was Fred Durant, an
officer with the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) who at the time was operating under the cover of being a
civilian scientist employed by the Arthur Little Co. In fact, in August 1952 Durant, claiming to represent a small
group of "concerned scientists" [actually CIA officers] had approached USAF Captain Ed Ruppelt,Commanding
Officer (CO) of the Air Force's UFO 'study,' Project Blue Book, and USAF Maj, Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon's
liaison to Blue Book. Most revealingly, the CIA had found it necessary to spy on the Air Force in order to find out
what it had collected on UFOs, and Fred Durant had been the perfect man for the secret mission. Similarly, a few
years later after the Soviets beat America to the punch with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit
the Earth, the CIA's Fred Durant brought America's top rocket scientists together with our top satellite developers
and began the American space program.
After the Robertson Panel meetings in early 1953, in which it became known that Durant had spied on the Air Force
for the CIA in order to learn the USAF's UFO secrets, the men who'd cooperated with Durant [and thus the CIA], Ed
Ruppelt and Dewey Fournet, were forced out of the service as punishment by the USAF's high-ranking Pentagon
brass, and the dispute over control of UFO intelligence was just beginning.
-30-
Copyright (c) 2005 by W. Todd Zechel
P.O. Box 117
Prairie du Sac, WI 53578-0117
next in "Close Encounters of the Government Kind pt3"
"The CIA Takes Control"
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