Table Of ContentUFOs and Government
A
Historical Inquiry
Michael Swords
Robert Powell
Clas Svahn
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
Bill Chalker
Barry Greenwood
Richard Thieme
JanAldrich
Steve Purcell
ANOMALIST BOOKS
SanAntonio * Charlottesville
UFOs and Government
Copyright © 2012 bythe UFO History Group
ISBN: 1933665580
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereofin any form
whatsoever without the written permission ofthe publisher.
The UFO History Group:
Michael Swords, primary content author for United States chapters
Robert Powell, project administrator, editor, and author
Clas Svahn, primary author for Sweden
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, primary author for Spain
Bill Chalker, primary author forAustralia
Barry Greenwood, author and content consultant
Richard Thieme, author and content consultant
JanAldrich, primary content consultant
Steve Purcell, primaryphoto illustration editor
The UFO History Group would also like to thankWilliam Murphy, Thomas Tulien, and Franklin
Woodward for their help and advice during the project.
Cover design: Seale Studios
AnomalistBooks.com
Anomalist Books
5150 Broadway #108
SanAntonio, TX 78209
This book is dedicated to Loren Gross
in appreciation for his long years ofcollegial friendship
UFO
and his valuable historical contributions to research.
1
Contents
Foreword by Jerome Clark vii
Preface x
Prologue xii
Chapter 1. WorldWar II and the Immediate Post-War Era 3
Chapter 2. Ghost Rockets 12
Chapter 3. The Flying Disks and the United States 30
A UFO
Chapter4. Formalized Project 48
Chapter 5. Grudge 71
Chapter 6. Duck and Cover 90
Chapter 7. Transition 112
Chapter 8. Tacking Against theWind 139
Chapter 9. The CIA Solution 170
Chapter 10. Intermission 204
Chapter 11. ACold War 208
Chapter 12. Something CloserThis Way Comes 238
Chapter 13. Battle in the Desert 27
Chapter 14. The Colorado Project 306
Chapter 15. After the Close ofBlue Book 336
Chapter 16. The Swedish Military's UFO History 361
Chapter 17. TheAustralian Military and the Official Government Response 373
Chapter 18. UFO Secrecy and Disclosure in Spain 423
UFOs and Government
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Chapter 19. UFOs and France Beginnings ofa Scientific Investigation 439
Chapter 20. Glimpses ofEpisodes in Other Countries 456
Epilogue 468
Appendix 472
Illustration and Photography Credits 530
Bibliography 540
About theAuthors 559
Name Index 561
Subject Index 569
UFO
Event Index 577
Foreword
Those of us who have devoted an alarming portion of our lives to the reading of UFO literature know
how awful much of it is. Those whose intellectual curiosity furthe—r encompasses mainstream history
and science often find themselves win—cing at the way UFO writers not excluding, by the way, many
who present themselves as skeptics have of drawing big conclusions from little evidence. Not
surprisingly, the results range from the amateurish and implausible to the paranoid and conspiratorial,
and end up being oflittle more than anthropological interest.
Still, let us be fair. One need not be crazy to wonder at the disconnect between deeply puzzling UFO
sightings and oddly apathetic official responses. From the earliest days ofthe UFO controversy, outside
— —
observers and some inside ones could only surmise that a presumably alert U.S. government tasked
to protect the nation's safety must be secretly in the know. Could it really be as little alarmed as it
appeared about mysterious sights and events that were sparking speculation, even by some scientists,
about visitation from elsewhere?
It wasn't as if the phenomena were no more than, say, ambiguous light sources glimpsed by
individuals possessed of excessive imagination and dubious probity. Countless sober witnesses spoke
ofwhat to all appearances were structured craft, observed under decent viewing conditions (sometimes
at close range) and displaying performance characteristics of a sort that ought to have given anyone
concerned with aviation security a bracing case of the chills. And worse, fresh sightings of such things
were being recorded daily. Some came from instrumented trackings, others from multiple and
independent witnesses on t—he ground, in the air, or b—oth. How reasonable was it to believe that
everybody must be radically and curiously consistently mistaken?
The first English-language books on UFOlogy, which saw print in 1950, took as their themes (1) the
reality of visitors from space and (2) the strong likelihood that the American government kept that
reality hidden behind a high wall ofclassification. One book, Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are
Real, held that the Air Force drew its conclusions from sightings by its own pilots and from believable
civilian observers. The other, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, put forth a more fantastic
allegation, that the military had recovered alien wreckage and bodies.
A number who embraced (1) rejected (2), but both views would prove durable. If Scully's story
collapsed after a famous True expose in 1952, crashed-disc rumors would persist on UFOlogy's fringes
into the late 1970s and the revival of interest in the now-celebrated Roswell, New Mexico, incident of
July 1947. Since then, a mass of crash/retrieval tales has circulated and captured the popular
imagination. Long dismissed as an absurd fabrication, even Scully's yarn concerning a crash with dead
humanoids atAztec, New Mexico, is now back up for discussion in some quarters.
If aspects of Roswell-related testimony (as painstakingly collected by civilian field investigators
over the past three decades) seem intriguing, albeit yet unproved, and the belated official explanations
remain less than persuasive, one cannot say as much of comparable claims which have gone nowhere.
—
Today, UFOlogy's more cautious proponents spurn them, though these stories along with suspect
—
related documents alleged to be of official provenance still wind up the impressionable even as they
try the patience ofthe rest ofus.
Quite aside from limitations ofevidence, the problem with the notion ofrecovered discs is one most
thoughtful analysts find insurmountable. If the U.S. government had access to a highly advanced
otherworldly technology from reverse-engineered spacecraft, yes, it could keep that a secret. It is
indeed true, an often-heard lazy contrary argument notwithstanding, that some secrets are successfully
kept over extended periods of time. One can reasonably argue, moreover, that if the assorted rumors
vii
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UFOs and Government
and testimonies are in any way true, the secrets haven'tbeen kept.
The problem, however, is that no such—episode could have occurred outside history. Decades of
concealment cannot hide the consequences technological, political, military, diplomatic, and other
of the intrusion into the normal course ofhuman events ofradically disruptive knowledge that abruptly
pushes science forward by decades or centuries. At the least, applications of that suddenly acquired
explosive information would show up everywhere from new weapons and transportation systems to
computers to household appliances. Yet the history of technology demonstrates a deliberate, linear,
step-by-step progression ofknowledge and application. It does not require, in other words, the injection
ofwhat amounts to otherworldly magic into the process.
Reading the cover-up literature, one notices how little many of the writers know about how history
works and why history after the end of World War II, when the UFO phenomenon entered popular
—
consciousness, happened as it did pretty much, in short, as ifno one had everreported an unidentified
flying object. Not only do UFOs have no visible part of that history, they are unnecessary to it. That is
an interesting story in itself. How could something of such potential official (and other) consequence
have been pushed so far to the official (and other) margin?
In what is sure to be an enduring work of historical UFO inquiry, UFOs and Government tackles
this question using the tools of the scholar: thorough documentation, scrupulous analysis, and
speculation tethered tightly to the recoverable record. The authors can't resolve every issue, naturally.
Grand cover-up theories aside, secrets and classification are genuine concerns and authentic barriers to
historical understanding. So is the loss of documents by design, carelessness, apathy, or routine
disposal. Where contemporary documents are unavailable, we are dependent upon the fallible
memories ofhumans.
Nonetheless, the evidence points overwhelmingly, at least in the case of American officialdom, to
something less like UFOs vs. conspiratorial plotters than like UFOs vs. bungling bureaucrats. In my
reading of the often frustrating, depressing, and infuriating mishandling of what future historians may
judge the most vital scientific question of the 20th Century, one is initially tempted to think of cat—egory
errors and to charge the Air Force, the Condon Committee, and others of falling victim to Type 2 the
sort that has the investigator thinking that nothing interesting is going on while in fact something is.
Sad to say, from all we can infer, the reasoning (to the extent that reasoning ever impinged on
dismissive impulses) never rose to the level of that kind of intellectual error. Perhaps that was because
so little actual investigation was pursued. In its recounting of dramatically anomalous sightings, this
book makes mordantly clear what wasn't being explained all the while. With a few scattered, honorable
exceptions in which genuine curiosity was expressed and real study urged (and, on rarer occasion,
practiced), even the most intriguing UFO reports seldom got more than the bum's rush out of the
building. The subject would be left to the few individual scientists who dared to identify themselves
with the Great Taboo and to lay UFOlogists forced to operate with no resources to speak of.
On theAmerican side ofthis official history, heroes, ifnot entirely nonexistent, are hard to come by.
The non-ignoble comprise some of the early Sign personnel, those University of Colorado project
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members who dared challenge the bullying, execrable Edward Condon, and at least at their best
—
moments, but not, alas, all of their moments Capt. Edward Ruppelt and astronomer/Blue Book
consultant J. Allen Hynek. (Ironically, in their later years the first would openly reject UFOs while the
second would resolutely champion them.) The villains, those who quashed the work that needed to be
done, are many. Robertson, Menzel, and Condon, though, will live on in particular infamy. The reader
will come to know them and others all too well in the pages that follow.
While UFOs and Government revisits an often unhappy history, the reading of it is far from an
unhappy experience. The authors, eloquent, intelligent, sophisticated, and conscientious, provide us
with the first credible, comprehensive overview of official UFO history in many years, superseding
such notable earlier works as Edward Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, David
viii
Foreword
Jacobs's The UFO Controversy in America, and Larry Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood's Clear Intent.
Most of the current volume (and thus most of the commentary above) deals with U.S. military and
intelligence responses to the UFO phenomenon, but it also features richly informative chapters that
expand the story across the international arena. If you're looking for an example of a nation that dealt
productively with the UFO reports that came its official way, you will take heart in the chapter on the
French projects.
From here on, every responsible treatment of UFOs and government will have to cite UFOs and
Government prominently among its sources. New facts about old issues will inevitably emerge, of
course, and one day no doubt a revised and expanded edition will be possible and necessary. In the
meantime, however, this is the real story as accurately as it can be reconstructed in the second decade
of the new century. I expect to keep my copy close at hand and to return to it often. While it cannot be
said of many books, UFO-themed or otherwise, this is among the essential ones. Stray from it at your
peril.
Jerome Clark
Minnesota
February 2012
ix
Preface
This book is a work of history. It describes the ways that human beings handled the UFO mystery. In
this, it is unlike the vast majority of other writings about UFOs that focus upon claims and the
phenomenology. This book's focus is, rather, on the way major governments dealt with the mystery and
the problems that it gave them. The sources of our information are the governments and their military
and intelligence organizations themselves. The story that emerges from those formal documents is
surprising and fascinating, and needs to be told. Although the book's theme centers upon the responses
and policy decisions ofthe intelligence communities, there must be significant space given to key UFO
incidents, as they are what initiated the government reactions. In all these "encounters," the book will
base its descriptions upon primary documents, just as it does each of its remarks about governmental
actions, policies, and even internal debates. A serious attempt has been made to place all information in
a solid scholarly context with well-cited descriptions ofthe exact source materials used.
The book is heavily U.S.-focused, though not entirely so. This is for many reasons. Rightly or
wrongly, many countries took their lead on how to respond to the UFO phenomenon from the United
States, and, in particular, the U.S. Air Force. Whether it was clearly true or not, the expression of the
UFO phenomenon seemed to center more so upon the United States than in other countries, particularly
in its early post-World War II days. Despite the awareness that many intelligence community
documents have either been lost or are still to be released, those currently available to the scholarly
community are mainly from U.S. sources as well. Thankfully those available resources, plus
outstanding sources from other countries, form a fertile and powerful base upon which to build the
book, and hopefully many others to come.
The formation of this project was accidental but perhaps inevitable. Robert Powell, the Research
Director of the Mutual UFO Network, had the idea that the subject of UFOs needed some serious
scholarly writing; perhaps a few "essays" or "white papers," making clear the stand ofcolleagues who
had researched this subject in depth. He persuaded his board ofdirectors to fund travel expenses for six
persons to meet and talk about such a project. For that catalysis, all ofus in what came to be known by
ourselves as the UFO History Group are grateful. From that meeting, and over four years of consistent
work, came the History Group team and this book. Everyone has contributed, whether by writing
chapters or notes, massive editing or small, reference finding and illustrations, and the constant patient
lead ofRobert Powell bringing it together.
This book, as you will read, is primarily chronological. It chooses its beginning in World War II
with the "foo fighter" phenomenon, and follows the U.S. path up through the Colorado Project era and,
in a piecemeal fashion, beyond. This is not merely to be conventional. It is a decision based upon
available documentation. Without such documentation the writing would be merely speculative. After
the "U.S. Chronology" chapters are complete, the book shifts focus to several non-U.S. governmental
responses to the phenomenon. The very best UFOlogist-scholars were asked to write the Spanish,
Australian, and Swedish chapters, and we should all be thankful for their contributions. Because of
available documentation (and latent interest), shorter pieces on other governments' involvement have
been added. The similarities and differences in their dealings with the phenomenon are fascinating.
This is particularly true of the French program, based within their space agency. In contrast—, the
Canadian and British governments' reactions to the UFO phenomenon were quite similar to and
—
closely linked with that of the United States. Their story does not provide a unique perspective of
dealing with the phenomenon and is therefore not covered in this work.
This was not an easy book to create. That is perhaps why someone has not already done so. Dr.
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