Philip Klass - UFOs: The Public Deceived

To my good wife, Nadya, with appreciation for her understanding tolerance of her only competitor for my time and attention-but a very demanding one.

"C.I.A. PAPERS DETAIL U.F.O. SURVEILLANCE" was the headline on the feature story. The article did not appear in one of the sensationalist tabloids but in the respected New York Times, on January 14, 1979. The article stated:

Phoenix, Jan. 13 - Documents obtained in a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency show that the agency is secretly involved in the surveillance of unidentified flying objects and has been since 1949, an Arizona-based U.F.O. group said yesterday.

The C.I.A. has repeatedly said that it investigated and closed its books on U.F.O.'s during 1952, according to Ground Saucer Watch, a nation-wide research organization of about 500 scientists, engineers and others who seek to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of U.F.O.'s, but 1,000 pages of documents, obtained under a freedom of information suit, show "the Government has been lying to us all these years," it said.

"After reviewing the documents, Ground Saucer Watch believes that U.F.O.'s exist, they are real, the U.S. Government has been totally untruthful and the cover-up is massive," William Spaulding, head of the group said .... Among the documents are several detailed reports of Air Force attempts to either intercept or destroy U.F.O.'s ....

Mr. Spaulding says the documents show that there are links and patterns in the sightings. From the evidence, he says, he believes U.F.O.'s are here on surveillance missions. "We find a concentration of sightings around our military installations, research and development areas," he said ....

Mr. Spaulding said he has sworn statements from retired Air Force colonels that at least two U.F.O.'s have crashed and been recovered by the Air Force. One crash, he said, was in Mexico in 1948 and the other was near Kingman, Ariz., in 1953. He said the retired officers claimed they got a glimpse of dead aliens who were in both cases about four feet tall with silverish complexions and wearing silver outfits that "seemed fused to the body from the heat."

Mr. Spaulding said his group is waiting now for a Federal judge to rule on the last phase of its C.I.A. suit, which seeks access to 57 items that would provide "hard evidence" of U.F.O.'s or "retrievals of the third kind." That evidence includes motion pictures, gun camera film and residue from landings, he said ....

Five days later the Washington Post carried a front-page feature article, authored by Ward Sinclair and Art Harris, under the headline: "WHAT WERE THOSE MYSTERIOUS CRAFT?" The article was syndicated and later published by many other major newspapers, some of which used more ominous headlines. For example the Denver Post called its account: "SIGHTINGS NEAR BASES: U.S. REPORTS VISITS OF UFOs." The New York Post headlined its version: "UFOs SIGHTED AT MISSILE SITES: SECRET DEFENSE REPORTS BARED." The Washington Post article reported:

During two weeks in 1975, a string of the nation's supersensitive nuclear missle launch sites and bomber bases were visited by unidentified low-flying and elusive objects, according to Defense Department reports.

The sightings, made visually and on radar by air and ground crews and sabotage-alert forces, occurred at installations in Montana, Michigan and Maine, and led to extensive but unsuccessful Air Force attempts to track and detain the objects.

Air Force and Defense Department records variously describe the objects as helicopters, aircraft, unknown entities and brightly lighted, fast-moving vehicles that hovered over nuclear weapons storage areas and evaded all pursuit efforts.

In several instances, after base security had been penetrated, the Air Force sent fighter planes and airborne command planes aloft to carry on the unsuccessful pursuit. The records do not indicate if the fighters fired on the intruders ....

Yet another Air Force intelligence report indicated extensive interest in a 1976 incident over Iran, when two Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom fighter planes were scrambled to encounter a brightly lighted object in the skies near Tehran ....

In the wake of the Washington Post article, the Associated Press sent out a story that began: "Strange flying visitors to several defense installations in recent years are reported in nearly 1,000 pages of documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency." United Press International distributed a similar account to its subscribers.

In November 1975, shortly after the unexplained incidents at vital SAC bases, the wire services carried a report that a young man named Travis Walton, of Snowflake, Arizona, seemingly had been abducted by a UFO and that the incident had been witnessed by six other members of a lumbertrimming crew. Several days later, with Walton still missing, the wire services reported that the six crew members had taken a polygraph test, which five had passed, while the sixth was inconclusive. Shortly afterward, young Walton reappeared and told of having been held hostage aboard a UFO. Later the wires reported that young Walton had taken and passed a liedetector test. This incident would ultimately be endorsed as the most significant UFO event of 1975 by a panel of experienced "UFOlogists," many of them with impressive academic degrees.

The October 14, 1979, edition of the New York Times Magazine carried a major feature story on UFOs, headlined: "U.F.O. FILES: THE UNTOLD STORY." The subhead read: "Though officials have long denied that they take `flying saucers' seriously, declassified documents now reveal extensive Government concern over the phenomenon."

Less than two months earlier, in northwestern Minnesota, a deputy sheriff, Val Johnson, radioed a report that while driving in a rural area in the early morning hours, he had encountered a large glowing UFO that had "attacked" his patrol car. When another law-enforcement officer arrived at the scene, he found the windshield of Johnson's car was badly cracked, one headlight was broken, there was a dent atop the hood, and two radio antennas on the roof were bent back at sharp angles.

It is hardly surprising that a Gallup Poll conducted in mid-1978 indicated that 57 percent of the adult American population believes that UFOs "are real," an increase of 24 percent over the figure obtained in a similar survey in 1966. Gallup reported that for adults with a college education, the "belief" figure was an even higher 66 percent. When Industrial Research/Development magazine surveyed its readers in 1979, it found that 61 percent of the respondents believe that UFOs "probably" or "definitely" exist.