So next talk up is UFOs and government. Let's give them a
big hand. Come on. Thank you. Okay. 18 years of DEFCON. It's a
long time. And you're supposed to do the politician thing,
like, oh, hi. Hi, Mark. No babies here. They're DEFCON
kids. This talk is going to be tweaked for the DEFCON context
because I want it to be not only what it is, and I am completely
out of the closet now on the subject of UFOlogy. You have to
be careful along the way. There was once a reporter, columnist
of the Washington Post, who called me up and said, what are
the companies you've worked for? I love reading your stuff. And I
told him some of the bigger names. And he said, well,
you know, the ones you float. And then the column appeared,
and it was really kind of about how crazy can you be before
companies like this will stop hiring you. This could have a
powerful impact on your career and your life when all you have
is your word and your reputation. So I met him in
Washington. We had lunch. And we discussed the implications of
that. And he had gone over the line a little bit by
misinterpreting. And I said, well, you know, I'm not going
to be careful. You can do me wrong. And I said,
really ask me something about UFOlogy and about a friend of
NSA? Who I had quoted directly without approving what he said
as accurate, he had said, they're here. They're here. Now
our task, he said, is to figure out how they got here. And then
he starts speculating. And I said these were speculations and
that's what was reported as if I had said it was a fact. We
don't know. We don't even know what they means. And this book,
a historical inquiry is in fact not primarily about aliens or
crop circles or abductions or any of the craziness that you
have blended truth, half truth and flat out lies on cable TV
and in the whole UFO domain of myth and mythology. What it's
about primarily is the second word, government. It's about how
the government responded to a phenomena which compelled them
to respond by its ineluctable manifestation in their faces and
the reports from credible people beginning in World War II which
is when we kind of marked the modern era because there had
been reports many years prior to that and in the last century
that sound suspiciously like UFO reports did in the middle of the
20th century and forward. But we could no longer ignore them
because of the military imperative and as I will try to
show in an earlier video, I'm going to go back to the
brief way, the national security concerns that the phenomena
raised for them after World War II when the national security
state was in fact just beginning. The OSS migrating into the CIA
and many other instantiations and the kind of world in which we
live which is now getting some publicity because of the Snowden
affair as we call it, is the world that was really beginning
then and how the government responded to the phenomena,
set policies, deliberated, argued, competed within its many
different parts because there's no one government. There was CIA
and there was Navy and there was Air Force and there was the
executive branch and the White House and all kinds of competing
points of view trying to deal with this thing which challenged
people in a complex and puzzling way and above all would not go
away. So they had to respond and the way they would choose to
respond you will see even though I can only hit the highlights, I'm
going to hit the highlights because our book is 600 pages and
it has nearly 1,000 citations in it. It is the only book on the
subject recommended by the journal choice which does that for all
academic and university libraries because it is an exception to the
dreary field which is not as painstaking, as rigorous, as
academically solid as this team effort was which took five years to
create. I'll say a little bit more about that. But you will see
that what was said about the phenomena,
was very similar to what Clapper said to Congress a few weeks ago
under questioning when asked if we vacuumed up or collected the
communications of the American people. And he said no. And when
he was accused of lying, he did not admit that he had lied. He
said that he had told the least untruthful thing he could say in
public. And that's what happens to the people of the United States.
So the weasel words of the English language as they are used
and misused and intentionally used for deception and
disinformation. The fact is he lied. By normal human standards,
those of us who live out here, we outsiders out here, some of you
are insiders so you know more intimately what I mean but you
can't say that you do so you will act like outsiders out here for
the purposes of this talk. Right? So let's get to it. First of all,
I want to acknowledge too that DEF CON has shifted in the
18 years I've been coming and speaking here. There were a few
hundred. The first time there are, I don't know, 14, 15,000
probably this time. But what I noticed when they asked in the
other packed room how many are here for the first time, an
awful lot of hands went up. And how many were here more than a
few, five years? Not very many. And that means the context that I
take for granted, because I am a silverback. I can't hide that
either. I'm out of the closet as a deranged old man wandering
around the con. As somebody tweeted, I'm out of the closet.
Just two years ago during one of my talks. But he did add
nevertheless, he's still building out some pretty heavy ideas which
I appreciated despite the dementia which was obviously in
evidence. Part of the brain that was functional was still
somehow able to ideate and I thanked him for that. But it is
the marker. Two years after I started here, a reporter in
England said I was a father figure for online culture. Ten
years later, a hacker said he was a father figure for online culture.
I changed that to grandfather figure and then ten years later I'm a
deranged old man. So those of you who find that amusing, that will
be your destiny as well. I just warn you in advance. It is an
ineluctable pathway and those dots will also connect for you.
Okay. So let me establish the context. I used to refer to
books and then I found out that nobody read them anymore so I
started going to movies. When I referred to Hal and a hacker
came up and said, who is Hal? I said, I don't know. He said, I'm
from the west, I'm from the east, I don't know. That was
roku's story. And then I realized I couldn't use even
2001. That's a movie by Stanley Kubrick. As a point of reference
because not enough people had seen it. And when I was driving
the young man over here from the hotel this morning, I asked him
how he liked Vegas and it was his first trip and he said I
don't know how Vegas got here. How did this town get built?
And I said do you not know anything about the history of
Vegas? And he said, no. So all I could think of was movies, see
Bugsy, Casino, and then read Kitty Kelly's biography of Frank Sinatra, and you got the
whole thing. But see Casino. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. And
in this talk, see Chinatown. If you don't know the great flowering of golden Hollywood
movies in the 1970s, look it up on Wikipedia. It will be mostly accurate. And one of the
movies that will be celebrated is Chinatown, Robert Towne's great opus, and look at how
the end that they wanted to change it to was rejected because it was not real. A Chinatown
moment is that kind of moment that you have when you realize, has that package been
inspected? A what?
. . .
At my age it goes too quickly to the brain, I better not. But thank you for offering, I
appreciate it. Okay. Let's get into the talk. Chinatown moments are moments when you realize
things are not what they seem. They really are not what you thought they were. You may think you
know what they are, you may not know what they look like, but it's true. You can see how much
what you're dealing with Mr. Giddes said no across the embodiment of evil but believe me sir you
don't and there are moments and this is the silverback part as I have aged where you wander
into those zones of shadow and annihilation of the belief system you have built which is a more
optimistic one about how things actually work that for example Snowden's sacrifice of his life
as it will turn out to be perhaps I don't mean he'll be killed you don't need to kill people
my good friend Gary Webb took his own life when his reputation credibility and career were
destroyed when he wrote an article about the CIA's contra and crack cocaine that was in the main
98% correct but which he was forced to retract that is his editor retracted it and he was fired
a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter 10 years later the word was well of course we did a lot of that
because the longer you get from the deed the less accountability there is so Congress will adjourn
there can be headlines today and Congress will adjourn
and they'll come back in five or six weeks and there will be some other issue on the burner and
not all that much will change people in power just wait it out just wait it out and freedom of
speech is a bleeder valve to enable us to believe that we are having an effective response to the
things that so perplex us but when that speech becomes actionable that's when you better look
out that's when you become a whistleblower or a traitor all right that's right
I'll never take off my left.
But it's also relevant as the context in which this deception disinformation project took place
UFO's in government is above all a historical inquiry is a work of history.
It looks at how the government responded to the nineteen forties forward.
Michael Swords was the lead writer, Michael is a brilliant man who has been making really good
scholarship about this subject, professor at Western Michigan University PhD in the history of
technology and science.
science. He's written great quality articles to show it is
respectable so to do in this field. Michael was the lead
writer. I was invited to join this project I think by a wing
and a prayer. The details don't matter but I found myself in the
group that thought it was going to plan some white papers and
wound up planning this entire book and it took five years to
put the book together. After we met, we didn't meet again until
the book was complete. It was all done over the internet.
Chapters would go to and fro. There's no chapter allowed to
this one or that one. We all participated in the creation of
this 600-page historical record. The top three names you see,
Claus, Vincente and Bill, are experts in their own countries.
Claus in Sweden, Vincente in Spain and Bill in Australia
where they have been for many decades. Barry Greenwood
pioneered in the use of Freedom of Information Act to get
documents from the government that he claimed did not exist and
which did exist. He did that in the 70s when he was a
president. He knew in 1980 when Reagan was elected that that was
the end of FOIA as in fact it is. I've had friends both at FBI and
Interpol telling me, well, you're never going to get what you
request because we file it under different names in other file
folders so we can tell you honestly there's nothing in that
file because it's cross-referenced under different codes. So it's
not going to work the same way anymore and also you'll be
charged, what, $10 a page to duplicate 8,000 pages. I was
included by sheer good fortune. Jan Aldrich is the
head of project 1947 which you can find on the web with an awful
lot of documentation, former Army intelligence man who kept us
honest. If you look at the book, there will be a signing, I'll
just say that, afterward of the vendors thing, but the book is
available in print or as a PDF file from Google Books but not
for pads or Kindles. Jan kept us honest. We were drawing all of
the organizational charts and communication systems because he
would say, no, this one doesn't talk to that one, he talks to
that one. And so we had it all documented and correct. Steve
arranged for a million permissions and didn't include the pictures
for which we couldn't. It's full of photographs of people and
things. So that's what the book is. We're proud of it. We're
proud of it. And I can speak of it with such pride because it was
everybody else's work that made it such a splendid achievement.
First let's start with what a UFO is not. Tabloid. UFO fires on
Louisville, Kentucky. Police chopper. Two cops survive.
That is not what we mean by the word UFO. People project what
they think we mean onto it, aliens, this and that. That's not
what we mean. We mean an unidentified flying object. But
to our knowledge they did not fire on Louisville, Kentucky
police choppers. And to our knowledge as this man claimed,
space aliens drained my blood and then filled my veins with a
mysterious yellow fluid. It says shaken steel worker. Indeed, a
steel worker or any of us would be shaken by having their blood
drained and replaced with a yellow fluid. We're not going to
fluid, especially if it's a mysterious yellow fluid, the
purpose of which we just do not know. And if it was done by
aliens and on top of it an alien that looked like that
sketch which was made from his description, shaken is just the
beginning of our response to that experience. So the poor
steel worker probably lives in Akron, Ohio to this day and will
tell you his story. But that isn't what we mean by UFOs.
Unfortunately we don't mean this either. This was a great picture
from Paul Trent, a farmer in McMinnville, Oregon. Took two
pictures around 1950ish, late 40s of this object he said which
appeared over his farm and took two of them and I'll show you
both of them and they looked pretty good and the debunkers did
everything they could to show it was false and they couldn't
falsify it. The number of pages and work and effort dedicated to
it was extraordinary. That's the first of two photos.
This is a few newspaper clippings and what you see in
the sky are photo one on the right, photo two on the left,
tilted differently on the left and you can see that it had that
kind of protuberance on the top and he was just a farmer and I
talked to the people actually, you go to great lengths to find
out what's true. I talked to the people who buried him and knew
him all his life and they said no, he always said this is what
he had seen, this is what he photographed and then this came
in from Rouen, France. First it was said 54, then 57. And when
you're following this, you're going to see that this is the
provenance of a photo because we want to reject everything that
can't be documented clearly and verified for accuracy. Different
dates, no one came forward as they would have had this picture
been taken by gun camera footage from a jet from the French. And
it looks strikingly like, if you remember what the picture looks
like, the Trent photo. In fact, what it looks like is the Trent
photo which someone has adjusted and changed a little bit in
terms of perspective but it's the same photo. It's not the same
photo. It's not a separate photo and there's no provenance for it
and that's not what we mean by UFO. That is, things that seem to
be false are not what we mean by UFOs and I just spent time only
ten days ago here in Vegas with Francois Louange, a wonderful man
from France. If you saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
he was like the Truffaut character. He worked with JAPON,
the official French organization that was dedicated to
understanding and responding to the UFO phenomena from the top
down. He helped resuscitate it as JAPON in 2003. He was the first
person to do that in 2006 and he also worked with their spy
satellite imagery programs for many years. He's no slouch and now
as a consultant he developed a program for photo analysis and he
demonstrated to me painstakingly that the closer you get to that
photo, that one, the pixels begin to change and though the
filament cannot be discerned on the photo, you can see that there
is a filament there, better than two sigmas, greater probability
than not, that it is hanging by a very thin, invisible filament.
And that's just too damn bad because it's a great picture and a
great story. And that's not, therefore, what we mean by UFO.
But we do mean this. Coast Guard man, Salem, Massachusetts,
1952, he's in his office, he looks out the window, he sees
that. He sees that and he takes his camera and he takes his
picture. He also shows a photograph which was published
as news, to which I will refer shortly, as news in the
newspaper, unidentified aerial phenomena in the East Coast. He's
on the East Coast. The newspapers reported it as news.
Why? Because this is big news. When four vehicles in echelon
formation are speeding through the sky, surrounded by what
looks like a plasma. And, in fact, we'll say a little more
about that later. This is what we mean by a UFO. We mean a
genuine photograph of objects flying in echelon formation,
demonstrating aerodynamic characteristics and physical
characteristics, which at the time the picture was taken, or
the report was made, could not be easily duplicated or, in fact,
duplicated at all by any of us terrestrials. Not saying it's
extraterrestrial. I'm just saying we didn't know how to do
that. We didn't know how to go from zero to 1,000. At a talk I
gave at the random lake little public library, 88-year-old man
sitting in back says, you know, I was in Korea running radar and
I saw these things come across our screen at 1,000 miles an
hour. I called my superior officer, I said, should I report
this? And he said, no, you can't. I said, no, you can't. And he
said, no, no, no, the radar is malfunctioning. He said, oh,
then we should fix the radar. And the response was, no. So
that was the end of that. So that's what you run into. Okay.
So that's what a UFO is. And this is what a UFO is. The modern
era began in the 1940s with foo fighters. The French word for
fire is foo, F-E-U. I can't say it right, but it's foo for
Americans. And these glowing objects, you see three arrows in
the top picture and no light. And these glowing objects, you see
no arrows, but two glowing globular objects, were widely
reported from the German and Japanese theaters as pacing,
trailing, following, and then taking off from the planes they
paced or followed at an extraordinary rate of speed and
going straight up or disappearing horizontally in the distance.
And they glowed red and white like the plasmas that had become
so familiar to UFOlogy, and we didn't know what they were. Now,
the military said it did not make any official response, but
of course, using Freedom of Information Act and other
sources in archives and libraries and correspondence, we
have gotten the information that, in fact, they did. They
were very concerned about what these were. We thought they were
German or Japanese because we were flying missions over Germany
and over Japan. We learned after the war because we got most of
the scientists and turned them from bad Nazis into good
Americans like Werner Von Braun. Some became bad communists,
which a bad Nazi would do. But the bad Nazis were the ones who
were the best of them, including Werner Von Braun, became our good
American. Anyway, we found out Germans didn't have them. They
were as puzzled by them as we were. We got all the troves of
documents, so did the Russians. They didn't know what they were
either. Neither did the Japanese. So there was a military
response, at least commanders writing to others saying escalate
the hypothesis in order to understand what these are and all
they could think of was the category, the cognitive category, military
military operation against us by an enemy. This continued. 1947 is when we marked the
beginning of the modern era because that's when Kenneth Arnold in Washington east of
the mountains reported that what he saw were nine silvery objects flying in a kind of skipping
motion through the sky behind peaks and then out in front again and when he landed he said
they skipped through the air like saucers which good reporters reported as he said they
were saucers and then we had the word flying saucer which came into our lexicon. He actually
said they were heel shaped with a straight edge and then a rounded edge but it was reported
flying saucers because he said they skipped through the air like saucers. There were other
reports all over the country in small local newspapers of sightings of discs and cigar
shaped objects and other kinds of objects that were flying and incredible and seemed
strange.
And didn't make sense to us in 46 and 47. And it compelled the attention of the military.
So we have this memo from Lieutenant General Nathan Twining to a general George Shogan.
I want to underscore some words. He said it is the opinion that the phenomena reported
is something real and not visionary or fictitious. Underscore real, not visionary, not fictitious.
This is early on. They knew it was real. Why? Because not only people but also the people
with sensors like radar detected the objects in a consistent way which showed consistent
characteristics and because credible people as we'll hear in a minute, saw what they call
incredible things. They knew it was real. That's the basis. The sociological puzzle
and the psychological puzzle for the rest of the 20th century is how we humans can hear
this being said in the 1940's. They are real, the General said. They are real, the General
said.
said, and it does not penetrate our brain, even drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, in any
meaningful way so as to become the cornerstone or a foundational anomaly that is a fact,
which Richard Feynman, the great physicist, said is where you begin to change the paradigm.
It has to be a fact and it has to be anomalous. That is, it cannot fit in our current model
of understanding. It was anomalous, we didn't know what they were, and it was a fact. There
are objects properly approximated in the shape of a disk of such size as to appear to be
as large as manmade aircraft. They reported operating characteristics which are very
important, extreme rates of climb, maneuverability, and action which must be considered evasive
when sighted by aircraft and radar. It was serious and it was taken seriously. The aerodynamic
capability of the objects was reported to be far in excess of anything that we knew
how to do or could engineer, even though we may well have been working
on trying to understand electromagnetic systems or propulsion systems that didn't just blow
gas out of the back end of an object and push it forward in response with lift. They operated
in a different way and our observations confirm that and we didn't know and I don't think
we still know exactly how. Gravity was displaced or electromagnetic currents were generated
that affected space time and affected the people who were close to the object in the
way that they have been reported to do.
Even Lyndon Johnson, who was a congressman then, he said, what's the story? I'm getting
letters from constituents who see these things and he was told correctly, this is one half
of the quote that's in the book, you get that I'm just skipping through the highlights
of 600 pages of well-documented complex detailed history. We're investigating the flying disks.
Detailed statements of credible witnesses are being carefully reviewed. Underscore credible
witnesses. They knew then that's what they were and they were being carefully
reviewed. They knew then that's what they were and they were being carefully reviewed.
Although not in public. Well, they had to respond and they did. They formed project
sign in 1948. There were three hypotheses considered by project sign which was staffed
by people who were well-intended and thought their commission, their task was to try to
come up with a hypothesis that best fit the data they were presented and said what these
things were likely to be. And there were three major hypotheses. They were Russian. American.
And a compartmented secret project that other people didn't know about or have a need to
know about. Or as they thought, extraterrestrial. These days people will say maybe they're from
another universe or another dimension and some of the behaviors, I won't go into that.
This talk isn't about their behaviors. But today we would expand on that and say there
are a variety of possibilities that might explain this if they are intelligent and if
they are visitors. But at that time it was Russian or American or extraterrestrial. The
Russians were not overflying our cities and our missile bases and our airports. They
really weren't. They couldn't. They would have been in big trouble had they done that.
If it was an American project, well, let's flash forward a few decades when Edgar Mitchell,
Apollo 14 who walked on the moon, said to me with a very straight face, Richard, he
said, if we could do what they can do, they would not have sent me to the moon in a tin
Lizzie. This is a man who spent several days cramped up in a tin can going to the
moon, walking on the moon, and who coming back had a life changing experience in which
he determined, perceived, experienced the unity of all things, the interconnectedness,
the nonlocal connectedness and consciousness of all things and he's devoted his life ever
after to trying to articulate that so people could, very frustrating, very lonely, so people
could understand what he experienced when he saw the unity of all things like a mystic
coming back from the moon.
They wouldn't have sent me to the moon in a tin Lizzie if we knew how to move like
that, he said. So it was determined that they were not American, to make the story very
short. It was not a compartmental project and we did not have the technological ability
to do that. So the third hypothesis was the most likely, the least unlikely hypothesis
that explains what we are looking at as data and evidence is the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
They wrote an estimate of the situation, which is what you did in that
domain and sent it up the chain of command to Hoyt Vandenberg, the general at the top.
He responded appropriately by saying I refuse to accept that. Knocked it back down, went
back down the chain of command, project sign was disbanded but they had to do something
more so they did project grudge, the name of which signifies the attitude of the people
in it who now knew clearly because when your commanding officer says I refuse to accept
the likely hypothesis that explains the data, then you know your task is to come up with
a hypothesis.
That is probably much less accurate than that and therefore just spin your wheels, kill time,
have lunch, take long naps and come up with something.
Well, we don't have the estimate of the situation. There is one copy. It's kind of like the end
of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's hidden in a warehouse somewhere. But we do have the
report of Ruppelt, Captain Ruppelt, who was one of the first head of project blue book
later on, that it existed and what was in it. And it was that hypothesis and that's
what was rejected.
Well, project grudge had a different attitude and they came up with this. Look at this press
release, evaluate it for yourself. We have investigated and evaluated blank. That is
whatever is reported to be occurring and have found nothing of value which would change
our previous estimates on the subject. And we had Mimeo machines then, not digital.
So you crank out this press release, distribute them to all people and bases and when anyone
reports anything like an unidentified flying object, fill in the blank with the name of
the incident and say it has been investigated and it's nothing. That was an expedient response.
Some were unhappy, like General Cable. He said what the hell do I have to do? He said
what do I have to do to stir up action? Anyone can see we do not have a satisfactory answer
to the question? I want a good answer. In other words, the government is not just one
thing. There were people who looked at the data and knew it was real and not fictitious
and had read the data and wanted an answer. And of course, the problem was that they didn't
have an answer. They didn't know what it was. They didn't know
what it was doing or doing here. And above all, this is
critical, they wanted to know if it was a threat. Because it was
a Russian thing, it was a threat. It wasn't Russian but is
it invaders from Mars? Are they going to eat us? Is it a
plateau to tell us to get rid of our nuclear weapons? To stop the
roller coaster from going for 20 minutes to get the attention
of earth? It's not doing any of those things. What kind of a
threat to our national security might this be? Post World War II
Europe is in rubble. The Marshall Plan is being cranked
up as a way to reconstitute Europe. You guys are kids and
don't remember that Europe was destroyed by World War II. It
was like Syria today. And the Russians were cranking up the
Cold War. We were engaged in a new kind of battle. The Iron
Curtain had descended across Europe, et cetera, et cetera. In
the light of those things, we were going to be in trouble.
We were going to be in trouble. We were going to have peace. We
We had a good deal of resources. But for those concerns and
the paranoia and anticommunistic, not just paranoia, but realistic
concerns that we had in those years, whether or not an aerial
phenomena of this sort was a threat was a very important
thing and it was primarily what they looked at. What is the
national security evaluation of this phenomena and these
incidents? Well, some still claim they were a mirage but let's
flash forward again, skipping ahead. 1952, a significant
year. Do you fire on a mirage? Do you fire on a hallucination?
Quote, we quote, we have quotes around and footnotes and
documentation for every damn thing in the book. There is
nothing speculative. It's from the government's own documents
that for 50 years this dedicated one would say obsessive
compulsive team and do you know anyone who's interesting who's
not obsessive? Certainly not in this con, right? 52 at a
distance of 130 miles, the quote goes, northeast of Washington,
D.C., relevant, in a minute three different army radar units
detected an object at 18,000 feet. Strong signal. Not an
inversion, not a bogey, not a blip that wasn't explained. It
remained stationary on radar for 30 minutes and then began to
move and by the time it reached the end of the scope, as I
alluded, it was going 1,000 miles an hour. Our report went
all the way to the Pentagon and the order came
back. If another came in, fire on it. After that first night we
loaded our 99 millimeter anti-aircraft guns. Unusual to
do in a populated area. You don't hear them going off over
Nellis right now or over downtown Las Vegas or the Strip.
We don't fire those kind of guns over populated areas. At
nothing. We scrambled F94 jet fighters from McGuire Air Force
Base. They didn't see them again. They didn't fire. But
they were ready to engage in combat, not with a gun. They
didn't fire with a fictitious object but with a threatening
object because it invaded the airspace which the Air Force was
commissioned to protect and defend on behalf of the American
people and it had a lot of investment in having done so
during World War II to an extraordinary degree. So this
was really a threat and a challenge to everything, to
groupthink, to ego, to institutional mentality,
everything legitimate and maybe not as legitimate as well. But I
said that was June 1952. In July, the first day of the war,
Washington, D.C., very famous in the cycle, eight days over
Washington, D.C., so many objects appeared so often, they
were seen by multiple pilots, they were seen by multiple
witnesses on the ground and they were tracked by the air
traffic control stations on radar in multiple ways. So multiple
witnesses all correlated to the same points and the same
objects and fighters were scrambled and chased them and
couldn't catch them except one poor guy who was chasing one and
then instead of fleeing, as they did, they were able to get
back to him. They just played cat and mouse. It came back
toward him. And when he looked around, another one was coming
back toward him from this side. When you look at the radar
screen that is replicated by the transmission, by the transcript
of the conversation with the air traffic controller, you see his
blip here and you see a circle of closing blips around him and
he said the equivalent of holy smokes. How do I get out of
here? Well, if there was a they, something heard it too
because then the blips parted.
And there were multiple witnesses to this event and
General Samford said at a press conference before they decided the
whole thing of eight days duration was an inversion, a
weather inversion, despite the contrary indications from
meteorologists, he said credible people have seen incredible
things. And it was news still, 52. That's the front page of the
Washington Post. Can you imagine that today? The Washington Post,
the New York Times, saucer outran jet, not pilots,
speculates, pilot hopes, pilot thinks, pilot reveals. He chased
it and it flew away so fast he couldn't catch it. I can see
numerous clippings. We have literally thousands of clippings
that we painstakingly gathered from around the country, from
old periodicals as well as other archives that in this case,
there are many about this week, New York Times, other papers
carried it as news because an investigation had to be done in
secret after the chase over the Capitol.
So it was news. And it was big news. And that was important. So
they had to do something in response to this. They created
project blue book. These things were over the Capitol. They were
over the White House. They didn't land at the White House,
but they were over the White House. And they hired Dr. Allen
Heineck from Northwestern University, famous astronomer,
to be the resource for project blue book. And the CIA got
involved and concluded a study, listen to these words carefully,
because they signify, you know, it's going to be a great
opportunity for us to be able to apply what we document in
greater complexity in detail, a direction that subsequently was
followed after the Robertson panel met convened air force and
CIA people in 1953 and decided on a plan of response that made
sense to them and it kind of went aligned with this. Flying
saucers are not a threat to national security. They didn't
say they're not real, they said they're not attacking, they're
not a threat, they fly around. What is a threat to national
security, reports of flying saucers are. So they said, you
Therefore, military personnel should be trained in proper
observation of flying saucers. At this point we can speculate
and ask the question, why should they be trained? Well, because
if there's something 10 minutes, you give me a break. You're not
kidding. Okay. You think I was talking fast before? Look at
them. Learn everything you can from them. Figure out what they
are, if you can. Figure out how to reverse engineer them. Do
research and development along the lines that many DARPA
programs seem somehow, but that's all speculative, to have
followed in order to find a way to move like that. And also at
the same time create programs to debunk flying saucers to the
citizenry. And there you have it. There you have it. Ellen
Hynek said it's characterized by a constant flow of reports.
This is later. I'm jumping ahead as I need to now.
These are from highly responsible people. Either
something strange is going around, or I'm going to have to
call these people liars. If there are independent witnesses,
you have quite a job proving they're all hallucinated. Hynek
began a skeptic. And as reports came in, and as he did on the
ground investigations in detail, like with Father McGill in Papua
New Guinea, an extraordinary case. Or Lenny Zamora in
Socorro, New Mexico, an extraordinary case. He came
increasingly to be convinced exactly what they were doing.
But he says here, these people are not lying. They're not crazy.
Something's going on. And it's global. 150 countries. It is
global. It is reports in the same level of detail, same
idiosyncratic detail, same granular detail from all over
the world. And there's a friend of mine at NSA who wrote a paper
that was disseminated through the agency, said what's funny in
America is not funny everywhere. What's funny for one year isn't
funny for 50. And they agree in the small details from all over
the world. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do
and understand what's funny in America, and I'm trying to do
something about it. So 20 years later, when he became disgusted
with the realization that project blue book was a public
relations effort designed to placate and cover whatever was
really happening, in other words, with the least
untruthful things one could say while still lying in public,
because that's simply the nature of cover and deception. I'm
not saying something controversial there. That's how
it's done. It's not a conspiracy. It's policy. It's a
policy. And the people who formed the policy, yes, they meet in rooms. But it doesn't mean
I'm a conspiracy theorist or they're conspirators. It's the nature of the national security state
with the degree of secrecy that we have now and the high degree of classification and
the necessity, therefore, when something is believed that it should be covered appropriately
and a lot of people think they made the right decisions to decide this in light of national
security concerns, then you do say the least untruthful thing you can say in public while
still maintaining the cover story. But this is what it does to the public and that's why
people are so disoriented by the revelations about what we are doing at a government level.
The public, he said, was placed in the role of the enemy against whom counter espionage
tactics must be employed. From my experience, I felt those in charge considered people reported
or took a serious interest in the USO and just wanted to know about them, like me, schmucks
like me, what's going on on the planet. They were enemies.
Just as today it is very difficult to distinguish patriots from whistleblowers, from terrorists,
from religious zealots, from concerned citizens, from journalists. They all behave the same
way. It is allegiance, perceived allegiance that determines whether or not they're an
enemy. A hacker is simply a hacker. I've defined it correctly, I think. A black hat
hacker is a hacker who knows when to lie.
A gray hat hacker is a hacker who knows when it's appropriate to, well, fudge the truth.
A white hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere and can't remember where
he left it. It's just what it is. So what is a UFO? I have to do this quick. Herman
Oberth, Von Braun, who I mentioned for this reason, his mentor in rocketry looked at,
he says here, not three or four, but 50 radar measurements from Air Force and Navy jets.
These are from handwritten notes that we have from a lecture Oberth gave in Germany.
They can't all be so inaccurate. What was he talking about that he said was legitimate?
He was speaking of extraordinary speeds and maneuvers. And if you ask what those were,
he said they fly in this way. You can look at the details later. In sunlight, which is
brighter than the objects themselves, they glitter like metal. They're dark orange and
cherry red at night. If they don't need much power when they're suspended, that is hovering,
then they don't shine much.
But if they start really moving, shining brightens. They turn yellow, yellow-green, green like
a copper flame, in a state of highest speed or acceleration extremely white. Is that arcane
or mysterious? No. According to Paul Hill, who wrote a wonderful book, he was at NASA
for many decades. He was fascinated by UFOs, having had his own sightings. He was allowed
to collect whatever data and information and stories he could, undercover, because NASA's
official position is we don't investigate them and they don't exist anyway. But he was
allowed to do that.
And his book was published by
his daughter, Julie, posthumously as Unconventional Flying Objects, a scientific analysis in
which he spells out as best he could, with his limited ability but supreme knowledge,
the physics of what had been observed by him and by others. Five minutes. Okay. And in
the chapter on illumination, he correlates photon energy with the corresponding colors
exactly as Oberth described, exactly as many, many people have described from clear observation.
They come from energetic ionizing radiation generated
by the UFO, which ionizes the air, red and orange, the least energy, as you just heard,
then blue, blue and white, white and blue, corresponds to strong radiation peak, et cetera,
et cetera. In other words, people are corroborating and correlating data. And they are making
sense of the same thing. During the 1950s, Project Blue Book always explained away everything
except those it couldn't. And then those were listed as unexplained and treated separately,
as if they didn't count. The Air Force has a wonderful manual that it issued in 1970s,
to the Air Force cadets at the United States Air Force Academy. It had one chapter on UFOs.
About half of it was cases of unexplained, unidentified objects. And they made the statement
in the discussion section, and I'm paraphrasing, but this is what they said, the uncorrelated
data strongly suggests that we are being visited by three or four civilizations. Let that in.
And then when people got wind of this chapter, somebody was realized to have made a mistake.
The book was retracted. All were pulped.
The last chapter was rewritten. All the cases were removed and the statement was made. There's
nothing to it. But we think it's interesting for cadets to consider anomalies because it
challenges their thinking. But they said three to four civilizations are likely visiting
based on reports. But there are other cases like the RB-47 bomber, numerous events in
the 70s, a wave prompted a need to have it done scientifically and the Air Force was
sick of this because it couldn't deal with it.
And they appointed the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado. Our biggest and
one of the best chapters in this book is the detailed work Mike Swartz, the expert on the
Condon Committee, has done to show the politics of how that reached its conclusion. I have
to jump ahead to the conclusion. 1,500-page work, including numerous cases that were unexplained
and unidentified, and then one chapter, the only chapter Condon wrote without consulting
his own 1,500 pages of work by his committee and without doing any of the field investigation. It was, he
concluded, there was nothing to it and no reason to be investigating them any further. And the Air
Force, as intended, heaved a sigh of relief and said we're out of the business of UFOs. They are not going
to investigate anything anymore. And you'll get a boilerplate letter from them if you report
something. We don't do this. Call your police. However, Barry Greenwood using FOIA found out they
were very much interested in what was going on across the northern interior of the country in the
70s, like the Minot Air Force Base, which is on the web, Tom Tullino, Minneapolis, has done an
incredible project. It's a great project. It's a great project. It's a great project. It's a great
presentation documenting and detailing what happened at Minot. Loring Air Force Base, they said
nothing happened, but Freedom of Information Act got 24 documents describing indeed that something
happened. And across the whole northern tier, from Pease all the way to Malmstrom in Montana,
remarkable events took place to which I merely allude and encourage you to do your own thinking
and do your own research and find out what was going on because the manner of dealing with it
was to debunk, to ridicule, and demean. How did they do it? How did they do it?
I'm sure you've heard about the
then, in the 1990s. I remember a year or so ago, a friend of mine in NSA teaches on deception, so
three legs to the stool. Illusions? Create illusions that people believe are real and reenforce them
through media, amplification, create distraction, misdirection, like a magician. If somebody sees
something, all right it's there, but just make them look over here. A friend of mine who I met here works in the
as a contract employee, looks for correlation between scandals among celebrities and important
events that needed to be hidden in newspapers, he found a better than chance correlation.
It troubled him. Why was Paris Hilton let out of jail early? And then he looked and
found something about Iraq on page 22. Paris Hilton is the headline. No, it's not that
simple and that easy. But the media is complicit at best or worst, cooperative at best, complicit
at worst, in amplifying whatever it needs to amplify according to the people who feed
stories. That's a whole other talk that I'd love to do sometime on how we appointed ourselves
the Ministry of Culture, the CIA did in the 50s and 60s and what they did around the world
with the wholesale creation of newspapers, magazines and periodicals in order to make
them look independent so the different points of view could be articulated and then magnified
and then repeated by other magazines which they also influenced their own. Things are
not what they seem.
They really are not what they seem and that, too, is documented. Other cases continue to
refer you to the Tehran case. We have a document from the Defense Intelligence Agency describing
the dog fight. It's a fascinating reading. The big Alaska airship is also fascinating.
You're about to tell me that I'm almost, almost done. Okay. It's recommended for inclusion
in university libraries because it's an exception. A thousand citations, 600 pages, the history
of the government's response. We don't say anything about aliens or origins, but we do
think you're smart and if you see the nose of a camel inside your tent, guess what might
be attached to it outside the tent? Read this book and other credible work which is
referred to on my website. If you're interested in seeing the book or purchasing one, come
to the book signing over in the book vendor space at Breakpoint Books and take a look
at the book.
And we're not doing Q&A rooms anymore, but I have business cards. Anybody who wants to
contact me, talk about this or any of the other things I've done or said for 18 years,
which is a lot, take a book. The website is ThemeWorks.com. Contact me. I belong to
you. My life is an open book, kind of. And I'll be glad to talk about this or any
of the other relevant details. Thank you.