WHAT GOVERNMENT SECRECY?

Those favoring an extraterrestrial explanation of UFO sightings claim that governments have SECRET proof that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships. (For some unknown reason, the word SECRET is always capitalized in military writing) Here are the reasons why there probably is NOT a cover-up of UFO information:

1. Nobody could keep it quiet that long. If the government DID have crashed saucers and alien bodies, many more people who know would have slipped and let something out in the last fifty years. This is the strongest evidence against UFO secrecy.
2. It is impossible to prove that SECRET government information does not exist. This is the same case as proving that alien spaceships do not exist. It is impossible to prove that something does not exist.
3. If the government knew there was even a slight danger, they would be driving us crazy with public service announcements and debates on the hazards of UFOs. We would be bombarded with ads similar to the ones telling us not to eat fat, to be polutically correct, and to be "good to the earth." There were ads in World War II telling us what to do if a bomb fell, to help out by paying your income tax on time, to contribute to scrap drives (and you thought recycling was new), to grow victory gardens, and how to report fifth columnists. If the government knew anything, we would be hearing these:
   • "Guard your life, family, and sanity! Stay away from UFOs!"
   • "UFOs can be hazardous to your health! Radiation poisoning is possible!"
   • "You might be abducted by a UFO! Be careful around unknown entities!"
   • "Missing time? Come to the Federal UFO Abduction Therapy Center today!"
   • "Protect your children! Keep them away from UFOs!"
   • "Discrimination against UFO abductees is a violation of Federal law!"
   • "Paid for by the Federal Council on UFO Safety and the Ad Council."
4. The SECRET being kept may be that the government, particularly the military, has absolutely no idea about what is going on. No official wants to admit that he doesn't know what's really happening.
5. Where the government IS keeping SECRETs, an alien spaceship is probably not the reason for the secrecy. Here are some of the probable reasons for the secrecy:
   • Procedures used to intercept enemy aircraft must remain SECRET. Otherwise an enemy would know how to avoid the intercepting fighters.
   • Where any illegal activity is involved, the government keeps that fact SECRET until they can catch the perpetrators. Otherwise the criminals would stop or move the activity, making it harder to catch them. Examples are espionage, smuggling, illegal entry into the country, disposing of stolen goods, terrorism, and illegal penetration of airspace.
   • A SECRET military device may have caused the sighting. The most probable causes of the Roswell NM case, the Ft Knox (Mantell) case, and the Rendlesham Forest case were SECRET military operations or devices.
   • Where a SECRET military device is responsible for a sighting, records of the flight that caused the sighting may be expunged, to prevent a records search on the sighting from accidentally disclosing the SECRET.
   • Diplomatic communications are kept SECRET by international law.
   • SECRET movements are used to protect persons or materials from terrorists. An example is a spent nuclear reactor core.
   • The secrecy might be to protect someone's life from threats. A participant in the witness protection program who later has a sighting could be put in jeopardy by any publicity that results. The names of undercover agents and informants, and their whereabouts, must be kept SECRET to protect their families.
   • If a foreign government is responsible for a sighting, care must be taken to prevent war or other international problems.
   • Publication of dubious information could lead to a libel or slander suit.
   • Witnesses sometimes do request anonymity. Some that haven't done so have been inundated with crackpots and amateur investigators. People have lost jobs as a result of reporting a sighting.
   • Government officials who are witnesses fear losing their jobs or being voted out.
   • The military HAS used UFOs to cover other activities.
   • The existence of other (still SECRET) documents must be protected. These usually have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of UFOs, but all references to them must be deleted when documents are declassified.
6. Other government actions HAVE contributed to the notion of secrecy:
   • In several cases, government employees have given amateur UFO investigators wild stories to cover other SECRETs, or just to get rid of them.
   • In one case, a government official told a wild UFO story to a reporter who was looking into a political scandal. When his UFO story fell flat, nobody believed what he dug up on the scandal either, until it came to light through other sources.
   • What started as an interoffice prank memo leaks out as "fact" to the press.
   • One military commander found out a national UFO group was having a convention near his base. He gave them "something to do" with night aerial maneuvers, and then watched them going nuts "collecting data" on the moving lights in the night sky.
   • Government says "no known aircraft were in the area at the time." The truth is that government doesn't have any idea about many of the aircraft flying through, because the pilots of private planes use Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and don't bother to file flight plans.
   • Different classes of airports (military, commercial, private) don't have information on aircraft belonging to the other two classes.
   • Government agencies have denied responsibility for some physical evidence cases to avoid paying damages.
   • Government, especially the CIA, has used wild fabricated UFO stories to check for security leaks. They remove security clearance from people who leak the story. Sometimes these people are also fired.
   • The page author's brother once thought the government was telling space aliens to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service every January. (Remember those ads: "If you are an alien in the United States, you must...") At the time, he had never heard the word "alien" used to describe people from a foreign country. (Do we ask the UFOnauts for their green cards?)
   • One would wonder if the government term "alien activity" has been misinterpreted by the press to mean space aliens instead of foreign agents.
7. Reporters and UFO investigators have also contributed to the notion of secrecy:
   • They assume that when officials don't know the answer, they are lying.
   • They misinterpret scientific data they don't understand:
     • A common misinterpretation by amateurs is wind direction. Scientists always report the direction the wind is blowing FROM. Many amateur UFO investigators get a wind direction favorable for a balloon from the Weather Bureau or a nearby airport. Then they write, "There was a west wind, so a balloon moving east would have been heading into the wind."
     • Even when they get the direction correct, they use a report from an airport miles away, taken hours later, for the wind direction at the site at the time of the sighting.
     • The correct solution to the 1965 Northeast US blackout can be found in a quote of the IEEE Spectrum in the Condon Report, but neither the person who wrote the article, nor the Condon committee noticed the solution (follow the link above to see it).
     • They take witness estimates of the size, distance, speed, or altitude of an unknown object as fact. It is impossible to visually estimate any of these values for an unknown object without accurately knowing one of the others. An exception can be made if the object is closer than 20 feet, where binocular vision is accurate. Also, if the object passes directly in front of or behind a known object, some limits on size and distance may be derived from the relative angular sizes.
     • Some writers who have absolutely no scientific knowledge of energy transfer claim that UFOs can somehow remotely "steal" electrical power from power lines or automobiles. Most of them have been watching too much science fiction on TV. It can't be done without devices connected to the power lines or the auto. Strong RF might disrupt the operation of radio sets and spark plugs, but that is by giving them too much power.
   • They never seem to apply simple tests to photos of UFOs. The Strauch photo (1965 St George MN) is easily identified as a night-light bulb by using a blue filter. Its position on the film clearly shows it wasn't the subject of the photo. A flashbulb failed to fire. Probably Strauch tried to photograph a UFO, and thought this frame was the UFO photo.
   • They take incomplete notes, and misread what they wrote later.
   • They disbelieve the correct solution as absurd because they have never experienced it.
   • Some have the ulterior motive of selling books or newspapers. Keeping the strangeness going sells the material, but exposing the solution ends the otherwise continuing sales.
   • Many stories have been written about UFO detectors based on the magnetic compass. The page author made one of these, and it detected every sort of disturbance inside the house, but no UFOs.
8. Authors of books do not always check their facts before publishing.
   • Many times they take the statements of witnesses as fact without doing any detective work. Sightings that were easily solved later are included as "evidence of the unknown."
   • They ignore ulterior motives that UFO "witnesses" have for faking a sighting.
   • In "UFO -- The Government Files" (Brookesmith), a photo of trash ready to be picked up after a carnival celebration is portrayed as the wreckage of Capt. Thomas Mantell's plane. The plane crashed in a field. This picture is taken on an ornately paved surface that isn't even damaged by the "crash."
   • Four other photos similar to, but not identical to either of the Trent photos (1950 McMinnville OR), but taken at the same location two to five years later (evidenced by tree growth) are portrayed as the original photos in several different publications. The photos are in color, and the object has a dome instead of a pole.
   • "UFO -- The Government Files" (Brookesmith) has a picture of an older man holding the crashed remains of a Rawin reflector. "UFO -- The Complete Sightings" (Brookesmith) has a picture of a young man in the same room, holding similar remains. Each book calls it a picture of Lt. Jesse Marcel taken in 1947. We have an author contradicting himself!
      
     (The older man is General Ramey)
   • Some of them can't even keep their facts straight. One author referred to Lonnie Zamora as "An officer named Socorro" and published very bad mathematics as fact. Another constantly had incorrect dates for sightings, and still another misspelled so many place and witness names that it cast doubt on the entire book.
   • Statistics butchery is rampant. Statistics are cited as undeniable truth, but bad collection methods, omission of descriptions of sampled populations, bad partitioning methods, and overlapping categories makes it impossible for a real mathematician to use the published data.
   • Coral Lorenzen once accused the Air Force of trying to explain portions of single cases, because the statistics had decimal points in the percentages. She obviously did not understand the mathematics behind percentages or statistics. Unless the Air Force had exactly 100 cases, there should be decimal points in the percentages, because groupings in even hundredths of the total number of cases would be quite unusual.
   • They get excited when a landing mark or a crop circle is exactly a multiple of one of our earthly units of measure. This is more likely the result of a prankster making his prank easier to do by using nice round numbers. Of course, once this page becomes known, the pranksters will avoid round numbers to keep identification harder.
   • At least one author published a whole series of books based on a tall tale a military crash investigator told him just to get him out of the way. Another was duped by some publicity agents trying to increase interest in UFOs. This was done to increase ticket sales for the upcoming movie "The Flying Saucer."
   • The authors are not always to blame. Publishers have thrown them curves at times, by having control of content or of which photos are included.
9. Tabloids will say anything to sell magazines. Don't trust the 'bloids:
   • Government secrecy is a common theme, and is not limited to UFOs.
   • In 1997, one lifted a picture of Santa's workshop from "Santa Claus -- The Movie" and claimed that the Hubble telescope had discovered Heaven.
   • They once took a picture of the inside of an inflatable sports stadium dome when the air was turned off, and portrayed the sagging dome fabric as a captured UFO.
   • The art of faking photographs has been practiced by tabloids, but it is usually easy to spot the mistakes.
   • In at least one case, the "men in black" were working for a tabloid, and they obtained the original photographic materials by posing as government men.
   • One would wonder how many fire balloons were launched by tabloid reporters trying to generate a story.
10. Authors, publishers, and bookstores know the truth won't sell:
    • An author writes a book exposing the truth about UFO cases. It doesn't sell.
    • A publisher markets a book showing the truth about UFO cases. It doesn't sell.
    • A bookstore carries a book telling the truth about UFO cases. It doesn't sell.
    • The author learns to write books preserving the mystery of the UFO to sell books.
    • The publisher learns to avoid putting truthful UFO books on the market, if he wants to make a profit on them.
    • The bookstore owner learns to avoid putting truthful UFO books on the shelves, if he doesn't want to lose money.
    • Nothing sells books like a government conspiracy to hoodwink the public (Unless they expose programs that give people money -- that's why books exposing the frauds the liberals perpetrate don't sell).
    • The author learns to write books about extraterrestrials if he wants his UFO books to be sold in bookstores. So he writes trash and rakes in the bucks to support the serious investigation he is doing behind the scenes.
    • Thus, the public can't find the truth in a bookstore.

LINKS:

1. Main UFO page