House Oversight Hearing on UAPs - July 26, 2023

[Mendel]

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, granted that what happened at Roswell was a perfectly mundane thing that just so happened to involve top secret spy balloons that the United States didn't want leaked at the time, are there still details of that operation, or of the story itself, that are unknown by historians of this event because those details would have to be provided by the government, but which for one reason or another they still do not allow them to be released? [...] Or are all requests for information about this case generally understood to have been fulfilled and even details like these are well understood?

There's a wikipedia page on the Roswell incident; also, ...

Article:

... in 1994 the United States Air Force published a report

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

Review both and then decide if there's room for uncertainty.

 

[NorCal Dave]

One possible explanation could be something as trivial as "We know they were spy balloons listening for Soviet nuclear detonations, but the actual designs, materials, and means by which said balloons worked are still classified".

As @Mendel referred to above, most of it is known now:

The early Mogul balloons consisted of large clusters of rubber meteorological balloons, however, these were quickly replaced by enormous balloons made of polyethylene plastic. These were more durable, leaked less helium, and also were better at maintaining a constant altitude than the early rubber balloons. Constant-altitude-control and polyethylene balloons were the two major innovations of Project Mogul.

Content from External Source

There is even pictures of a Mogul array:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul

Also, note that we don't actually see Coulthart ask the Roswell question, it's just a voice over of B roll. When we come back to the participants, Coulthart is NOT talking, it just goes straight to Grusch's answer. And the answer doesn't mention Roswell, it's just a generic "Unfortunately those details were not approved for me to talk about" Then back to B roll and Coulthart voice over.

It's possible the answer doesn't exactly go with the question.

 

[Amathia]

As @Mendel referred to above, most of it is known now:

The early Mogul balloons consisted of large clusters of rubber meteorological balloons, however, these were quickly replaced by enormous balloons made of polyethylene plastic. These were more durable, leaked less helium, and also were better at maintaining a constant altitude than the early rubber balloons. Constant-altitude-control and polyethylene balloons were the two major innovations of Project Mogul.

Content from External Source

There is even pictures of a Mogul array:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul

Also, note that we don't actually see Coulthart ask the Roswell question, it's just a voice over of B roll. When we come back to the participants, Coulthart is NOT talking, it just goes straight to Grusch's answer. And the answer doesn't mention Roswell, it's just a generic "Unfortunately those details were not approved for me to talk about" Then back to B roll and Coulthart voice over.

It's possible the answer doesn't exactly go with the question.

Oh, good catch on the B roll. I wouldn't have noticed or even thought of that.

 

[Mendel]

I think these hearings are wonderful for the UFO topic. It will either:

1. Actually bring tangible evidence of aliens to light, or at least get that ball rolling.
2. Be an incredible let down(given the hype around it) to all the UFO believers, hopefully making them question their delusions.
3. Or, unfortunately, expose actual classified-worthy programs in which the gov't reverse-engineers foreign adversary craft/subs/ships, etc.

For the sake of our great country, I really hope #3 does not happen.

My baseline expectations:
1. There won't be new evidence of UFOs. Fravor, Graves and Grusch don't have any.
2. Grusch will repeat his claim about material retrieval programs, as far as cleared by DOPSR.
3. The UFO community will feel that important revelations are just around the corner!
4. We might actually, months later, learn that these are nothingburger claims: the programs may exist but not handle anything supernatural.
5. The UFO community won't care because a new, different revelation is just around the corner!

Anything that deviates from that will be noteworthy.

 

[Amathia]

My baseline expectations:
1. There won't be new evidence of UFOs. Fravor, Graves and Grusch don't have any.
2. Grusch will repeat his claim about material retrieval programs, as far as cleared by DOPSR.
3. The UFO community will feel that important revelations are just around the corner!
4. We might actually, months later, learn that these are nothingburger claims: the programs may exist but not handle anything supernatural.
5. The UFO community won't care because a new, different revelation is just around the corner!

Anything that deviates from that will be noteworthy.

We know from doomsday cults that when Armageddon doesn't come the group usually just doubles down rather than fizzle away and dissipate. A new date is almost always given and when that one doesn't come to pass more "revisions" to the initial calculations are made, rinse and repeat, until the leader passes away. It's only then that the group generally scatters.

Unfortunately Ufology doesn't have a leader that serves the same kind of role you find in a cult, so it behaves in the same way as a doomsday cult (the end, or disclosure is always just around the corner) but doesn't have one of the things that ensures most of these cults have an expiration date. Without that leader the Ufology world can just maintain itself in a perpetual state of anticipation. It's interesting because you can see that even they themselves see the endless pattern of dangling carrots and claims of disclosure being around the corner, they mention it all the time in the subreddit, and not just skeptics. But it seems like just being able to see the pattern and the psychological mechanism at play in this world isn't enough to make people walk away. Some may eventually get frustrated and tune out, but man, some of these folks stay in this state for decades.

 

[Amathia]

Oh boy. Anyone have a guess of where the hell Michio Kaku is getting these claims from?

 

[tobigtofool]

We know from doomsday cults that when Armageddon doesn't come the group usually just doubles down rather than fizzle away and dissipate. A new date is almost always given and when that one doesn't come to pass more "revisions" to the initial calculations are made, rinse and repeat, until the leader passes away. It's only then that the group generally scatters.

Unfortunately Ufology doesn't have a leader that serves the same kind of role you find in a cult, so it behaves in the same way as a doomsday cult (the end, or disclosure is always just around the corner) but doesn't have one of the things that ensures most of these cults have an expiration date. Without that leader the Ufology world can just maintain itself in a perpetual state of anticipation. It's interesting because you can see that even they themselves see the endless pattern of dangling carrots and claims of disclosure being around the corner, they mention it all the time in the subreddit, and not just skeptics. But it seems like just being able to see the pattern and the psychological mechanism at play in this world isn't enough to make people walk away. Some may eventually get frustrated and tune out, but man, some of these folks stay in this state for decades.

This is a way to look at UFO believers sure.

But consider this: If there are no such things as UFO's, then that means that the goverment has indeed encouraged the beliefe in UFOs, as misdirection for things like the Roswell crash, or god knows what else.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

That is the reason there are UFO death cults, because the goverment is and has, convinced people that UFO's are real.

This is why we need disclosure, there are victims being lied to. That is a fact.

This is not the same as religion, or a cult where a "cult leader" is lying to people. The literal US goverment is lying to people, and their lies, are creating cults, and in some cases: literal death cults (heavens gate)

It's dangerous, and irresponsible to have secret weapons' programs that uses mass delusion as a tool to remain secret. Weather you believe in aliens or not, we know for a fact the goverment has used them as a way to keep military testing secret, and that is what causes the hysteria.

Not anything else.

 

[ManInBlack]

Oh boy. Anyone have a guess of where the hell Michio Kaku is getting these claims from?

This is a sound bite, if you watch long form interviews/video of Michio Kaku, he says these are the theories that have been suggested by others (witnesses from the Nimitz encounters etc) but it is up to the government now to disprove these theories or cough up further evidence.

Dr Michio Kaku has had numerous discussion on UAP/UFO's over the years and all the short form videos are edited in this way.

 

[John J.]

If there are no such things as UFO's, then that means that the goverment has indeed encouraged the beliefe in UFOs

I'm at a disadvantage here because the NY Times article is behind a paywall. If a former CIA officer has said that the agency deliberately encouraged belief in UFOs as alien craft, unless he or she provided corroborating evidence then their story is anecdotal.
The Washington Spectator article that @AR318307 linked to,
https://washingtonspectator.org/spaceship-of-fools/, is very critical of the NY Times' attitude towards UFO stories.

The US government is normally criticized by believers for not accepting that UFOs exist (as alien spacecraft) and hiding "the truth".

It's pretty clear that the Roswell debris, from day 2 of it being collected by the USAAF IIRC, was described as a weather balloon.

There have been plenty of UFO cults that have nothing to do with official encouragement- George Adamski and his followers (mainly harmless), Billy Meier (with racist overtones), Heaven's Gate (suicidal- and you won't find any evidence that the US government ever said, or implied, that Hale-Bopp was anything other than a comet).
The Washington Spectator article mentioned an American follower of David Icke, who murdered his two children because he feared they had their mother's "reptilian genes"; Icke is no friend of the US government (or the authorities in his native Britain).

I don't think it can be shown that any famous/ influential UFO reports were hoaxes perpetrated by the US government (or any of its agencies).

 

[Ann K]

But consider this: If there are no such things as UFO's, then that means that the goverment has indeed encouraged the beliefe in UFOs, as misdirection for things like the Roswell crash, or god knows what else.

"The government" isn't some monolithic entity, but as we have seen in the several discussions in Metabunk, the government CONTAINS some people who believe in UFOs, and it is not possible to tell for sure with what level of sincerity. Your assumptions sound like baseless conspiracy theories. There have been official statements to deny things like the "alien bodies", but you're disregarding those, claiming it's "the government" that encourages belief, and going straight to "victims are being lied to". What victims? What lies? And if so, who is telling the lies?

The fact that SOME people who may be in the government are UFO believers is true. Please, don't confuse that with an official governmental policy, and don't overdramatize it with sweeping statements about "victims" or "hysteria".

I have no access to the quarter-century-old link you posted, and can't address either the content or the authorship.

 

[tobigtofool]

The fact that SOME people who may be in the government are UFO believers is true. Please, don't confuse that with an official governmental policy, and don't overdramatize it with sweeping statements about "victims" or "hysteria".

I think you're missing my point. The point is that "the American goverment" has released multiple press releases over the last 75 years that were indeed designed to misdirect the public about military testing.

I never said or implied, or believe in anything like a monolithic entity, or conspiracy.

Some people, is enough to create the hysteria we live in today

The fact that SOME people who may be in the government are UFO believers is true. Please, don't confuse that with an official governmental policy, and don't overdramatize it with sweeping statements about "victims" or "hysteria".

Please dont confuse or over dramatize that accusing the proven coverups I am speaking about, with some crazy monolithic conspiracy that you think I mean.

Some of the most important evidence that UFOs are real, are well known military coverups, or ones that will be well known soon.

Roswell, pheonix lights, the recent palms UFO. That is enough to make a cult.

I don't think it can be shown that any famous/ influential UFO reports were hoaxes perpetrated by the US government (or any of its agencies).

I cant find the smoking gun link for you because I am at dinner, but the official statement today about Roswell was that they used aliens as a misdirection for a crash of spy balloons. (correct me if I am wrong anyone?)

 

[NorCal Dave]

But consider this: If there are no such things as UFO's, then that means that the goverment has indeed encouraged the beliefe in UFOs, as misdirection for things like the Roswell crash, or god knows what else.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

If you have access to this article please share the relevant points. As @Ann K noted above it's behind a paywall for most of us.

I cant find the smoking gun link for you because I am at dinner, but the official statement today about Roswell was that they used aliens as a misdirection for a crash of spy balloons. (correct me if I am wrong anyone

There was 1 (one, singular) report of a "saucer" from an unidentified Army person right after debris had been found:

The Roswell incident took place during the flying disc craze of 1947, sparked by widespread media coverage of pilot Kenneth Arnold's alleged sighting. Amid hundreds of reports nationwide,[3] on July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field's press release was broadcast via wire transmission.[4] The Army quickly retracted the release, falsely stating the crashed object was merely a conventional weather balloon.[1][5][6]

Content from External Source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

Now if we want to get into the claims of Richard Doty trying to mislead Bennewitz on behalf of the government, that's for a different thread.

 

[tobigtofool]

If you have access to this article please share the relevant points. As @Ann K noted above it's behind a paywall for most of us.

C.I.A. Admits Government Lied About U.F.O. Sightings​

By William J. Broad

• Aug. 3, 1997

In the darkest days of the cold war, the military lied to the American public about the true nature of many unidentified flying objects in an effort to hide its growing fleets of spy planes, a Central Intelligence Agency study says.

The deceptions were made in the 1950's and 1960's amid a wave of U.F.O. sightings that alarmed the public and parts of official Washington.
The C.I.A. study says the Air Force knew that most reports by citizens and aviation experts were based on fleeting glimpses of U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, which fly extremely high.

Those planes were developed in the 1950's and 60's to photograph enemy targets. From secret bases, mainly in California and Nevada, the aircraft repeatedly flew across the country and eventually overseas to bases in countries that included Britain, West Germany and Taiwan.
While commercial airliners int he 1950's flew at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet, the U-2 soared to more than 60,000 feet and the SR-71 to more than 80,000 feet, or 15 miles, nearly the edge of space.

The planes carried powerful cameras to spy on foreign military installations and sensitive electronic gear to capture radio and radar transmissions. The spy craft were developed by the intelligence agency and often flown by the Air Force.

Rather than acknowledgeing the existence of the top-secret flights or saying nothing about them publicly, the Air Force decided to put out false cover stories, the C.I.A. study says. For instance, unusual observations that were actually spy flights were attributed to atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals and temperature inversions.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

The study, ''C.I.A.'s Role in the Study of U.F.O.'s. 1947-90,'' was written by Gerald K. Haines and appears in Studies of Intelligence, a secret Central Intelligence Agency journal. Five years ago, the agency began releasing unclassified versions of the journal yearly. The 1997 edition, with the study on unidentified objects, is at http://www.odci. ogv/csi/studies/97unclas/ on the World Wide Web.

Mr. Haines is a historian at the National Reconnaissance office, the intelligence agency that builds and runs the naiton's spy statellites.
The admission of Federal deception on the issue appears to be a first, experts said in interviews.

''It's very significant,'' said Richard Hall, chairman of the Fund for U.F.O. Research, a group in Washington. ''Certainly they've lied about not having any interest in the subject. But I don't know of any other deception like this.''

John E. Pike, head of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, also based in Washington, said the admission raised questions about other Federal cover-ups involving U.F.O.'s.

''The flying-saucer community is definitely onto something,'' in charging that the military is hiding something, Mr. Pike said.

There are two schools of thought on the nature of such a cover-up. One, from Mr. Pike and other aerospace experts, holds that many sightings over the decades involved secret Federal projects featuring advanced aircraft and reconnaissance missions. The new admission strengthens that view.

The other school holds that the Government has come into possession of extraterrestrial craft and beings and is hiding them from the public, partly to avoid causing panic. That view was celebrated last month on the 50th anniversary of an incident in Roswell, N.M., in which conspiracy theorists say a saucer crashed to Earth and was seized by the Government.

The deceptions about the spy flights were issued in some of the tensest days of the cold war. The Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1955, the year that the U-2 flew for the first time.

In 1960, a U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union, leading to the cancellation of an East-West peace conference. In 1962, a U-2 spotted a buildup of Soviet nuclear arms in Cuba, precipitating the diplomatic crisis regarded by some experts as the closest the superpowers came to nuclear war.

To make the spy planes harder to see and less likely to prompt U.F.O. reports, they were eventually painted black. The C.I.A. study said U-2's initially had silver bodies ''and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset.''

The report added that ''they often appeared as fiery objects to observers below.''

But the SR-71, which first flew in 1964, was apparently painted black from the start. Its nickname was the Blackbird.

I think its important to clarify the difference between accountability, and "conspiracy"... when I'm referring to how the secrecy, and behavior of various entities in the US goverment about UFO's has been the systematic failure that has caused the UFO hysteria of today.

For example, when I say "our goverment has lied about" that does not mean "conspiracy" it means individuals in an agency that is designed to have accountability are creating misinformation and the following accountability is not enough to stop the hysteria that follows.

If our agencies were more transparent, and people could have better access to, oh idk, 3 mysterious "balloons" the most powerful military in the world was afraid of and somehow cant figure out how to take a picture of, yet they can shoot missiles at it with 40 million dollar war planes... then people would be less hysterical about UFOs.. let alone the effect misinformation can have.

That is going to cause some hysteria, I am sorry. And we simply deserve better accountability, in my opinion. This is my opinion so you're free to disagree.

 

[tobigtofool]

There was 1 (one, singular) report of a "saucer" from an unidentified Army person right after debris had been found:

This was the smoking gun I was talking about: 60 years of coverup

https://apnews.com/article/c6249b0817b80e803c0e35f9d6228355

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Air Force today offered what it hopes is the final word on claims by UFO buffs that alien bodies were recovered at a crash site in New Mexico in 1947: The ``bodies’’ were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests.

There were witnesses that said they saw bodies, and all that the USAAF had to say about that was "it was a weather balloon".

But 60 years later they come out and go, ahhh you got us, it wasn't a weather balloon, and there were crash test dummies!

That's how the hysteria and distrust and conspiracy stuff starts.

 

[LilWabbit]

I think its important to clarify the difference between accountability, and "conspiracy"... when I'm referring to how the secrecy, and behavior of various entities in the US goverment about UFO's has been the systematic failure that has caused the UFO hysteria of today.

For example, when I say "our goverment has lied about" that does not mean "conspiracy" it means individuals in an agency that is designed to have accountability are creating misinformation and the following accountability is not enough to stop the hysteria that follows.

No UFO hysteria has followed as far as the majority of the population is concerned. So let's first get the facts straight. Hysteria only affects gullible people who are unnecessarily surprised by governments sometimes using deception to cover up secret capabilities they don't want their adversares to get wind of in the interest of national security.

It's true that we know from declassified CIA documents that many experimental USAF capabilities such as the SR-71 Blackbird were initially reported as UFOs when first spotted. The Pentagon had no qualms going along with that smokescreen.

It's certainly useful to maintain some ambiguity whilst Pentagon (or any other gov't agency) isn't by law allowed to blatantly deceive the public and if and when they've done so, they've acted against better moral judgment.

To repeat something I wrote on another thread, the varying combination of these following four psychological factors, imo, accounts for all claimed extraordinary UFO sightings far better than aliens or government misinformation campaigns:

(1) The power of human imagination together with the brain's visual perception functions, fuelled by cultural fiction and myth, in filling information gaps
(2) Strong personal motivation (one or a combination of a-c):
(a) Supernatural motive: Strongly wanting to believe in something extraordinary;
(b) Narcissistic motive: Wanting to claim privileged access to special knowledge that sets one apart from others;
(c) Social neediness or neediness for an identity whereby to feel good about oneself: Wanting to belong to a group that accept each other without judgment and who value each other's unusual experiences, thoughts and interests;
(3) Gullibility or superstition stemming from ignorance and/or a lack of critical/scientific thought
(4) Ego: Unwillingness to consider one might have been mistaken, misled, forgotten or even undergone a short-lived psychosis of some type and degree (suggestive, hallucinatory or otherwise)

I would say ufologists and skeptics variously share 1, 2a-c and 4. Some skeptics may even have 2a, whilst acknowledging having found no evidence for satisfying 2a.

But the main difference is usually with factor no. 3 -- at least with respect to UFOs.

 

[tobigtofool]

Also lets not forget this entire conversation is a result of 2+ generations of hysteria that began (coincidentally?) with the pentagons exploding military budget.

Im curious about the history of the UFO phenomenon in the united states. When is it generally accepted that it began?


ChatGPT:

The UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) phenomenon is generally accepted to have started in the United States in the mid-20th century. Here's a brief timeline:

1. 1947: Often considered the starting point of modern interest in UFOs, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects near Mount Rainier in Washington. His description of their motion as "like a saucer if you skip it across water" was misquoted in the press as "flying saucers," leading to the popular term.
2. Also in 1947, the infamous Roswell incident took place. A rancher discovered inexplicable debris in his sheep pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico. The U.S. military stated it was a crashed weather balloon, but some people suggested it was the remains of an extraterrestrial flying saucer.
3. 1952: The "Washington, D.C. UFO incident", also known as the "Washington flap," took place. This series of sightings in July 1952 became one of the most publicized events. Radar screens in the Washington area picked up several unidentified objects, and fighter planes reported strange lights in the sky.
4. 1950s-1960s: As Cold War anxieties increased, so did UFO sightings. The government's response was a series of investigations, such as Project Blue Book, launched by the U.S. Air Force in 1952 and lasting until 1969. The project's goal was to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data. By the time Project Blue Book ended, it had collected 12,618 UFO reports.
5. 1961: Barney and Betty Hill, a couple from New Hampshire, reported being abducted by aliens. Their detailed and sincere account sparked widespread public interest and remains one of the most famous alleged alien abduction stories.
6. 1990s-present: Sightings have continued into the 21st century. Notably, in the late 1990s, a flurry of sightings occurred near Phoenix, Arizona, known as the "Phoenix Lights."
7. 2004 & 2015: The U.S. Navy pilots encountered unidentified aerial phenomena that moved in ways they couldn't explain. These incidents, along with others, prompted the Department of Defense to launch the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was revealed to the public in 2017.
8. 2019: The Navy confirmed the authenticity of these previously leaked videos and incidents, which reignited public interest in UFOs.
9. 2020-2021: Government acknowledgment of these phenomena continued to increase. In 2020, the Department of Defense established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force to investigate sightings of unexplained aerial objects by military personnel. In 2021, a government report on UAPs acknowledged the existence of these phenomena but did not provide a definitive explanation.

The history of the UFO phenomenon in the United States is a mixture of genuine sightings, hoaxes, misinterpretations of natural phenomena, and misunderstandings of human-made objects. It's crucial to note that while the existence of UAPs is accepted, there's no scientific consensus that these phenomena represent extraterrestrial life or advanced technology from other civilizations.

Cool, when did the pentagon begin?

The Pentagon, which serves as the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, was built during World War II. The construction began on September 11, 1941, and it was completed on January 15, 1943. The rapid construction was a result of the urgent need for office space to manage the war effort.

It's one of the world's largest office buildings, with about 6.5 million square feet of space, of which about 3.7 million square feet are used for offices.

 

[beakflip]

If it's the last option, given how much is already known about what happened in Roswell, including from government sources like the report it released in the 90's, are there parts of the story that are still unknown because the government still doesn't allow that information to be disclosed? (

A reasonable idea is that they might have been spying on more than just Russian activities with those balloons and they don't want to spell out the names and specifics of what data they were gathering.

 

[Itsme]

This was the smoking gun I was talking about: 60 years of coverup

https://apnews.com/article/c6249b0817b80e803c0e35f9d6228355

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Air Force today offered what it hopes is the final word on claims by UFO buffs that alien bodies were recovered at a crash site in New Mexico in 1947: The ``bodies’’ were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests.

Content from External Source

There were witnesses that said they saw bodies, and all that the USAAF had to say about that was "it was a weather balloon".

But 60 years later they come out and go, ahhh you got us, it wasn't a weather balloon, and there were crash test dummies!

That's how the hysteria and distrust and conspiracy stuff starts.

Indeed, and what does not help is that according to that same government:

The very first crash test dummy was developed in 1949

Content from External Source

https://www.gao.gov/blog/vehicle-crash-tests-do-we-need-better-group-dummies
1949 was two years after Roswell.

And according to the source you gave:

The life-size dummies were used in high-altitude parachute drops from 1954 to 1959 as part of Air Force projects code-named High Dive and Excelsior. [...] The majority of them landed outside the confines of military bases in eastern New Mexico, near Roswell, according to the Air Force report.

Content from External Source

https://apnews.com/article/c6249b0817b80e803c0e35f9d6228355

And according to the government:

In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. [...] The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed.

Content from External Source

https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-187.pdf

This all strengthens the believe that something is being covered up.

 

[Eburacum]

The 'dummy' reports are supposed to have been retroactively associated with Roswell long after the 1950s. Remember that no-one in 1947 at Roswell reported any bodies, and Marcel certainly never mentioned them. All the data concerning Roswell resurfaced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and by that time it was inextricably mixed with reports of dummies in the desert, the hoaxed Aztec crash, and a dozen invented 'me too' stories. Not a government conspiracy, just a cock-up.

 

[Ann K]

If our agencies were more transparent, and people could have better access to, oh idk, 3 mysterious "balloons" the most powerful military in the world was afraid of and somehow cant figure out how to take a picture of, yet they can shoot missiles at it with 40 million dollar war planes... then people would be less hysterical about UFOs.. let alone the effect misinformation can have.

And yet, there are legitimate reasons why any military force would want to keep secrets, are there not? Your article, in spite of the clickbait title about the CIA lying to the public, explains this quite clearly:

In the darkest days of the cold war, the military lied to the American public about the true nature of many unidentified flying objects in an effort to hide its growing fleets of spy planes, a Central Intelligence Agency study says.

The deceptions were made in the 1950's and 1960's amid a wave of U.F.O. sightings that alarmed the public and parts of official Washington.
The C.I.A. study says the Air Force knew that most reports by citizens and aviation experts were based on fleeting glimpses of U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, which fly extremely high.

Those planes were developed in the 1950's and 60's to photograph enemy targets.
.......
'Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

Content from External Source

The transparency you demand would put Americans at risk by undermining the work of the military. It's a completely unreasonable demand that the country should suffer, perhaps disastrously, just to assuage the curiosity of you and others.

As for your claims of "hysteria" among the public, I haven't seen it. Curiosity, yes, but nothing approaching hysteria. Perhaps it exists only in echo-chamber chat rooms.

 

[Amathia]

Some of the most important evidence that UFOs are real, are well known military coverups, or ones that will be well known soon.

Roswell, pheonix lights, the recent palms UFO. That is enough to make a cult.

The fact that you include the twentynine palms UFO in this list is illustrative of the kind of error you're making.

From The Black Vault:

On May 23, 2023, investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released exclusive footage of a UFO, dubbed the “Mojave Triangle UAP”, hovering over the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms – Camp Wilson. The event, which took place on April 20, 2021, between 8:20pm to 9:30pm PST, is labeled by Corbell as a “mass UFO sighting” and said to have over fifty eyewitnesses. The object, captured on iPhones and infrared, is described as a silent triangular-shaped craft, estimated to be between half the size of a football field and a three-bedroom, two-story house.


Following the sighting, Corbell stated there was a “significant air and ground response,” which he further claimed was a search and reconnaissance effort related to the UAP event, lasting approximately three hours. Given the location of this sighting within the restricted airspace of an active United States military installation, it is believed by Corbell that a significant amount of data, including radar, thermal, electro-optical, and signature intelligence, were accumulated.


However, later the same morning that the footage appeared online, The Black Vault pointed out that on the date of the sighting, April 20, 2021, the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-21 was well underway at the same location. This course involved the deployment of numerous aircraft and ground troops during a seven-week total training exercise.

A military exercise being conducted in a government owned piece of land designated for precisely such exercises was picked up by the UFO community and hucksters like Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp and passed off as being a case of a massive ship being taken down by military forces, along with an entire search and reconnaissance effort. Folks like Mick West immediately debunked the video as being nothing more than just flares. Corbell never bothered to respond to the criticisms offered by both Mick and Greenwald regarding the video and his claims.

The pentagon spokesperson then released the following statement:

“I can confirm that there were military aviation assets in the Twentynine Palms, California, airspace and a Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course was being conducted at the time. There is no record of communication with the base range control concerning a UAP sighting, nor of the allocation of any base resources to investigate a UAP sighting. AARO does not have a record of this alleged event and cannot verify the authenticity of the report.”

— Susan Gough, Department of Defense spokesperson

So, you have a perfectly normal military training operation happening within military land that is then used by people like Corbell as an alleged example of a UAP craft being spotted and downed by the military. He ignores all the evidence to the contrary. The pentagon spokesperson publicly confirms that there was military aviation activity happening during the time of the sighting, which coincides with the timing of a known weapons and tactics instructor course, and also confirms that there is no record of any communication with the base about any alleged UAP sightings or any allocation of base resources to investigate any such sighting.

What on Earth about this case are you claiming is the fault of the government? If the government cannot even conduct a very basic military training operation without idiots like Corbell turning it into a UAP story, then that is Corbell's and the people who take him seriously's fault. This is a perfectly good example of a case where perfectly normal, every day activities get picked up and twisted to fit UFO mythology with absolutely no effort on the part of the government to encourage such ridiculous stories from propagating. They're in fact actively denying any such UAP activity took place, and yet here you are blaming them for the propagation of such myths, even though it is entirely clear that the myth is a result of terrible reasoning and ignoring of clear evidence by grifters like Corbell. It doesn't matter what the government does, these stories can and do take a life of their own without any intervention from any state agents. This story is a perfect example that contradicts the very claims you're trying to make.

 

[NorCal Dave]

This was the smoking gun I was talking about: 60 years of coverup

Not exactly 60 years, more like 24 hours, the story was corrected the next day. For whatever reason Walter Haut used the term "flying disk" on July 8th:

On Tuesday morning, July 8, Marcel took the debris to the 509th Commander, Colonel William Blanchard.[18] Blanchard reported the finding to General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Air Field (FWAAF), which resulted in orders to fly the material out to FWAAF that evening.[22] By the end of the day, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a "flying disc" near Roswell.[24]

Content from External Source

That was corrected the next day:

As soon as Marcel brought the material to General Ramey's office, both Ramey and his chief of staff Colonel Thomas Dubose identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon kite.[18]

On July 9, 1947, the US Army publicly identified the debris as an ordinary weather balloon. [5][6] As described in the July 9, 1947, edition of the Roswell Daily Record:

Content from External Source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

There were witnesses that said they saw bodies, and all that the USAAF had to say about that was "it was a weather balloon".

But 60 years later they come out and go, ahhh you got us, it wasn't a weather balloon, and there were crash test dummies!

That's how the hysteria and distrust and conspiracy stuff starts.

This is much more pertinent to the topic. I think in this case the government allowed the UFOlogist to set the argument and then tried to respond, which may be the same thing that is happening now.

Roswell was officially said to be a weather balloon, which was 1/2 true, it was a classified Mogal balloon. As for the bodies, the government should have said:

There are little to NO reliable stories concerning recovered bodies from the time of the incident in 1947. All the stories about bodies are form 25-40 year old memories and recollections, and often 2nd and 3rd hand accounts and here say.

Instead, the government tried to account for the body stories by introducing the crash test dummies, which does make sense. If these dummies where being used 5-10 years after the supposed crash, it's very likely that some people could have confabulated those 2 different things together 20+ years later.

It was a case of UFOlogist bringing weak evidence and then saying "prove there are no bodies". The government took the bait.

I think were seeing the same thing here with these hearings. Grusch and others say there are recovered craft and bodies, now prove them wrong.

 

[RTM]

So it’s like a case of prove there is no cover up, and when a cover up is denied it’s a case of “see, there is a cover up”.

 

[tobigtofool]

Not exactly 60 years, more like 24 hours, the story was corrected the next day. For whatever reason Walter Haut used the term "flying disk" on July 8th:

You must have missed the link or quoted content, the AP article (and quoted content from it) was about revealing that crash test dummies were indeed used and it was NOT a weather balloon 60 years later.

The exact example you use as "the truth" was an admitted lie, it was not a weather balloon, it was a spy balloon.

So it’s like a case of prove there is no cover up, and when a cover up is denied it’s a case of “see, there is a cover up”.

Instead, the government tried to account for the body stories by introducing the crash test dummies, which does make sense. If these dummies where being used 5-10 years after the supposed crash, it's very likely that some people could have confabulated those 2 different things together 20+ years later.

There's one right there.

Do you think misinformation and its effects are not real?

 

[deirdre]

If you have access to this article please share the relevant points.

not always but sometimes things are available on wayback machine or even archive.is

https://web.archive.org/web/2023060...mits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

 

[tobigtofool]

not always but sometimes things are available on wayback machine or even archive.is

https://web.archive.org/web/2023060...mits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

I quoted the entire article....

 

[deirdre]

and say there was a coverup

not a coverup of aliens.

 

[deirdre]

I quoted the entire article....

im telling him for future use. (not that you shouldnt have quoted the article in the first place, because you should have)

 

[tobigtofool]

not a coverup of aliens.

The entire content and thesis of my post is that by covering up military testing, with omissions, lies and misinformation, that the US military industrial complex is the systematic failure that has resulted in the UFO hysteria of today, cults, suicides, and a lot more.

 

[deirdre]

If the government cannot even conduct a very basic military training operation without idiots like Corbell turning it into a UAP story, then that is Corbell's and the people who take him seriously's fault. This is a perfectly good example of a case where perfectly normal, every day activities get picked up and twisted to fit UFO mythology with absolutely no effort on the part of the government to encourage such ridiculous stories from propagating. They're in fact actively denying any such UAP activity took place,

they do that with their alleged false flag myths too (like Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing etc), if there is any military training within 200 miles they use that as some kind of proof. annoying.

 

[deirdre]

The entire content and thesis of my post is that by covering up military testing, with omissions, lies and misinformation, that the US military industrial complex is the systematic failure that has resulted in the UFO hysteria of today, cults, suicides, and a lot more.

um.. all militaries world wide do that. no need to pick the US separately as if they are doing something odd. Not telling your enemies about your new capabilities is just common sense, no need for hysteria in this day and age.

 

[Eburacum]

Thanks to @tobigtofool for quoting the article and @deirdre for finding the original on the Wayback Machine.
One statement in that article is particularly nonsensical, and is probably due to a misunderstanding by the writer, William J. Broad.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says.

That is almost certainly not the case; most UFO reports in that era, as now, were the result of misidentifications of stars, planets, atmospheric phenomena, reflections inside buildings, stray balloons, birds, misidentified civilian aircraft and military aircraft that were not reconnaissance flights, rocket launches and fuel dumps. Whoever made that claim has either greatly exaggerated the role of reconnaissance aircraft in the UFO phenomenon, or cherry-picked a few cases to be representative of the whole.

I also doubt very much that there was any concerted effort to propagate the UFO myth to cover up these flights - most reconnaissance flights would surely have occurred over foreign territories, with few US citizens around to see them.

 

[tobigtofool]

um.. all militaries world wide do that. no need to pick the US separately as if they are doing something odd. Not telling your enemies about your new capabilities is just common sense, no need for hysteria in this day and age.

I said if you have a different opinion that secret military operations and missinformation from them is fine, but that doesn't make anything I said wrong. Just because Russia does something, doesn't mean we should do it too.

I also doubt very much that there was any concerted effort to propagate the UFO myth to cover up these flights - most reconnaissance flights would surely have occurred over foreign territories, with few US citizens around to see them.

This one I actually worry about more than how it has affected us. If they will misinform Americans about what they saw, I cant imagine the psychological distress they cause people in countries the military doesn't care about.

I imagine if I was living in a 3rd world country and I saw a UFO off the ocean all I could think was, "there goes those Americans again" But in a lot of cases you end up with mass delusions and whatever negative effects those might cause.

It's reckless, and sad, on a global level IMO let alone a country that prides itself on not being misinformed.

That is almost certainly not the case; most UFO reports in that era, as now, were the result of misidentifications of stars, planets, atmospheric phenomena, reflections inside buildings, stray balloons, birds, misidentified civilian aircraft and military aircraft that were not reconnaissance flights, rocket launches and fuel dumps. Whoever made that claim has either greatly exaggerated the role of reconnaissance aircraft in the UFO phenomenon, or cherry-picked a few cases to be representative of the whole.

Well, during the cold war, the manned flights and test aircraft were a lot more frequent.. so it's not unbelievable to say that. Also if you're going to say the article is cherry picked by saying a rocket launch is not a manned test flight, then you're splitting hairs.

I would wager that there were far more sightings of tests flights than misidentifications of stars and planets or atmosphere phenomena between 1950-1960 - the heat of the cold war. Just watch Strategic Air command to get an idea of how outrageous the airforce was back then.

 

[beakflip]

The entire content and thesis of my post is that by covering up military testing, with omissions, lies and misinformation, that the US military industrial complex is the systematic failure that has resulted in the UFO hysteria of today, cults, suicides, and a lot more.

Take away all the mistique, and almost everyone who is convinced that aliens are visiting Earth will still believe that aliens are visiting Earth. It was pointed out throughout the thread that the UFO phenomenon wasn't born of the incidents that it stands atop, but by creative writing about them, decades after they happened. You can't just reduce the UFO lore to government misdeeds.

 

[Eburacum]

The article specifically said manned reconnaissance flights, not test flights, were responsible for half of all UFOs in the late 50's and 60s. This is an absurd exaggeration.

 

[tobigtofool]

The article specifically said manned reconnaissance flights, not test flights, were responsible for half of all UFOs in the late 50's and 60s. This is an absurd exaggeration.

If you truely believe that you are only strengthening my argument that misdirection from the goverment causes conflicts among Americans, as you are saying that the CIA has released misinformation:

CIA: Most UFO sightings in 50s, 60s were of spy planes​

A recently declassified CIA report on the development of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes said the high-flying jets were mistaken for UFOs more than half the time in the late 1950s and 1960s during Project Blue Book, a Wright-Patterson Air Force Base operation that investigated reports of UFOs.

https://www.daytondailynews.com/new...s-60s-were-spy-planes/BYl69uDgoRQ65QdNPBzqgM/

Take away all the mistique, and almost everyone who is convinced that aliens are visiting Earth will still believe that aliens are visiting Earth. It was pointed out throughout the thread that the UFO phenomenon wasn't born of the incidents that it stands atop, but by creative writing about them, decades after they happened. You can't just reduce the UFO lore to government misdeeds.

Roswell is one of the most famous, and influential UFO moments in modern history history, and turned out to be misdirection from the cold war.

The absence of dialogue, creates violence.

 

[Eburacum]

The actual study was by Gerald Haines, and can be found here.
https://sgp.fas.org/library/ciaufo.html#rft45
Haines does indeed say:

According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45) This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s. The percentage of what the Air Force considered unexplained UFO sightings fell to 5.9 percent in 1955 and to 4 percent in 1956

Note that he attributes this in the footnotes in the following fashion;

See Pedlow and Welzenbach, Overhead Reconnaissance, pp. 72-73. This also was confirmed in a telephone interview between the author and John Parongosky, 26 July 1994. Parongosky oversaw the day-to-day affairs of the OXCART program.

Gerald Haines either misunderstood the statements by Pedlow, Welzenbach and/or Parongosky, or those august gentlemen were mistaken. The statement that half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s cannot be sensibly reconciled with the statement that only 4% of all cases were unidentified in 1956.

Someone along the line seems to have misunderstood the data; I'm guessing it is Haines.

 

[tobigtofool]

This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s.

Oh look at the text in your link here!

This is the entire thesis to my argument.

You and me, are having an argument about UFO sightings from 70 years ago, that were the result of misinformation and misdirection.

The behavior by the military has had a net negative effect on the people and our ability to trust each other, the news, or anything else.

Again, you can have the stance that the lies and misinformation are valuable, but you can't have the stance that it has negative effects and doesn't/isn't happening.

 

[LilWabbit]

Oh look what we have here.

This is the entire thesis to my argument.

You and me, are having an argument about UFO sightings from 70 years ago, that were the result of misinformation and misdirection.

The behavior by the military has had a net negative effect on the people and our ability to trust each other, the news, or anything else.

Again, you can have the stance that the lies and misinformation are valuable, but you can't have the stance that it has negative effects and doesn't/isn't happening.

Have you been fired from a government job at any point in time? The USG is by no means perfect but your anti-establishment venom is something else.

 

[tobigtofool]

Have you been fired from a government job at any point in time?

No. You?