CIA Papers On UFO Fears Released?

[Michael L.]

Anyone know any more about this? Are these papers on Black Vault?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/general/alien-life/2007/11/02/1193619113758.html

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Nice find, thanks for posting. I'm curious what Roswell files have been found, which were mentioned at the end. If anyone finds out, please share. Thanks.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Nice find, thanks for posting. I'm curious what Roswell files have been found, which were mentioned at the end. If anyone finds out, please share. Thanks.

At the very least, I can see where all those alien invasion movies in the 1950s also contributed to possible fears on the subject. And the memories of the infamous Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio show must have been fresh in their bureaucratic minds.

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Nice find, thanks for posting. I'm curious what Roswell files have been found, which were mentioned at the end. If anyone finds out, please share. Thanks.

At the very least, I can see where all those alien invasion movies in the 1950s also contributed to possible fears on the subject. And the memories of the infamous Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio show must have been fresh in their bureaucratic minds.

It's always hard to know which came first. Fear, or the movie. Often movies are a reflection on the collective mindset. It's as Bill Hicks says, "which came first, the boner or the Madonna video?" Due to boners, we have Madonna videos? Or due to Madonna we have boners? Both I think.

Orson Wells really screwed us I think.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Nice find, thanks for posting. I'm curious what Roswell files have been found, which were mentioned at the end. If anyone finds out, please share. Thanks.

At the very least, I can see where all those alien invasion movies in the 1950s also contributed to possible fears on the subject. And the memories of the infamous Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio show must have been fresh in their bureaucratic minds.

It's always hard to know which came first. Fear, or the movie. Often movies are a reflection on the collective mindset. It's as Bill Hicks says, "which came first, the boner or the Madonna video?" Due to boners, we have Madonna videos? Or due to Madonna we have boners? Both I think.

Orson Wells really screwed us I think.

Isn't she getting a little long in the tooth, though?

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Nice find, thanks for posting. I'm curious what Roswell files have been found, which were mentioned at the end. If anyone finds out, please share. Thanks.

At the very least, I can see where all those alien invasion movies in the 1950s also contributed to possible fears on the subject. And the memories of the infamous Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio show must have been fresh in their bureaucratic minds.

It's always hard to know which came first. Fear, or the movie. Often movies are a reflection on the collective mindset. It's as Bill Hicks says, "which came first, the boner or the Madonna video?" Due to boners, we have Madonna videos? Or due to Madonna we have boners? Both I think.

Orson Wells really screwed us I think.

Isn't she getting a little long in the tooth, though?

Yeh, I almost mentioned that. Bill's been dead for awhile, no newer quotes.

 

[CapnG]

Yeh, I almost mentioned that. Bill's been dead for awhile, no newer quotes.

Hold a seance!

You could have always substituted Madonna for a starlet du jour...

 

[Aaron LeClair]

Yeh, I almost mentioned that. Bill's been dead for awhile, no newer quotes.

Hold a seance!

You could have always substituted Madonna for a starlet du jour...

No body to do it with. Everyone is scared

Blame Bill for the Madonna reference

 

[Michael L.]

Any Aussies out there that can fill us in on the Sunday print article?

 

[DanielBrenton]

Any Aussies out there that can fill us in on the Sunday print article?

Aussie, no. I live in the suburbs of Area 51.

(Damned flying saucers.)

The article is here, called "Plan 9 From Outer Space." It opens with some of the same copy Michael L. pointed us to. Lesley, of The Debris Field, posted it about 18 hours ago, but I didn't put them together.

 

[Michael L.]

I just found it as well and was about to post it but you beat me to it.

This ONE group seems fairly interesting. Makes me wonder what is in the NSA, FBI and Air Force have laying around... but I reckon we have been wondering that for a while now.

 

[DanielBrenton]

This ONE group seems fairly interesting. Makes me wonder what is in the NSA, FBI and Air Force have laying around... but I reckon we have been wondering that for a while now.

Yeah -- I liked this comment:

ONE is as close as we get to a documented version of the rumoured Majestic-12 group.

Obviously this guy keeps up on the ... should we call it "folklore?"

Maybe the Black Vault has some of this stuff. Probably does. Sounds like a lot of work to go through it.

 

[Michael L.]

I poked around a bit last night... ONE is not the best term to search for, I can assure you!

 

[Gil Bavel]

This seems to tread somewhat on the area of whether the government is justified in UFO secrecy or not. I should point out that the Brookings Report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report, allegedly based on Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast doesn't work as a very good model. Most of the people that listened to that Oct. 31 1938 broadcast had listened to a music act at the top of the hour, and then switched over to listen to the Mercury theater. So, they missed the intro saying that it was fictional.
When you add on top of that that they couched the entire broadcast in panic and news reports by broadcasters reporting horrible destruction by Martians, it's not a good model to use for justification of secrecy. Of course people are going to freak if you present information that way.

Even if the news is disturbing, which it may well be, our government is ruled by, of and for the people. The information belongs to us and we deserve to know the truth.

No longer does the national security blanket excuse hold. If UFOs are no threat to national security, as the Air Force has claimed, then there is no reason to withhold the truth from the American people. If UFOs are in our airspace, and there's nothing we can do about it, hiding the larger truth will only hurt us when the smaller truths come out here and there in local incidents that get out.
If UFOs have unrestricted free reign in our skies, and not only can they outrun scrambled state of the art aircraft, but radar operators actually do as they're told and screen out the "fastwalkers", then we should have access to all the data they've collected.

It's time for the government to stop treating us like children. Our government is out of control and needs to be reigned in, and not just on this issue. Their bloated, pork-ridden black ops projects take such a large majority of funding not under congressional oversight that it eclipses the war in Iraq in deficit spending.

Either it's the story of the millennium or it isn't. I believe we should all call for new, independent investigations, not by the military, not by congress, and not by Colorado University. It's time for an independent, transparent investigation by a panel appointed by we, the people.

 

[Michael L.]

As a sidenote, you will find the original Mercury Theater broadcast here along with a recording of HG Wells meeting Orson Welles.

Many of the stories about the panic surrounding the broadcast are apocryphal. There was a great deal of glee in reporting about the rubes that fell for it the evening before. After all, by checking any other radio station you would find an appalling lack of attention being paid to the alien invasion.

As far as modern day UFO secrecy, why is it always supposed that there is no newer source of information about public reaction than the Brookings Report? For Pete' sake people, if the government is capable of developing stealth technology in secrecy, much less if they can recover crashed UFOs and truckloads of dead aliens without it becoming the lead story on CNN, don't you think they could pull off a simple research project without anyone knowing? There have probably been a dozen studies since the Brookings Report with more reasons not to disclose what is known.

 

[Gil Bavel]

Some of the stories of the panic after the broadcast may be apocryphal, but I've seen the footage of Welles the next morning nearly losing his job (and some were worried for his life) after the blowback from the broadcast, apologizing profusely and saying they had no idea that people would actually commit suicide over their little Halloween joke.

Angry mobs of people surrounded the studio and Welles had to be taken out the back door after the press conference.

In any case, it's idiotic for the Brookings Report to reference this as the only example of our society's response to a possible revelation of alien intelligence on our planet. It takes it completely out of context, and is a classic example of the government deciding the answer first and fitting the facts to suit their wants afterward.

And, yes, there have in fact been more studies, some quite recent, to find in favor of secrecy. It doesn't change the fact that the government thinks (and quite rightly) that it's in their own best interest to keep the truth to themselves--rather than the public's.

As long as they conceal information (and technology?) from us, then they can control us. I remember back in the 70's the line was that they had technology 30 years in advance of the state of the art. This was so the R&D companies could sell the government what they had already spent money on, and make more money than if they let them in on what they had in the pipeline.

Think of how far ahead they are now? What kind of tech do they have that we don't know about, and we don't get to use? How long did they have CD-R technology and we were stuck with cassette tapes? Probably fifteen years.

Some claim that many UFOs are "stealth blimps" and that the huge, flat, black craft seen that take up most of the sky (e.g. the Phoenix Lights craft*) are secret government projects. If so, it's proof that they are more like fifty to a hundred years ahead of the rest of us.

Now--if UFOs are ET spacecraft, and I believe that _some_ of them are--how far advanced are they as compared to the government's state of the art?
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*When one witness was answered that he probably saw a B-52, he said, "The craft that I saw, you could have landed all 40 of our B-52's on one wing".

 

[Michael L.]

That's a bit paranoid, don't you think? Did the government have CD technology while you were rocking cassette tapes? I dunno, maybe but you could have had laserdisks and probably chose not to. After all, the lasers made them extremely expensive. Once the price of the components came down you saw it in the consumer market. And is the government ahead of me in military technology? Hell, yeah they are. I don't have a F-18 much less a stealth bomber or a stealth blimp. Of course, I don't need one either (according to my wife).

I still don't think that recovering a crashed UFO is necessarily going to lead to huge jumps in technology. Give the 18th century genius of your choice an iMac and see if they can get it to work (they won't even be able to plug it in, mind you, so they will have to work out powering it without destroying it). Now give it to them but make sure that the printing is entirely in demotic so they have that little translation issue to deal with as well. This technological headstart probably isn't going to end up with computer guided missiles being used in the US Civil War. We would face similar issues with a nice alien piece of technology.

Besides, I don't know that there aren't perfectly good reasons to keep the UFO presence quiet. I can certainly imagine some. What if some of those reports seem to prove that knowledge of space-faring civilizations visiting Earth would lead to a stagnation in the development of technology because society as a whole instead turns its focus to trying to get alien tech instead of developing our own? Then what do you do? Start a massive project to develop a cultural attitude that would lead to a different, more favorable result perhaps? Hard to say.

I have walked the streets of Communist China. I have been warned away from entering Internet cafes because of the police raids. I have had a company official give me a list of the types of sites I could not access on the building's Wi-Fi because they did not want to have to answer for my actions. I have watched TV programs showing how incredibly skilled Chinese Army special forces are on prime time. I've even had my bags searched while SKS rifles were held at the ready. America doesn't seem nearly as restrictive to me as it once did!

 

[Michael L.]

PS- There was one documented attempted suicide during the '38 broadcast. Doctors saved her. You have to remember that newspapers saw the radio as a great threat to them and used the opportunity of a fake news broadcast to skewer the upstart industry!

 

[Gil Bavel]

I'm happy to be called a paranoid. Comes with the territory. But, let's take a skeptical look. CD-R technology was on the "grey market" for years before it became widely available in the U.S*. I remember working at Radio Shack in '93 and being really pissed off that they _still_ weren't letting us record on CDs. The record company lobby thought that it would be the end of everything, even as they did when cassettes came out. They lobbied against it strongly, creating a grey market for those that could afford the technology. Every time a recordable technology comes out, after things level off, it ends up being good for their business.

It may not be as flashy as being able to go to Internet cafes in China, but I was also the manager of 3 different used record stores in between the period when CDs came out and when CD-R technology arrived, and then later worked for a Chinese multimedia manufacturer in Silicon Valley and had to learn all the ins and out (pun intended) to write the copy for their web pages. The history of recordable and rewritable media is clear--it's available to those that want it and can afford it long before the rest of us get it, if they know where to look.

But I wasn't speaking of the government or the military when I mentioned CD-Rs, just bringing up the principle. The government may have had CD-R technology before we did, I have no idea.

Laserdiscs are a good example. Yes, I did have a laserdisc player, right up until last year, actually, when I gave it away.

I'll leave the American government seeming less restrictive comment alone for now... suspension of habeas corpus and elimination of posse comitatus probably belong in a different post.

I guess we're getting pretty far afield from the thread topic here... but I thought it was a good post.

Uh... let's see, I have to come up with something paranormal to stay in the thread... Ghosts are spooky!
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http://technology.findlaw.com/articles/01133/010460.html

 

[Michael L.]

There is actually a big difference between cassettes and CDs and their threat to producers, but that really is a discussion for another time.

Look, all I am saying is that there could be a myriad of reasons that disclosure is a bad idea and they are not all necessarily nefarious. If you do not take a second to consider all of the possibilities you are not giving the situation an honest assessment.