Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the UFO movement repeatedly charged that the U.S. Air Force was hiding secret files and documents that proved that UFOs were “real,” that is, extraterrestrial. Later, the CIA became the alleged repository for the secret files. The most far-fetched claim is that the air force has an entire crashed flying saucer, complete with frozen (or embalmed) remains of the occupants, hidden at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Just how the UFOlogists managed to discover this secret, in spite of the MIBs and government secrecy, and why the government permits them to “blow the cover” on the most sensational secret of the century is never made clear.

In 1977 Ground Saucer Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the CIA in an attempt to force the agency to reveal all its secret UFO files. This resulted in the release of nearly one thousand pages of materials from CIA files related to UFOs. The genesis of CIA interest in the UFO issue in the 1950s, as Klass (1983, chap. 2), points out, was the fear that Russia, “with its growing fleet of long-range bombers and its newly acquired atomic bomb, could conceivably exploit UFO-mania within the U.S. to stage a surprise attack.” Not a very realistic fear, perhaps, but it certainly indicates that the CIA never took seriously the idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial.

Klass (1983) obtained copies of all the released documents. The 997 pages of documents covered a thirty-year period, from 1949 to 1979. This works out to about three pages of material per month on the topic accumulated by the CIA. Of the total material, Klass reports that about 350 pages had been classified. This means that the CIA generated “an average of only one page of classified UFO-related material per month” (p. 14). If the CIA were really involved in some sort of massive cover-up, the amount of material generated would be much greater.

The actual contents of the released documents further destroy any claims of a government cover-up. The documents included letters to and from the CIA regarding UFOs, among them letters from people inquiring about the CIA’s role in the UFO cover-up and the replies. Also included were miscellaneous newspaper clippings relating to UFOs, a Russian bibliography on parapsychology, and interoffice memos on the topic.

More revealing were several secret briefings for high-level CIA officials on the topic of UFOs. One such briefing took place in August 1952 and covered several theories about the nature of UFOs. The following quotation is relevant:

The third theory is the man from Mars—space ships—interplanetary travellers. Even though we might admit that intelligent life may exist elsewhere and that space travel is possible, there is no shred of evidence to support this theory at present….

The fourth theory is that now held by the Air Force, that the sightings, given adequate data, can be explained either on the basis of misinterpretation of known objects, or of as yet little understood natural phenomena.

Remember that this was a secret briefing for high-level CIA officials. As Klass puts it, it is “inconceivable” that the air force could have knowledge of a crashed flying saucer and still convince the CIA that it believed sightings were the result of misidentifications and such. Another declassified secret briefing paper from August 1952 states that “no debris or material evidence has ever been recovered” from a UFO sighting (Klass 1997, p. 205). Obviously such statements would not have been made in 1952 if real flying saucers had been recovered at Roswell in 1947.

It is true that certain items were censored by the CIA before the documents were released. But this is hardly evidence for a cover-up; what was censored were the names of individuals making UFO reports and individual employees in the government whose names appeared on the released documents. The censoring conformed with Privacy Act requirements to protect the privacy of individuals who had communicated with the CIA on the topic.

An examination of the secret CIA papers and documents on UFOs reveals an agency mildly interested in the phenomenon but skeptical of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. These documents also clearly contradict the silly claims that the air force (or the CIA, the National Security Agency, or the Boy Scouts) have a flying saucer hidden somewhere. They also contradict the off-repeated claims of a government cover-up of the “truth” about UFOs.

Roswell! No other UFO incident in history has so entered the public mind as what allegedly happened near the little town of Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. It was there, according to the standard version of the legend, that one or more flying saucers crashed in the desert. The military recovered not only the debris of the craft, but the bodies of the alien occupants. The local military initially is said to have at first admitted the recovery of the flying saucers, but higher authorities quickly clamped down tight security. The debris and remains were taken to a secret laboratory somewhere (often said to be at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, known as Wright Army Air Field at the time) for analysis. From that day to this, the government has denied that the incident ever happened and is hiding the truth from the American people. In fact, there is not just one “standard” Roswell story. Saler, Ziegler, and Moore (1997) have identified six different versions of the story. The Roswell incident has generated a huge amount of published literature in the form of articles and books, to say nothing of at least two movies that I know of ( Hangar 18 from 1980 and the 1994 TV movie Roswell ) and one television series (NBC’s Roswell , which premiered in 2000). Interestingly, the wide interest in the Roswell incident is a fairly recent development, dating from the last decade.

The Roswell incident took place just a few weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s first modern report of “flying saucers” hit the news. As Peebles (1994) has noted, “The flying saucer myth was defined against a background of conspiracy, fear and espionage” and this is certainly true of Roswell as well (p. 46). At the time, in 1947, World War II was just two years past and the Cold War was starting. It was becoming clear that the Soviet Union, our WWII ally, was now our chief antagonist on the world stage. In fact, the real cause of the events at Roswell was a highly secret government project aimed at keeping an eye (an “ear” would be more accurate) on weapons development in the Soviet Union.

Roswell turns out to be a most spectacular case of initial mistaken identity, followed years later by an explosion of media hype. Saler, Ziegler and Moore (1997) have provided the most detailed analysis of what actually happened near Roswell in that summer of 1947. By 1946 the United States government had come to recognize the Soviet Union as a possible military threat. At that time, the United States was the only nation with nuclear weapons, but the Soviets were certainly making every attempt to achieve their own nuclear capacity. The U.S. military put several measures in place to keep tabs on Soviet nuclear-testing programs. One of these, known as Project Mogul, was the development of highly sensitive devices that, when sent into the upper atmosphere, would hopefully be able to detect Soviet nuclear weapons tests. Project Mogul was highly secret. The United States did not want the Soviets to have any idea that it might have the ability to detect such tests. But how to get these instruments so high in the air and keep them there? The answer was obvious—balloons. But then-existing balloons wouldn’t do, because they wouldn’t keep the instruments at the fairly stable high altitude needed for accurate monitoring. So the military funded development of balloons that could. The efforts to develop the balloons themselves was not secret, as they would have many scientific as well as intelligence uses.