Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

General Nathan Twining, chief of staff of the U. S. Army and commanding general of the Army Air Force, wrote on September 23, 1947 about the flying disks reported in various parts of the country: “1. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

2. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft. 3. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena such as meteors. 4. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely” (Condon 1969, p. 894).

To carry out Twining’s directives for a study group, the Air Force organized Project Sign, which continued until February 1949. The research work, which took the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs as a serious possibility, was carried out by the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Thereafter, work by the ATIC continued under the name Project Grudge. But there was a change in attitude toward the phenomenon. J. Allen Hynek, who worked on the project said, “The change to Project Grudge signaled the adoption of the strict brush-off attitude to the UFO problem. Now the public relations statements on specific UFO cases bore little resemblance to the facts of the case. If a case contained some of the elements possibly attributable to aircraft, a balloon, etc., it automatically became that object in the press release” (Hynek 1972a, p. 174). Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, a project officer, said, “This drastic change in official attitude is as difficult to explain as it was difficult for many people who knew what was going on inside Project Sign to believe” (Hynek 1972a, p. 175). The final report of Project Grudge, released in August 1949, said there was no evidence of any high tech devices, and explained away UFO reports as mistakes, illusions, or fabrications. Project Grudge was formally dissolved in December 1949.

General C. B. Cabell, director of Air Force intelligence, reactivated Project Grudge in 1951, putting Captain Ruppelt in charge. Ruppelt was fairly open minded, but even he had his limits. Although he was ready to take unidentified flying objects a little seriously, he had problems with reports of UFOs that landed. And there were quite a number of such accounts. Ruppelt later wrote that he and his team systematically eliminated such accounts from their reporting system (Vallee 1969b, p. 28).

The CIA was also interested in UFOs. On September 24, 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s assistant director for scientific intelligence, wrote a memo to CIA director Walter Smith about UFO publicity and the high rate of reports of UFO activity coming into the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His main concern was public opinion: “The public concern with the phenomenon, which is reflected both in the United States press and in the pressure of inquiry upon the Air Force, indicates that a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible. In this fact lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic” (Thompson 1993, p. 81). Chadwell feared that false reports of UFOs could distract the military from real observations of attacking Soviet bombers. He also feared that the mentality of the American public could be used by the enemies attempting to engage in psychological warfare against the United States.

In 1953, the CIA formed a panel to study the UFO phenomenon.

It came to be known as the Robertson panel, after Dr. H. P. Robertson, director of the weapons systems evaluation group for the Secretary of Defense. The Robertson panel included several prominent physicists. They decided that UFOs were not any real threat to national security, i.e. they were not machines from foreign powers or outer space. But they did say “that the continuous emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does . . . result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic” (Condon 1969, p. 519). The panel recommended that “the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired” (Condon

1969, pp. 519–520). The panel recommended a systematic program of debunking. “The ‘debunking’ aim would result in reduction in public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction” (Condon 1969, pp. 915–916).

In 1953, in a development perhaps related to the Robertson panel’s conclusions, the U.S. Air Force enacted Air Force Regulation 200-2, restricting public reporting of military UFO sightings. “In response to local inquiries resulting from any UFO reported in the vicinity of an Air Force base, information may be released to the press or the general public by the commander of the Air Force base concerned only if it has been positively identified as a familiar or known object” (Thompson 1993, pp.

83–84). In other words, anything that could not be identified as a weather balloon, ordinary airplane, planet, or meteor would not be announced. The effect of this policy is that if there are observations of extraterrestrial UFOs, there will be no public reports about them coming from official military and governmental sources.

Air Force UFO reports did, however, continue to be collected by Project Grudge. In 1959, the name of the Air Force UFO research program was changed to Project Blue Book. In 1964, the nongovernmental National Investigating Committee on Aerial Phenomena published a report called the uFo evidence, which contained 92 UFO sightings by aircraft crews of the United States military. The sightings took place in the period 1944–1961. Of these cases, 44 involved U.S. planes being chased or buzzed by UFOs, U.S. aircraft chasing UFOs, or UFOs flying low over U.S. military bases (Hall 1964, pp. 19–22). In 1969, the Air Force stopped its official Project Blue Book UFO investigations. A summary and evaluation of the entire effort appeared in the Condon Report, which was released in that same year.

Although the Condon Report contained many detailed accounts of unexplained sightings, the report’s conclusion said “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge” and “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby” (Condon 1969, p. 1). In answer to the question what should be done with UFO reports that come to the government and military from the public, the report advised “nothing should be done with them in the expectation that they are going to contribute to the advance of science” (Condon 1969, p.

4). And finally, the authors said: “We strongly recommend that teachers refrain from giving students credit for school work based on their reading of the presently available UFO books and magazine articles. Teachers who find their students strongly motivated in this direction should attempt to channel their interests in the direction of serious study of astronomy and meteorology, and in the direction of critical analysis of fantastic propositions that are being supported by appeals to fallacious reasoning or false data” (Condon 1969, pp. 5–6).

Since this time, the official policy of the U.S. government and military has been to keep silent about the UFO phenomenon. Nevertheless, high government officials have reported UFO experiences and have sought to get government agencies to release information on UFOs. President Ronald Reagan, while governor of California, reported sighting a UFO while flying in a plane over southern California. In 1972, shortly after the incident, Reagan told Norman Miller, Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal : “We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens” (Burt 2000, p.