- George W. Bush raised a few eyebrows during the 2000
presidential campaign when he responded to a question about releasing government
files on unidentified flying objects. "It'll be the first thing he
(Dick Cheney) will do," Bush said. "He'll get right on it."
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- Immediately upon assuming office, however, the Bush administration
exhibited an impulse for even tighter controls on government information,
long before the 9/11 security clampdown. From Bush's immediate suspension
of the 1978 Presidential Records Act to Cheney's refusal to comply with
a General Accounting Office request for the names of the Vice President's
Energy Task Force members, patterns of concealment are consistent. Just
last month, Bush signed Executive Order 12958, which gave the director
of the Office of Science and Technology Policy the unprecedented authority
to declare information "Top Secret."
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- "They didn't explain a rationale for it," says
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government
secrecy project in Washington, D.C. "The only way to know for sure
how significant it is, is to come back a year from now and see how many
times it's been exercised."
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- UFO declassification proponents thought they were building
momentum for congressional hearings with a forum of witnesses in May 2001
announcing their willingness to testify. Then, the roof fell in. "The
Saudi Arabian flying circus came to town, and the U.S. declared an open-ended
war against this term, this noun, called terror," recalls lobbyist
Stephen Bassett. "All the attention and all the headlines got sucked
up by 9/11, and all the political work went into suspended animation."
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- But UFO reports never stopped. Nor did calls for government
accountability. Friday, one of the leading advocates -- Stanton Friedman
-- will discuss what he calls the "Cosmic Watergate" at Brevard
Community College's Titusville campus.
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- Author of "Crash at Corona" and "Top Secret/Majic,"
Friedman was among the first to revisit the 1947 Roswell Incident, in which
military authorities initially announced the recovery of a flying saucer,
only to reverse themselves amid the ensuing media clamor. But from his
home in New Brunswick, Canada, the American-born researcher blames contemporary
media passivity for enabling a cover-up.
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- "The only way we'll make any progress with this
issue is when the press gets off its duff and takes a serious look at all
the documents that have been in the public domain for years," says
Friedman. His background in nuclear physics landed him 14 years' worth
of work on nuclear rockets, much of it classified. "I'd like to see
them spend just 10 percent of the energy they invested in covering Gary
Condit, Elian Gonzales and Monica Lewinsky."
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- Friedman contends government documents already in the
public domain are loaded with smoking guns, not the least of which is the
famous Bolender Memo. In 1969, just as the Air Force was terminating its
public investigation of UFOs called Project Blue Book based on their negligible
impact on national security, Brig. Gen. C.H. Bolender, deputy director
of development for the USAF chief of staff, illuminated a backdoor policy:
"Reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national
security. . . . are not part of the Blue Book system."
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- "The media needs a commitment to the truth and to
ignore the crap," says Friedman. "There was a conference in Chicago
in 1997, on the 50th anniversary of Roswell, and one guy shows up wearing
alien antennae on his head. CBS was covering the event and -- wouldn't
you know it? -- the guy with the headgear is the one who makes the news
that night. This is typical."
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- Next April, during the presidential primary campaigns,
Friedman and a host of investigators will join Bassett, founder of X-PPAC,
the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, in Washington
for yet another effort to forge UFOs into political dialogue. Bassett was
on hand in 2001 when an initiative called the Disclosure Project pressed
for immunity for whistleblowers whose testimony would violate their security
oaths.
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- Among the most impressive insiders assembled by the Disclosure
Project was a retired USAF captain who -- supported by Strategic Air Command
documents -- was in a Wyoming ICBM silo in 1967 when a UFO drained the
power from launch complexes housing 10 nuclear-tipped warheads. Another
was a Federal Aviation Administration accidents division chief who, despite
being told by a CIA agent to keep a lid on it, presented a box full of
records concerning a harrowing, 30-minute encounter involving a UFO and
a Japanese airliner off Alaska in 1986.
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- Although the Bush presidency apparently has no intention
of addressing UFOs, its attitude is part of a bipartisan continuum by chief
executives to avoid the issue. Jimmy Carter, for instance, filed a report
of his own UFO sighting with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena and promised an open investigation during his 1976 campaign.
But as president, Carter never followed through. Bill Clinton, according
to the memoirs of former deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell, directed
him to get to the bottom of UFOs. Hubbell failed.
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- Repeated efforts by Florida Today to interview both Democrats
about UFOs have been unsuccessful.
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- Last year, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta
announced his partnership with the Coalition for Freedom of Information
-- funded by the Sci Fi Channel, a client of his PodestaMattoon law firm
-- to try to end UFO gridlock. For CFI research advisor Ted Roe, the issue
is compelling, but so delicate he refers to the mystery in broader terms:
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAEs.
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- Roe is the executive director of the National Aviation
Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) in Vallejo, Calif. In
order to improve flight safety, NARCAP, a private outfit, collects data
on everything from ball lightning to plasma disturbances, as reported by
pilots, radar operators and air traffic controllers. But getting these
sources to cooperate is dicey, due to the exotic nature of many UAEs.
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- "The really strange ones involve cylinders, discs,
spheres, red lights and white lights, V-shaped or boomerang-shaped objects.
Some of them are huge," says Roe, whose colleague, Dr. Richard Haines,
authored a controversial report in 2000 analyzing more than 100 incidents,
entitled "Aviation Safety in America."
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- "Some of them seem to demonstrate an alteration
of magnetic fields, which can cause compasses to turn up to 20 degrees
off direction. They can have transient or permanent effects on avionics
systems, such as shutting off transmitters."
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- In early September 2001, NARCAP sent survey questionnaires
on UAEs to 300 pilots of a major airline carrier. "We couldn't have
picked a worse week," says Roe. "Two days later, the (World Trade
Center) towers fell." Still, NARCAP got a 24 percent response, with
one of every six subjects reporting having seen something so bizarre they
couldn't identify it. "But not a one of them reported it to management,"
Roe adds.
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- Roe says retirees are more likely to talk than active
pilots, which isn't a surprise. "The airline facilitator who was trying
to promote our survey wound up getting two psychiatric evaluations,"
he says. "There are 500,000 people in our target culture, the aviation
community, who are very interested in this subject. But these experiences
become toxic when they manifest into (pilots') environment."
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- Only constant media pressure, says Friedman, will force
authorities to respond to public curiosity. After all, 72 percent of Americans
responding to a Roper Poll conducted last year believes the government
isn't telling everything it knows about UFOs.
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- "I read that with Watergate, the Washington Post
had something like 16 people working that story at one time," says
Friedman, who'll also be signing copies of his work at Barnes & Noble
Booksellers on Merritt Island on 7 p.m. Thursday. "It's going to require
that sort of effort. You can have all the seminars and lectures in the
world, but if the press doesn't come and follow it up, then you haven't
had much of an impact."
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