Decades of Government UFO Gaslighting
Article by Alejandro Rojas July 20, 2020 (openminds.tv)
• The United States Air Force claims that it stopped investigating UFOs in 1969 with the closing of the UFO research program, Project Blue Book. This is the official position in the “USAF UFO Fact Sheet”. But it is a lie. The US Air Force was gaslighting the public to believe that they have no real interest in UFOs. But, as often demonstrated, the government has been taking UFOs seriously for a very long time. And it continues to this day.
• In a memo dated October 20, 1969, Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender noted that “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.” The memo noted that the most critical cases did not go to Project Blue Book at all. First of all, why have an official UFO research program like Project Blue Book that excludes “the most critical cases”? Secondly, why aren’t UFOs that ‘could affect national security’ investigated?
• In 1993, the military modified its ‘no such thing as a UFO threat’ position when the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “OPREP–3 reports containing information relating to unknown objects near US military installations are considered extremely sensitive, and thus not releasable.” So the US military says that it is not interested in investigating UFOs, while at the same time expressing concern about UFOs flying over military bases, including nuclear weapons installations.
• It seems the US and the UK had a similar UFO public relations strategy. In the 1990s, Nick Pope ran Britain’s Ministry of Defense’s “UFO desk.” Pope told the Huffington Post, “We were telling the public we’re not interested, this is all nonsense, but in reality, we were desperately chasing our tails and following this up in great detail.” “To really achieve our policy of downplaying the UFO phenomenon, we would use a combination of ‘spin and dirty tricks,’” said Pope. “We used terms like UFO buffs and UFO spotters — terms that mean these people are nut jobs. In other words, we were implying that this is just a very somewhat quaint hobby that people have as opposed to a serious research interest.” Whenever someone went to the aviation authorities or the police, as soon as they mentioned ‘UFO’ the authorities would immediately lose interest and refer them to civilian UFO groups, regardless of the perceived threat.
• Senator Marco Rubio is the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). In the proposed Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021, the SSCI asked that the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with the Secretary of Defense put together a report on “unidentified aerial phenomenon [UAP].” The report is to include information from the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’. Rubio recently told CBS Miami that he was concerned about “things flying over your military bases… [that] exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal.” “[T]o me,” said Rubio, this “is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”
• Why would Senator Rubio assume that the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’ would have this sort of information? Luis Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who headed up a previous Pentagon UFO research project called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, or AATIP. While the DoD claimed that the program ended (in 2012), Elizondo claimed that the program continued even after he had left. Eventually, the DoD admitted that the program existed and still exists. This is the Task Force.
• On July 21st, Elizondo told investigative journalist George Knapp on Coast to Coast AM that he was recently at a meeting having a classified discussion when one of the men present told him he had done Elizondo’s job in the 1980s. “[I]t was very clear to me that AATIP was not the first of its kind,” said Elizondo. “There was an organized effort back in the ’80s to do exactly this as well.”
• Chris Mellon is a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and a former Staff Director of the SSCI. He and Elizondo are currently featured on the History Channel’s UFO investigation series “Unidentified”. Such efforts to reveal the government’s knowledge of UFOs have resulted in the Navy admitting they took UAPs seriously, investigated UAP incidents, and have begun reporting them to Washington DC lawmakers.
• Mellon says they have several never before seen military cases featured in the HISTORY show’s new season. For example, Mellon relates the story of a NORAD officer who was tracking a UFO on radar. The military was “scrambling every jet they could get in the air.” But when researcher John Greenewald filed a Freedom of Information Act request on this incident, NORAD responded that it had “found no records.”
• Hopefully, mainstream science, media, and academia are beginning to realize that the government has been lying to us about what it knows about UFOs. So how will the government and the military respond to investigative agencies such as Rubio’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? Will they gaslight the SSCI, like they have done with the public at large since (at least) 1969?
The United States Air Force claims it stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. It is a point they love to repeat when inquiries have been made for the last few decades, even when researchers present government documents to demonstrate otherwise. Often in the past couple of decades, instead of answering my inquiries about UFO documents, I am sent the USAF UFO Fact sheet. However, given recent revelations, the USAF fact sheet was wrong, and, as many have demonstrated, the government has been taking UFOs seriously for a very long time.
According to the USAF UFO Fact Sheet, the USAF program to investigate UFOs, Project Blue Book, was closed because “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.”
In a memo dated October 20, 1969, by Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender, the reasons for closing Project Blue Book were outlined. In the memo, Bolender noted that “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.”
His note indicates that the most critical cases were not going to Project Blue Book, which begs the question, “what good is it to investigate UFOs without the best cases?” It also implies there were cases, “which could affect national security.”
JANAP 146 detailed “Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings [aka CIRVIS].”
“Unidentified flying objects” were one of the items listed as something to report.
Eventually, the military replaced CIRVIS with Operational Reporting (OPREP). A document distributed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 says, “OPREP–3 reports containing information relating to unknown objects near U.S. military installations are considered extremely sensitive, and thus not releasable.”
Sure enough, UFO researchers have found several of these documents. They typically address UFOs incursions over weapons storage areas, including those that house nuclear weapons.
Despite having receipts, UFO researchers are often grouped in with the tin-foil hat crowd. Nick Pope ran the Ministry of Defense (MoD) “UFO desk.” He dealt with these issues from the government side. Pope told the Huffington Post, “We were telling the public we’re not interested, this is all nonsense, but in reality, we were desperately chasing our tails and following this up in great detail.”
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