dr wu
Doctor Prog
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2002
- Messages
- 2,506
- Location
- Indiana.....in the cornfields
Vallee's the man......
Those of us who have studied UFOs for many years are familiar with the
researcher Dr. Jacques Vallee, who wrote ground-breaking books on the
subject such as Passport to Magonia. Vallee retired from the UFO world
about 10 years ago for unknown reasons, perhaps due to fatigue brought
on by UFO infighting, perhaps due to frustration with being a rigorous
scientist in a field known for its second-rate science that is scorned
by the media and the scientific establishment. Now he’s back with an
introduction to the new edition of Richard Dolan’s book, UFOs and the
National Security State. To have an introduction by Jacques Vallee is a
great honor for Dolan and means that his book is seen as important by a
scientist who has done some of the most important work in the field.
16-Jul-2002
UFOs and the National Security State by Jacques Vallee
The important book you are about to read (“UFOs and the National
Security State” by Richard Dolan) is the first comprehensive study of
the U.S. Government's response to the intrusion of UFO phenomena in
American skies over the last 50 years. While several historical studies
of the controversies surrounding the reports have been conducted, the
military and intelligence implications have, until now, remained in a
state of confusion.
As a longtime student of the phenomenon I can testify to the complexity
of the data Richard Dolan had to decipher. The U.S. Air Force itself,
overtly the main contender in thisdrama, never attempted to compile a
comprehensive history of its own files on the matter. When I reviewed
the 11,000 cases in the Air Force files between 1963 and 1967, the
military had no index of that data. The most cogent participants, such
as Captain Edward Ruppelt and professor J.Allen Hynek, did write about
what they had done but they left many undocumented areas. Interested
outsiders picked up the pieces of the various projects, and presented
personal interpretations of what had happened. Understandably, the
result was a vibrant melange of facts, fiction and subjective
interpretations, which has led to the wildly conflicting theories the
media love to exploit.
Even the White House was unable to reconstruct the full picture when
President Jimmy Carter instructed Nasa to undertake a review UFO
information in the late seventies. A Washington wag described the space
agency’s reaction to this presidential order as “a flurry of alarmed
paralysis.” At the height of the Carter effort a small group of us from
various research institutes and universities volunteered to help. I
vividly recall a meeting I had with a high-level official at the Office
of Science and Technology Policy, across the street from the White House
in September 1977. I tried to convey to him that we had experts all
across the U.S. who were ready, willing and able to get involved in
Nasa’s review of the phenomenon if they were given a green light. He
listened to me sympathetically but expressed discouragement about what
he saw as “an impossible political situation.” Discussion turned to the
fact that the CIA and the Air Force, as well as several other agencies,
must have entire file cabinets filled with reports from their own
people, if only because the phenomenon is known to trigger the kinds of
sensors that have been deployed to detect enemy threats during the Cold
War. I was told there was plenty of data all right, collected by the
military and intelligence community, but it “never saw the light of
day.” The White House might force some of it to be released, he told me,
but that might not advance the problem: “Those guys twist everything to
suit their own political schemes. It’s like pulling teeth to get data,
and you never know if they tell you the truth.”
It is in this murky world of deception and confusion that Richard Dolan
has now cast a welcome light. But it will take a sustained effort along
the lines he has pioneered if we hope to validate the facts, uncover the
motives, and reconstruct the patterns. In order to conduct this analysis
it is very important to take notice of what is NOT there: The missing
parts of the overall puzzle. What is not there constitutes a world of
heroic complexity and immense proportion.
I had a vivid example of this fact, on a much smaller scale, when I
unearthed a secret letter from a Battelle scientist named Cross, who had
written to the CIA at the time of theRobertson panel in 1953. (I have
referred to this document in my previous books as the “Pentacle
Memorandum”). To this day there are ufologists who claim the letter was
unimportant. Yet there are indications it may represent the point of
major bifurcation when the most serious part of the official study
plunged underground while Blue Book continued as a public relations
exercise, the visible effort by the military to gather UFO reports from
American citizens.
The experience of tracking down that single document makes me appreciate
the delicate nature and the sheer difficulty of the task undertaken by
Richard Dolan in compiling the present book.
The Cross letter was significant because it implied that a group of
specialists working in the shadows on the most massive UFO study to date
had the power to keep critical information from a prestigious national
security panel. Furthermore they had another plan, a brilliant project
of far-reaching implication, which they proposed to implement as a way
of getting to the heart of the phenomenon. I had a copy of that letter.
It was stamped Secret. I knew its exact origin. Yet all the efforts I
made to unearth an official copy from the Air Force or the National
Archives through the Freedom of Information Act failed to yield results.
It is finally through Congress that I obtained clearance to release the
text. The process has given me a sobering view of the ability of the
bureaucracy to hide the truth for decades, occasionally using the
colorful community of UFO believers itself as an unwitting tool as it
covered its tracks. To this day I am convinced that historians of the
phenomenon have remained blind to some of the implications. It is my
hope that books like the present one can stimulate a renewed effort to
get at the truth.
Like the “missing mass” that astronomers are trying to locate in the far
reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomenon rests on an ocean of dark
matter, deep secrets, and forgotten wars fought only in shadows. Not all
of it had to do with the kind of objects the American public imagines
UFOs to be. Some of the warriors seem to have understood, early on, that
if UFOs existed as a genuine new phenomenon of intelligent origin, this
fact did not necessarily mean they were from outer space. And other
warriors may have decided that the belief in the reality of UFOs could
be twisted, exploited, and bent to obscure political ends. They may have
planted false UFO stories to hide real experiments. They may have
disguised helicopters as flying saucers, or lied to witnesses at sites
where advanced prototypes had crashed, never to be divulged again. No
wonder even White House officials get confused when they try, years
later, to reassemble the facts.
As we ponder the implications we are led, inexorably, to a much larger
issue. As anyone learns who has become a naturalized United States
citizen, the rock upon which American democracy is built is “an informed
citizenry.” Without full information, how would you know how to vote?
And if you didn’t know how to vote, could you still pretend you lived in
a democracy?
In the last fifty years the various branches of the military and
intelligence community in the United States have so clouded the reports
of the UFO phenomenon that the citizenry has been left not just
uninformed but indeed disinformed. This may not have been the intent,
but it is indeed the result. Those who truly care about democracy are
justified in asking that the government come clean about what it knows,
and – most importantly perhaps – what it doesn’t know about a phenomenon
of such far-reaching consequences for our science and our society.
All efforts to break open the mystery so far have made the assumption
that the “big secret” merely involves extraterrestrial spacecraft put
together with metal and rivets. This partial view is supported by the
many instances in which UFOs have been seen by pilots, photographed, and
tracked on radar. Yet modern physical theory opens up a much wider,
richer spectrum of hypotheses for objects that might blink in and out of
perception, impact the consciousness of witnesses, accelerate without
creating sonic booms, change shape and merge with one another
dynamically. Concepts of higher dimensionality, once on the fringes of
physics, have entered the mainstream of science. Given what we know
about the universe today, it is irrational to assume it can be described
with only three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
The UFO witnesses are telling us they have experienced objects of vast
complexity that challenged their sense of reality. Such observations are
anomalous in the narrow sense of the classical physics we learn in
school, but they may help build a conceptual framework for the physics
of the twenty-first century. It is all the more important then, as
Richard Dolan points out, to make a precise assessment of what the most
reliable witnesses have observed, and to seriously start looking for the
missing parts of this famous puzzle. UFOs have been with us since the
beginning of recorded history. Could they be trying to tell us who we
are, and what true place we are destined to occupy in the universe?
(((((((((
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts,
foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation
that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an
open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
-- President John F. Kennedy
Those of us who have studied UFOs for many years are familiar with the
researcher Dr. Jacques Vallee, who wrote ground-breaking books on the
subject such as Passport to Magonia. Vallee retired from the UFO world
about 10 years ago for unknown reasons, perhaps due to fatigue brought
on by UFO infighting, perhaps due to frustration with being a rigorous
scientist in a field known for its second-rate science that is scorned
by the media and the scientific establishment. Now he’s back with an
introduction to the new edition of Richard Dolan’s book, UFOs and the
National Security State. To have an introduction by Jacques Vallee is a
great honor for Dolan and means that his book is seen as important by a
scientist who has done some of the most important work in the field.
16-Jul-2002
UFOs and the National Security State by Jacques Vallee
The important book you are about to read (“UFOs and the National
Security State” by Richard Dolan) is the first comprehensive study of
the U.S. Government's response to the intrusion of UFO phenomena in
American skies over the last 50 years. While several historical studies
of the controversies surrounding the reports have been conducted, the
military and intelligence implications have, until now, remained in a
state of confusion.
As a longtime student of the phenomenon I can testify to the complexity
of the data Richard Dolan had to decipher. The U.S. Air Force itself,
overtly the main contender in thisdrama, never attempted to compile a
comprehensive history of its own files on the matter. When I reviewed
the 11,000 cases in the Air Force files between 1963 and 1967, the
military had no index of that data. The most cogent participants, such
as Captain Edward Ruppelt and professor J.Allen Hynek, did write about
what they had done but they left many undocumented areas. Interested
outsiders picked up the pieces of the various projects, and presented
personal interpretations of what had happened. Understandably, the
result was a vibrant melange of facts, fiction and subjective
interpretations, which has led to the wildly conflicting theories the
media love to exploit.
Even the White House was unable to reconstruct the full picture when
President Jimmy Carter instructed Nasa to undertake a review UFO
information in the late seventies. A Washington wag described the space
agency’s reaction to this presidential order as “a flurry of alarmed
paralysis.” At the height of the Carter effort a small group of us from
various research institutes and universities volunteered to help. I
vividly recall a meeting I had with a high-level official at the Office
of Science and Technology Policy, across the street from the White House
in September 1977. I tried to convey to him that we had experts all
across the U.S. who were ready, willing and able to get involved in
Nasa’s review of the phenomenon if they were given a green light. He
listened to me sympathetically but expressed discouragement about what
he saw as “an impossible political situation.” Discussion turned to the
fact that the CIA and the Air Force, as well as several other agencies,
must have entire file cabinets filled with reports from their own
people, if only because the phenomenon is known to trigger the kinds of
sensors that have been deployed to detect enemy threats during the Cold
War. I was told there was plenty of data all right, collected by the
military and intelligence community, but it “never saw the light of
day.” The White House might force some of it to be released, he told me,
but that might not advance the problem: “Those guys twist everything to
suit their own political schemes. It’s like pulling teeth to get data,
and you never know if they tell you the truth.”
It is in this murky world of deception and confusion that Richard Dolan
has now cast a welcome light. But it will take a sustained effort along
the lines he has pioneered if we hope to validate the facts, uncover the
motives, and reconstruct the patterns. In order to conduct this analysis
it is very important to take notice of what is NOT there: The missing
parts of the overall puzzle. What is not there constitutes a world of
heroic complexity and immense proportion.
I had a vivid example of this fact, on a much smaller scale, when I
unearthed a secret letter from a Battelle scientist named Cross, who had
written to the CIA at the time of theRobertson panel in 1953. (I have
referred to this document in my previous books as the “Pentacle
Memorandum”). To this day there are ufologists who claim the letter was
unimportant. Yet there are indications it may represent the point of
major bifurcation when the most serious part of the official study
plunged underground while Blue Book continued as a public relations
exercise, the visible effort by the military to gather UFO reports from
American citizens.
The experience of tracking down that single document makes me appreciate
the delicate nature and the sheer difficulty of the task undertaken by
Richard Dolan in compiling the present book.
The Cross letter was significant because it implied that a group of
specialists working in the shadows on the most massive UFO study to date
had the power to keep critical information from a prestigious national
security panel. Furthermore they had another plan, a brilliant project
of far-reaching implication, which they proposed to implement as a way
of getting to the heart of the phenomenon. I had a copy of that letter.
It was stamped Secret. I knew its exact origin. Yet all the efforts I
made to unearth an official copy from the Air Force or the National
Archives through the Freedom of Information Act failed to yield results.
It is finally through Congress that I obtained clearance to release the
text. The process has given me a sobering view of the ability of the
bureaucracy to hide the truth for decades, occasionally using the
colorful community of UFO believers itself as an unwitting tool as it
covered its tracks. To this day I am convinced that historians of the
phenomenon have remained blind to some of the implications. It is my
hope that books like the present one can stimulate a renewed effort to
get at the truth.
Like the “missing mass” that astronomers are trying to locate in the far
reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomenon rests on an ocean of dark
matter, deep secrets, and forgotten wars fought only in shadows. Not all
of it had to do with the kind of objects the American public imagines
UFOs to be. Some of the warriors seem to have understood, early on, that
if UFOs existed as a genuine new phenomenon of intelligent origin, this
fact did not necessarily mean they were from outer space. And other
warriors may have decided that the belief in the reality of UFOs could
be twisted, exploited, and bent to obscure political ends. They may have
planted false UFO stories to hide real experiments. They may have
disguised helicopters as flying saucers, or lied to witnesses at sites
where advanced prototypes had crashed, never to be divulged again. No
wonder even White House officials get confused when they try, years
later, to reassemble the facts.
As we ponder the implications we are led, inexorably, to a much larger
issue. As anyone learns who has become a naturalized United States
citizen, the rock upon which American democracy is built is “an informed
citizenry.” Without full information, how would you know how to vote?
And if you didn’t know how to vote, could you still pretend you lived in
a democracy?
In the last fifty years the various branches of the military and
intelligence community in the United States have so clouded the reports
of the UFO phenomenon that the citizenry has been left not just
uninformed but indeed disinformed. This may not have been the intent,
but it is indeed the result. Those who truly care about democracy are
justified in asking that the government come clean about what it knows,
and – most importantly perhaps – what it doesn’t know about a phenomenon
of such far-reaching consequences for our science and our society.
All efforts to break open the mystery so far have made the assumption
that the “big secret” merely involves extraterrestrial spacecraft put
together with metal and rivets. This partial view is supported by the
many instances in which UFOs have been seen by pilots, photographed, and
tracked on radar. Yet modern physical theory opens up a much wider,
richer spectrum of hypotheses for objects that might blink in and out of
perception, impact the consciousness of witnesses, accelerate without
creating sonic booms, change shape and merge with one another
dynamically. Concepts of higher dimensionality, once on the fringes of
physics, have entered the mainstream of science. Given what we know
about the universe today, it is irrational to assume it can be described
with only three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
The UFO witnesses are telling us they have experienced objects of vast
complexity that challenged their sense of reality. Such observations are
anomalous in the narrow sense of the classical physics we learn in
school, but they may help build a conceptual framework for the physics
of the twenty-first century. It is all the more important then, as
Richard Dolan points out, to make a precise assessment of what the most
reliable witnesses have observed, and to seriously start looking for the
missing parts of this famous puzzle. UFOs have been with us since the
beginning of recorded history. Could they be trying to tell us who we
are, and what true place we are destined to occupy in the universe?
(((((((((
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts,
foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation
that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an
open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
-- President John F. Kennedy
