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On May 17, the U.S. Congress held its first hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—the new official name for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)—in more than 50 years.

Less then two months earlier, President Joe Biden’s $773 billion budget request for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2023 included $24.5 billion for the U.S. Space Force and the Space Development Agency—about $5 billion more than what Congress approved in 2022.

The fortuitous timing was all but predicted by Wernher von Braun, a Nazi scientist recruited under Operation Paperclip, who served as the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, from 1960 to 1970.

Before his death in 1977, von Braun said: “Weapons will be based in space—hence the need to create a psychological nexus whereby people will fear all things alien.”^[1]

As Von Braun Would Have Wanted

Von Braun’s spirit was evident in the opening remarks of André Carson (D-IN), the chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism, and Counterproliferation, who emphasized that UAPs “are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way.”

Carson further stated:

“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issue to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community. Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it’s true. But they are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence showed two videos at the hearing taken by Air Force pilots which showed white objects that looked like flying saucers in the air whose source could not be identified.

Bray said that, although the second object in particular could have been some kind of drone, he was not aware of any foreign adversaries who had technologies that resembled these objects.

Bray further said that, while some of the sightings could have been of airborne clutter, meteorological phenomenon, or U.S. industry or military technologies, of the 144 reports of UAPs documented between 2004 and 2021, 18 appeared to exhibit unspecified flight characteristics and lacked evidence of propulsion—even when they moved at excessive speeds—which made them intriguing.

An unidentified flying object captured by the U.S. Navy in video. [Source: cnet.com]

False Threat Inflation

Last December, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) succeeded with bipartisan support in inserting an amendment into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that directs the Pentagon to work with the intelligence community to investigate the phenomenon of UAPs and to publicly report its findings.

Gillibrand—who has received huge campaign donations from Wall Street and consistently supports U.S. military interventions—said that “our national security efforts rely on aerial supremacy and these phenomena present a challenge to our dominance. The United States needs a coordinated effort to take control and understand whether these aerial phenomena belong to a foreign government or something else altogether.”

At the May 17 hearing, Russia hawk Adam Schiff (D-CA)—who has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from Raytheon since 1999—echoed Gillibrand by emphasizing the significance of UAPs as a national security matter.

Ronald Moultrie, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, emphasized the potential threat of UAPs to U.S. military bases and installations, which he vowed to protect.

When Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher (WI) challenged Moultrie, he called for investigation of an alleged 1975 incident in which a glowing red orb was witnessed above Malmstrom Air Force Base in rural Montana, eight years after ten nuclear inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) became inoperable there.^[2]

Gallagher became angry when Moultrie said he had not heard of the incident, and asked him to investigate it—omitting that it had occurred decades ago, before Gallagher was even born.

Gallagher was not so subtle generally in advocating for greater vigilance by the government in protecting the nation from inter-galactic predators intent on destroying the United States—along with other foreign enemies.

Planning for Interplanetary War?

Dr. Steven Greer, who retired from the emergency room to pursue the hunt for aliens as the self-described “world’s expert on UFOs,” is among those horrified by the mindset that was on display at the congressional hearing.

As Greer sees it, aliens are here to help us and the military-industrial complex is hyping their danger and creating the U.S. Space Force to prepare for interplanetary war, arguing movies like “Independence Day” are part of “a false narrative created by covert groups striving to generate fear of ETs.”

Source: arkadincinema.com

“Have We Visitors From Space?”

Public fixation with UFOs in the U.S. goes back to at least the 1920s when science fiction writers featured stories of scientific geniuses who developed super-weapons that helped save the U.S. from alien invaders.^[3]

This 1929 cover of Science Wonder Stories, drawn by notable pulp artist Frank R. Paul, is one of the earliest depictions of a “flying saucer” in fiction. [Source: wikipedia.org]

On April 7, 1952, Life magazine published an article entitled “Have We Visitors From Space?” which purported to offer scientific evidence verifying the existence of interplanetary saucers.

The article mentioned numerous UFO sightings, including one in 1947 by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold who said he saw nine saucer-like things flying like geese near Mount Rainier, Washington, in a diagonal chain-like line at speeds estimated to be 1,200 miles per hour.

At that time there was still some thought that Mars or Venus might have a habitable surface. People thought these UFOs were Martians who had come to keep an eye on Planet Earth now that the U.S. had nuclear weapons.

Project Bluebird

Such attitudes prompted an Air Force study out of Wright Patterson Air Force base in Ohio called Project Bluebird, which collected and analyzed more than 12,000 UFO reports from 1952 to 1969.

A few years before the project was initiated, Lt. General Nathan Twining, the commander of Air Materiel Command (later to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), sent a secret memo on “Flying Discs” to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces at the Pentagon, stating that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” The silent, disc-like objects demonstrated “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and motion which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”

Project Bluebird, however, concluded that most of the UFO sighting reports were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft.

A number of the reports could be explained by flights of the formerly secret U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance planes, though some remained unexplained.

CIA’s Robertson Report

In the early 1950s, the CIA weighed in with its own investigation, headed by a Cal Tech physicist Dr. H.P. Robertson, which concluded that low-grade, unverifiable UFO reports were overloading intelligence channels, with the risk of missing a genuine conventional threat to the U.S.

The Robertson Commission recommended that the Air Force de-emphasize the subject of UFOs and embark on a debunking campaign through the mass media to lessen public interest and ridicule those who believed in UFOs.^[4]

The committee’s final report specified that civilian UFO groups “should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking…The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.”

Amateur photo of flying saucer in 1952. [Source: history.com]

These latter comments have fueled belief in a huge CIA/government cover-up. They were echoed at the May 17 congressional hearings by Ronald Moultrie, who implied that amateur UFOlogists were advancing conspiracy theories.

A big difference today, however, is that the Pentagon is now encouraging UFO sighting in order to validate the weaponization of Outer Space—and secure U.S. domination of Planet Earth.

Historian Jack Manno, author of Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-1995 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1984), told space expert Karl Grossman that “control over the Earth” was what those who have wanted to weaponize space seek. “The aim is to…have the capacity to carry out global warfare [using] weapons systems that reside in space.”

Roswell

The name Roswell was never invoked at the May 17 hearing—except in passing—though it might have been if the Pentagon were savvier in its public relations.

On July 3, 1947, a cattle rancher named Mack Brazel uncovered debris from a downed plane in the remote New Mexico town of Roswell, which had lightweight wood that would not burn and metal beams filled with writing that bore some resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Barney Barnett, a civil engineer, uncovered another crash site nearby with the bodies of four beings whose heads were larger than their bodies and whose eyes were slanted.

Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey, Commanding General of Eighth Air Force, and Col. Thomas J. Dubose, Eighth Air Force Chief of Staff, identify metallic fragments found near Roswell, New Mexico. [Source: history.com]

Debris in field after Roswell crash. [Source: unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com]

The U.S. Army claimed that the aircraft was a weather balloon and tried to silence Brazel, though a top secret army report leaked in 1984 pointed to a cover-up.

Source: theweek.co.uk

Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack concluded in a 1989 episode on Roswell:

“The military declared that the remnants found in that remote field [in Roswell] came from a downed weather balloon. But the people who actually saw and held the wreckage disagree. Perhaps it was an experimental aircraft that the military wanted to keep top secret at all costs. But perhaps, just perhaps, it was something else.”

Concealing Military Experiments

Perhaps it was, but journalist Annie Jacobsen interviewed an engineer with EG&G Company, who worked at Area 51—a top secret military testing base in Nevada—who said that the Soviets stirred up the Roswell UFO incident by sending flying discs into New Mexico with child-size aviators on board as a warning that they could spark a UFO panic if they wanted to.^[5]

Jacobsen’s source believes that the Soviets dispatched flying-disc drone aircraft—which they had developed during World War II—from a mother ship flying near Alaska. Intermittent radar signals were picked up by U.S. installations, but the discs were able to enter U.S. airspace and come down near Roswell.

The child-sized aviators were about 13 years old and surgically or biologically altered to give them enlarged heads and eyes. Jacobsen quotes her source as saying he was told that the alien look-alikes were the result of experiments conducted by Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele.

When Jacobsen asked the engineer—who had a top-secret security clearance—why President Harry Truman did not report all this in 1947, she said the source replied, “because we were doing the same thing.”

NBC News suggested that the “UFO” was indeed a flying disc, but that it was a U.S. rather than a Soviet experimental craft. In this scenario, the alien-looking bodies might have been dummies designed to create a preposterous cover story.

If the latter is true, the cover-up at Roswell had nothing to do with aliens, but was designed to cover up secret and unethical U.S. military experiments.

The Pentagon’s latest invocation of the UAP “threat” similarly aims to divert public attention from the military’s new Frankensteinian projects, while triggering concerns about a phenomenon that exists only in science-fiction stories and in people’s imaginations.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Quoted in Dr. Steven Greer, Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge (Crozet, VA: Crossing Point, 2006), 37. 

2. According to a report in the Sun (a British tabloid), a CIA aircraft gave chase to a mysterious aircraft near the base, which then vanished before reappearing, and one hurtled into the sky at rapid speeds. Brigadier General William D. Barnes signed off on a document that specified that the encounter was “unknown.” 
3. See H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 
4. In 1966, fitting with the CIA’s mandate, Walter Cronkite sponsored a CBS News special “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” which focused on debunking UFO sightings. 

5. See Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (Boston: Little & Brown, 2011). 

Featured image: Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, left, and Ronald Moultrie, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, right. Both testified at the first congressional hearings on UFOs in more than 50 years. In the center is a video of a so-called unidentified flying object. [Source: unitednewpost.com]