Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. wrote:
> UFO Expert Comes To Brevard
> Source: Florida Today
> By Billy Cox
> Florida Today - Oct 14, 1:58 PM
>
> 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."
>
> 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."
>
> "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."
>
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> "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."
>
> 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."
>
> "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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Repeated efforts by Florida Today to interview both Democrats about
> UFOs have been unsuccessful.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> "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."
>
> "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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> "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."

This may be off-topic.