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A lot happens
behind-the-scenes in the UFO community—or rather,
doesn’t happen—which the public, for the most part,
never hears about. The previous piece about Bruce Maccabee and
his CIA connections doesn’t even come close to telling the
whole story. Much has happened since, and in preparing this book
I felt the need to flesh out this “behind-the-scenes”
angle a little. The following story involves a stellar cast of
characters—the CIA’s own Fox Mulder, one of the
richest men in America, and the President himself—as well
as some not-so-stellar characters. The following sequence of
events is the best I could piece together given that everyone
involved, or on the periphery, seems to disagree on exactly what
happened and when it happened. This piece, written in January of
2001, has not appeared anywhere previously.
•
Shortly after Bill Clinton became president in 1992 a number of
well-connected people attempted to have the new man-in-charge
reveal the government’s long-held UFO secrets. Two of these
people were Laurance S. Rockefeller, the 86-year-old
philanthropist and grandson of John D. Rockefeller, and Scott
Jones, a retired naval intelligence officer who worked as a
consultant to the Defense Nuclear Agency (1981–1985) then
as a Special Assistant on “paranormal interests” to
Senator Claiborne Pell (1985–1991).
Rockefeller and Jones wanted to get UFO disclosure on the
president’s agenda. To accomplish this goal Rockefeller
employed Washington lawyer Melvin Laird, who had been the
Secretary of Defense for Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, to
approach then Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Laird did so and
Aspin in turn tossed the ball to the White House science advisor,
John “Jack” Gibbons. Gibbons, who claimed not to know
a thing about UFOs, then asked the CIA White House liaison for
information on the subject. That led to Ron Pandolfi, apparently
the CIA’s real X-Files man. But Pandolfi didn’t have
someone within the agency prepare the UFO briefing paper. Instead
he turned to Navy physicist and UFO buff Bruce Maccabee for the
task. And that’s just what Maccabee did in April of
1993.
Pandolfi provides some insight into how all this came about in
an email posted on physicist Jack Sarfatti’s stardrive.org
site on the internet. “I had one and only one conversation
with Jack [Gibbons] on the issue of UFOs,” writes Pandolfi.
“Jack was concerned with how to respond to requests from
Rockefeller. Jack asked why in the world someone like Rockefeller
would believe such nonsense. My response was that only a fellow
believer could answer such a question. I offered to ask Bruce to
respond, and Jack accepted. The entire conversation lasted about
30 seconds. I called Bruce and he agreed to work that evening on
a briefing book. Bruce delivered the briefing book to Jack the
following morning before his meeting with Rockefeller. My
understanding is that Jack gave the briefing book to Rockfeller.
I have no reason to believe Jack read the briefing book or made a
copy.”
Why would Jack give the briefing book to Rockfeller? Macabee
provides some insight into the matter on Sarfatti’s
website: “My real hope for having the briefing read was
based on the requirement that it be available to Gibbons before
the Rocky “Horror” Scott show [this is how Maccabee
refers to the Rockeffeler-Scott Jones effort, which he
abbreviates elsewhere as RHS]. I assumed that my effort would
bear fruit if I kept to the timeline and transmitted my briefing
on time (I was at home and had to wait for a nearby store to open
before I could fax the document at 8AM). Little did I know that
my effort had been undercut by the decision of Gibbons and the
others to set the RHS show before my briefing could get there.
Then of course, after the RHS show was over Gibbons had disposed
of the problem and had no reason to read the briefing.”
And what did Maccabee put in this briefing paper? Information
that, he says, “would or should be startling to anyone who
had never encountered the subject or who had dismissed it out of
hand. Hence my inclusion of the SAC base flyovers in 1975, the
Iranian Jet case in 1976, and even the Coast Guard case in 1988.
My intent was to, at the very least, put a question in his mind.
Could this be true?”
But it was all for naught. Gibbons wanted to shield the
president from the “nuts” and apparently did a good
job of it. The briefing document probably never made it into the
White House, and if it did, it probably stopped at the desk of
Mack McClarty, the Chief of Staff to the President.
Some believe the real briefing for Gibbons was conducted by
Christopher “Kit” Green, a General Motors executive
formerly of the CIA with an interest in such matters, but Green
denies ever briefing the president himself on UFOs. On this
subject Pandolfi comments: “Kit mentioned several short
UFO-related conversations he had with Jack [Gibbons] during
breaks in meetings on completely unrelated subjects. You can call
these ‘mini-briefings’ if you want, but as I recall
it was just Jack expressing frustration with how to avoid
confrontation with Rockefeller on what Jack perceived to be a
non-issue.”
The pressure from below continued on those above in September of
1993 when John Peterson, a futurist who runs the Arlington
Institute, a beltway think tank for the military, presented James
Woolsey, a friend of his who was then director of the CIA, with a
package of heavily sanitized CIA documents on UFOs that UFOlogist
and nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman likes to brandish about
during his UFO lectures. Peterson, whose book Out of the Blue
discusses the potentially huge impact of human contact with
extraterrestrial intelligence, wanted to know why the documents
were so heavily sanitized and Woolsey agreed to look into the
matter.
Then on December 13, 1993 Steven Greer, an emergency room
physician in North Carolina and avid UFO believer who runs a UFO
organization called CSETI, and his wife flew to Washington D.C.
to have dinner with then CIA director James Woolsey and his wife,
who was then the Chief Operating Officer of the National Academy
of Sciences. The host of the dinner part was none other John
Peterson. Greer viewed the event as a UFO briefing for the CIA
director. In his book Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and
Implications, Greer claims that at the meeting Woolsey and his
wife recounted having seen a UFO in New Hampshire in the late
1960s, and that after about 15 minutes of Greer’s UFO
presentation Woolsey had said in effect, “Yes, I know they
exist.” Woolsey subsequently called Greer’s
recollection of the dinner inaccurate. Woolsey and Peterson
called it a dinner party. Greer says the dinner party was a cover
story for the briefing. Perhaps it was a serious conversation
over dinner, but who ever heard of a briefing over wine with
spouses?
Peterson’s efforts paid off to some extent. At the end of
1993 Woolsey commissioned Gerald K. Haines, the National
Reconnaissance Office historian, to prepare a historical review
of the CIA’s UFO involvement. The Haines report entitled
“A Die-Hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs,
1947-90” was later unclassified and published in a 1997
issue of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence.
In the introduction Haines explains how he had come to his task.
“In late 1993, after being pressured by UFOlogists for the
release of additional CIA information on UFOs, DCI R. James
Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on UFOs. Using
CIA records compiled from that review, this study traces CIA
interest and involvement in the UFO controversy from the late
1940s to 1990. It chronologically examines the Agency’s
efforts to solve the mystery of UFOs, its programs that had an
impact on UFO sightings, and its attempts to conceal CIA
involvement in the entire UFO issue. What emerges from this
examination is that, while Agency concern over UFOs was
substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only
limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena.” Haines
says that CIA officials wanted to keep the public unaware of the
agency’s interested in UFOs, fearing that it would just
fuel the already heated controversy over the subject. “This
concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges
of a CIA conspiracy and cover,” wrote Haines.
One should note that Woolsey, frustrated by his lack of access
to the president, would not be in his post as CIA director for
long. Andrew Cockburn, writing in the July 23, 2000 issue of the
New York Times Magazine, stated: “When a deranged pilot
crashed a small plane into the White House grounds in the fall of
1994, the isolated CIA chief bitterly repeated a joke that this
was Woolsey making a desperate attempt to see the president. In
December 1994, convinced that he would never get support from
above, he announced he was quitting.” Not only had the
president failed to back him, but Woolsey encountered disloyalty
within the agency itself. Lying and deception, he discovered,
were institutionalized within the agency bureaucracy.
For this reason, I wonder if Woolsey ever really discussed UFOs
with Clinton, despite rumors to the contrary on the internet. The
mysterious Dan Smith recounts the following story: “Ron
[Pandolfi] and I are driving back from Front Royal after my
briefing a special forces Colonel, a devout Catholic, on UFOs,
eschatons and messiahs, with Ron observing. So I ask Ron about
briefing the next President. And he said that if Geo W. [Bush]
wanted a briefing he could just ask his dad about it. Ok, and
what would his dad tell him, Ron? Well, his dad could tell him
that he had tasked Jim Woolsey to find out and get back to him.
Oh, really! And what was the result, Ron? Well, Jim came back and
told the President that he just didn’t need to
know.”
Smith then mentions a subsequent get-together with Pandolfi:
“The point of the dinner meeting was to see if Ron would
confirm or not deny his original statement to me that Woolsey had
told Pres. Bush that he did not have a need to know about the
‘visitor’ situation. If he would not deny it,
[documentary producer] Gus Russo was prepared to take the story
to [New York Times investigative reporter] Sy Hersh. Ron did deny
it...”
Meanwhile Rockefeller kept pressing Clinton. Finally, during the
weekend of August 19-20, 1995, Rockefeller got his chance to make
his UFO pitch to the president. Bill and Hilary Clinton and Jack
Gibbons had come out to Rockefeller’s Wyoming ranch in the
Grand Tetons for the weekend. Clinton subsequently instructed
Webster Hubbell, his associate attorney general, to look into
UFOs. Hubbell disclosed the president’s request in his
book, Friends in High Places. But despite the president’s
request, Hubbell was unable to learn anything about the subject.
At least nothing that satisfied Clinton’s curiosity.
It’s likely that the back-door full court press will
continue. During the 1968 Congressional Hearings on UFOs, it was
Donald Rumsfeld, now President George W. Bush’s new Defense
Secretary (and President Ford’s Defense Secretary as well),
who introduced astronomer and Project Blue Book scientific
advisor J. Allen Hynek. Rumsfeld was Hynek’s congressman at
the time. Rumfeld should expect a knock on the door any day
now.
Vice-President Dick Cheney has already been quizzed on his
knowledge. On April 11, 2001, while appearing on the Diane Rehm
radio show on WAMU, Grant Cameron called-in this question:
“There is a vicious story circulating in the UFO community
that you have been “read into” the UFO program. My
question is, in any of the government jobs you have had, have you
ever been briefed on the subject of UFOs? If so, when was it, and
what were you told?”
Cheney replied: “If I had been briefed on that, I’m
sure it was probably classified and I couldn’t talk about
it.” Rehm then posed a follow-up question, asking if there
was any investigation within this administration with regards to
UFOs. Cheney answered with a chuckle: “I have not come
across the subject since I’ve been back in government,
since January 20th [2001]. I’ve been in a lot of meetings,
but I don’t recall one on UFOs.”
Eventually UFO buffs will grow up and stop trying to collar the
president (or the next best thing). When it comes to UFOs,
it’s obvious he doesn’t know much more than the rest
of us. Of course, some people claim that the president is
deliberately kept out of the loop when it comes to UFOs, that
those few in-the-know are controlling the information and
misinformation, its secrecy and release, and have done so for the
past half century. This close-knit group is supposedly called
MJ-12. But the documents supposedly revealing the existence of
this super top-secret group are not convincing and are probably a
hoax—at best part of the misinformation being spread on the
subject. There never was such a group and no such group of
insiders who knows “the truth” about UFOs exists
today. It’s a fantasy. And not a very good one at
that.
But if I’m wrong, would someone please tell the
president?
Copyright © 2000-2002 Patrick
Huyghe
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