The Presidents and the Hard Evidence (interview with Grant Cameron)
There were a number of attempts. "Close Encounters" was one, "Project UFO" a TV series was another, produced by Colonel Coleman from Blue Book, that ran for two years. This was rumoured to be one of the schemes to drag the truth out without disclosing the cover up. Walt Disney was offered footage in 1956 and it was pulled back at the last moment. Mike Malloney, a British photo journalist talks about going to Disney and being shown some footage in 1972 by a guy called Kimball.
In 1980 Linda Howe was offered the Holloman film. She was working on a documentary for HBO at the time. She was contacted by Richard Dowey [sic] and people in the DIA and she was made the same offer. The Holloman clip was to go into the HBO documentary and they dragged it out and dragged it out. She didn't get the footage and in the end, they tried to get her to go to PBS as they felt they could control the Public Broadcasting better than they could HBO.
I think covert government agencies are interested in the UFO phenomenon for two main reasons. The first is data collection. With a bizarre, potentially nonhuman spectacle unfolding in our skies, it's logical to enlist the efforts of private researchers, even if their perceptions have been muddied by disinformation and the distortions of belief.
Secondly, it makes sense to keep the public in "standby" mode in the event of an unexpected breakthrough -- which may not have anything at all to do with extraterrestrials. UFOs, while real enough, make wonderful scapegoats for "black ops" aerospace projects because our culture is impregnated with filmic visions of alien contact.
Whether movies like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" play a semi-official indoctrination role, as argued by Cameron, is an entirely secondary issue and, in my opinion, camouflages the central dilemma by fostering a false sense of imminent disclosure. For if we are indeed being visited by humanoid aliens with comprehensible motives (itself a dubious proposition), I can't help but think that revelations of any meaningful sort will only be forthcoming from "them."
3 comments:
Something that we sci-fi reading types forget is that 'normal' people dont bother thinking about this stuff at all. So some tiny minority claim to see UFOs or are being snatched from their bed by greys.
So what?
If it doesnt affect their job, their kids, their time stuck in traffic... it just doesnt matter. When the stealth fighter was intro'd to the public it got about 20 seconds on the evening news. Military plane buffs and geeks like us went "COOL!" but the rest of the nation yawned and flipped the channel. If it doesnt effect them it just doesnt matter.
Until they come out into the open or we manage to lay hands on one of the little buggers we might as well be talking about Klingons as far as the rest of the nation is concerned.
Yet even "normal" people have had at least some exposure to the predominant alien meme. You don't have to buy it or be "into it" to have at least a perpipheral awareness that a UFO controversy exists and that some people seriously think we're being visited.
leo -- I do find it CONCEIVABLE that the U.S. government could be in secret contact with alien emissaries. The government certainly wouldn't tell US and (according to Cameron) probably not even the President because he has "no need to know." (In my view, Bush likely didn't even know about probable U.S. government complicity in 9/11 -- hence his totally clueless expression when told in the FL schoolroom about the event. He was "out of the loop" as they say or maybe just plain out of it.)
Could they keep something this big a secret? Yeah, probably. Look at the Manhattan Project, which involved literally thousands of workers and researchers. If the aliens came in just a single expeditionary mother starship, with maybe a dozen or so "landers" (these would be the UFOs we actually see, not the starship itself) keeping it secret at least sounds plausible. And if they are, say, only a few hundred years ahead of us technologically, they might even total one of their landers occasionally.
The "few hundred years ahead of us" humanoid-type aliens seem to be the popular image of what UFOs are, and even most of the "expert" ufology seems to concentrate on this possibility. And this is the possibility that does not seem very likely to me. The odds against two such similar races inhabiting the Milky Way at roughly the same technological level just strike me as being high. (Science fiction has, of course, richly explored this notion but SETI theory takes a somewhat dim view of it although the "listening" programs kind of uncritically presuppose it.)
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