New book explores FOIA UFO documents - 'UFOs And Government: A Historical Inquiry'.

Here's a link to a brief interview with one of the co-authors of the book.

Q. What is the biggest revelation you found in your research?

A. That the documentation represents a compelling, accurate historical narrative of at best government obfuscation and at worst manipulation of the facts in the interest of national security.

reply to post by Orkojoker


Thanks for posting that interview mate and he certainly makes a good point about how the Robertson panel cultivated the ridicule factor and under reporting bias in the pilot community.

The Robertson Panel made the decision to ridicule people. Illusion, misdirection and ridicule are the three legs of the stool of deception. I've talked to pilots who saw a UFO and their superiors said, "You must have been drinking." All you needed to do is have your eyesight or your drinking questioned and you didn't fly again. I'm willing to talk about this subject because I don't have much to lose..

If I was a pilot UFO witness I don't think I'd submit an official report either (so kudos to the courageous ones who do) - I know you've read through it but for folks who haven't here's Ted Roe's technical report with some relevant statements.

NARCAP

Pilot Commentary:


"We didn't say anything. We figured nobody would believe us."
Charter Pilot



"Upon return to my domicile, JFK, I reported our sighting to the proper authorities. I was shortly visited by two federal investigators who evidently thought I was hallucinating for one of them stated he had seen spaceships while fishing in Great South Bay and was quite obviously trying to prove that I was a loony."
Captain, Pan Am (ret.)



"It must have been Huge! We were all due back at JFK about the same time two days later so I waited in the crew ready room to talk to them. None of them wanted to talk! They were afraid management would take them off of flying status and have them tested for booze and drugs. The story never came out!"
Flight Engineer, TWA (ret.)



"a group of lights in the air appeared at our 12o'clock position. I called departure control and asked them if they had any traffic in that area. When they came back and said NO, what do you see, I said no, just checking. For at that time when a pilot reported seeing a UFO he was in a lot of trouble."
Captain, Ozark Airlines (ret.)



"I, and Flight crew saw something (in broad daylight) that did things that no known aircraft could do without killing any living thing inside. I will only give sketchy details to protect the privacy of the rest of the crew. If you are interested, and all information (is) kept anonymous, contact me. I will not present myself for public ridicule."
Captain, NW (ret.)

Aviation Safety in America: Under-Reporting Bias of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and Recommended Solutions. Ted Roe

Cheers.

Thoughts on the book from researcher Keith Basterfield (sourced by Realtvufos):

“thoroughly researched and enjoyable, a magnificent contribution to our knowledge".

As many blog readers will be aware, I facilitated a team of Adelaide based researchers (members of the Australian UFO Research Association) who looked for, located, and documented the file holdings of the Australian government, between 2003-2008. I now continue this work as an individual, as I slowly find more and more files in the National Archives of Australia. It is for this reason, as well as others, that I looked forward to reading a new, scholarly, work titled “UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry” written by members of the UFO History group, and published in 2012.

www.thiemeworks.com...

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Thoughts on the book by Giuliano Marinkovic:

” the best book about the UFO phenomena that was ever written”

Journalist and writer Giuliano Marinkovic, a former Croatian Army Military Intelligence SIGINT operator, presents a review of the book, “UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry”

link

More from co-author Richard Thieme:

Out of the closet on UFOs


..I was recently privileged to be included as contributing editor and writer on a team that produced the book, "UFOs and Government: An Historical Inquiry" over five years. The research/writing team was led by Michael Swords, a professor of natural science (now retired) at Western Michigan University and Robert Powell, a nanotechnologist formerly with AMD. The book is regarded as an "exception" to the dreary field by Choice, the journal that recommends works for inclusion in university collections. Choice suggested that all university libraries should have it (to date, 45 have it in their collections, including four in the University of Wisconsin system, as well as many Wisconsin public libraries).

The almost-600 page book is well-grounded with nearly 1,000 citations from government documents and other primary sources so it is "bullet proof." There is virtually nothing speculative in it. We document the response of governments from the 1940s forward to events they took quite seriously — and which readers, judging on the evidence and data, will take seriously as well.

A short op-ed cannot do justice to the complex narrative, but I can state a few facts.



■ Any other domain of inquiry with hundreds of well-documented events would be considered worthy of scientific and historical investigation.

■ Well-executed policies carried out with secrecy do not constitute "a conspiracy," and we are not "conspiracy theorists," a term used to attack investigators of unpopular subjects. Members of the military and intelligence community, from the early 1950s on, decided to learn as much as they could about UFOs — which they decided did not constitute a direct threat to national security — while at the same time playing down and dismissing reports from the public. The reports themselves were considered to be the primary threat by the CIA.

■ The data illuminates a phenomenon that is global, persistent and sufficiently similar in small details to invite taxonomic classification as to vehicle types, the physics of force fields that power the objects and ionize the air around them, producing characteristic colors in relationship to speed and power, and diverse kinds of robotic or sentient beings associated with the objects.

■ It is an astonishing sociological and psychological phenomenon that throughout the 20th century, despite reports by credible observers, corroborated on multiple radar sets on the ground and in jets, resulted not in public investigation but in an inability to get our minds around the mere possibility. Instead the subject is literally "unthinkable."

■ One reason it is "unthinkable" is the effective use of ridicule, the mocking of people who made reports or took the subject seriously, and a long silence from official authoritative voices in the face of credible testimony. When I delivered a speech and served on a panel recently at the National Security Agency, I was reminded by a veteran analyst that "the three legs of cover and deception are illusion, misdirection and ridicule. But the greatest of these is ridicule"— which discredits the person, not the testimony, and the testimony I have heard has come from military and civilian pilots, astronauts, even the intelligence head of a foreign military force. "This is what I saw, and I know what I saw" is what I am told, corroborating the statement in 1947 by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining that "The phenomena is something real and not visionary or fictitious."

■ My personal exploration began in 1978 when, as a recently ordained Episcopal clergyman in a parish on the edge of an Air Force base, a parishioner, a decorated fighter pilot with all the "right stuff" who retired as a colonel, told me, "We chase them, and we can't catch them."

■ "UFOs and Government" includes quotations from generals, senior intelligence personnel and professionals such as Hermann Oberth, the father of German rocketry, that affirm the exotic characteristics of the technology that no earthly power could then achieve. As Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell told me, "Richard, if we could do what they can do, they wouldn't have sent me to the moon in a tin lizzie."

link

Excerpts, tables and responses from the book taken from the NICAP website:

“248-249

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS & 1957”:

link


“249-252

Operation Moonwatch”:

link


“252-256”:

link


“TABLE 1: 1957 UFO Sightings from Blue Book”:

link


“TABLE 2: 1949-1979 UFO Vehicle Interference Cases from CUFOS”:

link


“Responses”:

link

originally posted by: karl 12



Robert Powell and Bill Chalker from 1:20:00

During the third hour, ufologist Robert Powell detailed the evolution of US government interest in the UFO phenomenon. He noted that early studies appeared to be good faith attempts at solving the enigma. However, Powell pointed to the 1953 Robertson Panel as a turning point in UFO history, since the group's recommendations spawned an active debunking campaign to "demystify" the phenomenon. He also observed that lying to the public about official interest in UFOs, despite later FOIA releases disproving these claims, appears to be the standard operating procedure of the government. "By the time you release the documents, you have a new generation and they don't really care about what happened 50 years ago," he lamented.

In the final hour, UFO researcher Bill Chalker joined Powell for a discussion on the history of ufology in Australia. He recalled how the Australian government grappled with the UFO enigma in the mid-1960's and that the Air Forced actually dubbed them "unusual aerial sightings" as a way of avoiding the "flying saucer" stigma. According to Chalker, as the decade came to a close, official interest in the phenomenon by the Australian government slowed down via "a gradual process of almost intentional neglect." In modern times, he said, the subject is marginalized by the government and that when new sightings are reported they are actually "farmed out" to UFO groups to investigate.

Video has been removed but the full show can be found here.