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By Root 2002 0

For example, they say, a response was required to an FOIA request on what the NSA knew about the singer Elvis Presley. (Apparitions of Mr Presley and resulting miraculous cures have been reported.) Well, the NSA knew a few things. For example, a report on the economic health of a certain nation reported how many Elvis Presley tapes and CDs were sold there. This information also was supplied as a few lines of clear in a vast ocean of censorship black. Was NSA engaged in an Elvis Presley cover-up? While of course I have not personally investigated NSA’s UFO-related traffic, their story seems to me very plausible.

If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens from us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can push for declassification of relevant information from decades ago, of which the July 1994 Air Force report on the ‘Roswell Incident’ is a good example.

You can catch a flavour of the paranoid style of many UFOlo-gists, as well as a naivete about the secrecy culture, in a book by a former New York Times reporter, Howard Blum (Out There, Simon and Schuster, 1990):

I could not, no matter how inventively I tried, avoid slamming into sudden dead ends. The whole story was always lingering, deliberately, I came to believe, just out of my grasp.

Why?

This was the single, practical, impossible question that was balanced ominously on the tall peak of my mounting suspicions. Why were all these official spokesmen and institutions doing their collusive best to hinder and obstruct my efforts? Why were stories true one day, and false the next? Why all the tense, unyielding secretiveness? Why were military intelligence agents spreading disinformation, driving UFO believers mad? What had the government found out there? What was it trying to hide?

Of course there’s resistance. Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It’s a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

One of the most provocative purported intersections of UFOs and secrecy are the so-called MJ-12 documents. In late 1984, so the story goes, an envelope containing a canister of exposed but undeveloped film was thrust into the home mail slot of a film producer, Jaime Shandera, interested in UFOs and government cover-up, remarkably, just as he was about to go out and have lunch with the author of a book on the alleged events in Roswell, New Mexico. When developed, it ‘proved to be’ page after page of a highly classified ‘eyes only’ executive order dated 24 September 1947 in which President Harry S. Truman seemingly established a committee of twelve scientists and government officials to examine a set of crashed flying saucers and little alien bodies. The membership of the MJ-12 committee is remarkable because these are just the military, intelligence, science and engineering people who might have been called to investigate such crashes if they had occurred. In the MJ-12 documents there are tantalizing references to appendices about the nature of the aliens, the technology of their ships and so on, but the appendices were not included in the mysterious film.

The Air Force says that the document is bogus. The UFO expert Philip J. Klass and others find lexicographic and typographic inconsistencies that suggest that the whole thing is a hoax.

Those who purchase fine art are concerned about the provenance of their painting - that is, who owned it most recently and who before that... and so on all the way back to the original artist. If there are breaks in the chain,