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Keeping the Secret the nature of the UFO crashes in New Mexico sufficiently secret to make it appear that they never happened. For that matter, it has been able to keep the American people from learning much about UFOs in general, even though hundreds of thousands have seen them, and a majority is convinced they are real and probably extraterrestrial. This almost certainly constitutes the greatest example of secret-keeping in history. It far outclasses even the landmark job done to conceal the development of the first atomic bomb in the early 1940s, for that security operation was during war- time and represented the collective will of the nation. And the secret was kept for just a few years, at that. The story of the reality and nature of UFOs has been kept under wraps for almost half a century, during no fewer than nine different presidential administrations, several major wars, and the flowering of manned space travel. Even while the American people were becoming world- and space-conscious, their govern- ment's attitude toward UFOs remained intractable and secure. Fes MORE THAN forty years the U.S. government has kept When UFOs burst upon the scene in late June 1947, they were publicly held up to ridicule and in private frantically researched. The initial (and perfectly reasonable) fear that they might be unexpectedly advanced Soviet airplanes or missiles 148